In all probability today's photo, ‘Medic's Tent' was taken on the same blustery day as yesterday's photo.
As there were no reliable camera repair shops in the vicinity, I tended to keep my camera packed away on windy days, not wanting the sand to infiltrate the body. I was worried about scratches on the film if the sand got into the rear or damage to the mirror if sand got into the front or damage to the shutter from either front or back.
When I first arrived in Libya in 1984, we learned first aid and served as our own medics. By the time I left after my first stint in 1986 we had doctors assigned to our crews. Most of them were Czechoslovakians – nice guys. The gear they had was somewhere between first aid and a doctor's office.
They obviously had a better quality tent than the survey supply tent, but it was still a tent and not an air conditioned space, and still full of sand.
Of course, the only fatality on my watch in Libya (a few months after this photo was taken and on a different crew) happened while the assigned doctor was in Tripoli or Benghazi buying supplies. Murphy's Law in action, I guess.
That event left me with a dilemma; lie to the inbound medevac aircraft and claim he was still hanging on or throw the food out of the chest freezer in order to store and transport the body, leaving the crew without meat and then having to buy a new chest freezer. It didn't take me long to decide to lie to the inbound medevac flight and have them remove the body back to Benghazi.
We never did get any feedback on why he's died. It wasn't as a result of an accident. He'd just complained of being sick and clearly had a fever. We were going to drive him to the medical facility at Sarir, the nearest oil installation, but that was a few hours drive away across the dunes. As the land rover was about to leave his condition rapidly worsened which is why I called the medevac service. He deteriorated pretty quickly and despite about 20 minutes of CPR by various people taking turns he'd shuffled off to the afterlife.
I canceled work for the remainder of the day and called the labor force back in so they could pay respects before the medevac flight took his body away. When my bosses on the coast found out they weren't happy, but then and now I felt it was the right thing to do and I earned a bunch of respect from the workforce which paid back time and time again for the remainder of my second stint in Libya.
He was one of four that died on my crews in my 11-year field career. The first was a laborer killed by a fellow laborer in South Africa with one of those really small Swiss Army knives with an inch and a quarter long blade (stabbed in the carotid artery), another was a South African laborer (Jim Moeng, the only one whose name I still remember) killed in a road traffic accident, then there was this guy in Libya and finally a kitchen assistant who died from carbon monoxide poisoning while taking a shower in our staff house in Tunisia. That last one could have been me – that was one of the showers I occasionally used also.
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