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Over Coffee
One thing I’ve learned about this job is that I’ve got to be prepared for anything. One minute I might be in a 40-year-old two-bedroom trailer where duct tape holds the windows in place and the next, sitting in a $3-million mansion overlooking a private beach. But just when I think I’m prepared for anything, I meet somebody doing something I never imagined I’d see.
I had read Charles Turner’s five-page resume long before I met him. I knew he began his career as an orthopedic surgeon and now travels the world teaching advanced trauma support. I realized he had to have a multi-faceted background to have made the switch from the sterility of the operating room to training emergency medical personnel in hot spots like South Africa and Israel but the cold pages of a resume don’t give details about the fascinating classes and seminars he has taken and taught.
A Sun City Center resident for six years, Charles went from a childhood in Hattiesburg, Miss., through medical school, and then to Korea and Vietnam during the wars. He moved from his position as a “regular” military doctor to teaching advanced trauma support but when the wars ended, he went back to practicing medicine as a civilian.
After awhile, he realized he missed his involvement in battlefield trauma and joined the private sector as a consultant to the government doing jobs overseas. From directing a team that vaccinated 30,000 State Department employees in the Middle East to handling radiation and other terrorism threats for the Department of Homeland Security and consulting for FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), Charles learned about the various terrorist organizations and now helps configure ways troops can react under a whole assortment of terrorist attacks.
“I’ve been doing trauma work for 35 years,” he told me recently at his kitchen table, the smell of coffee – which he says he drinks continuously all day – in the air. “For the last 10 years I’ve been the medical director for the Eagle Group (International, Inc.) under contract with the State Department.”
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| CHARLES TURNER |
Returning only last week from Israel, where on his return flight back to the U.S. the plane lost an engine and had to dump fuel so it could return to Tel Aviv for repairs, Charles is now preparing to leave for Ghana. Meanwhile, he is also finishing up his master’s degree in disaster medicine management from Philadelphia University. “I’m just one 92-page thesis away,” he said with a smile. “I like the hands-on work much better than writing about it.”
Together Charles and his wife, Charlotte, have six grown children and eleven grandchildren in various states across the country whom they visit occasionally when Charles isn’t learning about, or teaching, global terrorism recovery, investigating field response or deployed elsewhere in the world on a government contract.
Meeting Charles was definitely an interesting experience, proving once again that there are a lot of interesting people and events in our neck of the woods that I hope you’ll continue to call and e-mail me about.
* Perhaps you have something you’d like to share. Or maybe you’d rather tell the community about your favorite charity or cause; or sound off about something you think needs change. That’s what “Over Coffee” is about. It really doesn’t matter whether we actually drink any coffee or not (although I probably will). It’s what you have to say that’s important.
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