Mass Casualty Management and the Abbey Gate Attack: An Interview with Dr. Kat Landa

In this episode of the GS ACEP podcast, guest host Dr. Anne Long interviews Dr. Katrina (“Kat”) Landa, an emergency physician and former Navy officer, about mass-casualty management in combat settings—focusing on her experience during the Abbey Gate bombing in Kabul in August 2021. Drawing on her roles as mass casualty coordinatorat the NATO Role 3 hospital in Kandahar (2018–2019) and later as officer in charge of a Shock Trauma Platoon during the Afghanistan withdrawal, Dr. Landa describes how deliberate training, a shared mental model, and well-prepared corpsmen shaped her team’s response under extreme chaos.

They discuss practical frameworks for mass-casualty triage, pre-hospital damage-control resuscitation, the realities of operating in an austere environment with limited supplies, and the critical importance of communications, logistics, and integrated trainingwith line units. Dr. Landa also reflects on leadership, moral injury, and what junior military physicians and commands can do now to better prepare for future high-acuity, low-frequency events.

Transcript

1:09

welcome to the government services Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Podcast gsapp represents emergency physicians who work in the federal government, including active duty military National Guard and military reserves, as well as the Veterans Administration, Indian Health Service and other federal agencies, our mission is advancing emergency care for America's heroes. In this podcast, we bring you lectures and conversations with leaders in federal emergency medicine to help you better care for your patients and lead your departments. The views expressed on this podcast are personal views and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense, any branch of the military or the federal government, and they do not constitute endorsement of any product by any of these entities. Hi,

Ann Long: 2:03

everyone. And welcome to this episode of the GS ACEP podcast. My name is Dr Anne long and I'll be your guest host today. In a few minutes, you'll be hearing my conversation with Dr Katrina Landa, a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians and current emergency physician in Marietta, California. Doctor Landa is originally from New York, and graduated from Loma Linda School of Medicine in 2011 She completed her residency training at Naval Medical Center San Diego in 2017 and retired from the Navy in 2024 her military career spanned multiple duty stations and included two combat deployments to Afghanistan. Today, we'll be discussing mass casualties and specifically her experience in Afghanistan at Abbey gate in 2021 thanks for listening. Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of the gsacep podcast. My name is Dr Anne long, and today I have the privilege of interviewing my good friend, Dr Katrina Landa, welcome. Thank you so much. Yeah, so today, we're going to be talking a little bit about triage during mass casualty scenarios, specifically, you know, referencing your time in Afghanistan on the most recent deployment that you did. But you know, we'll also be just talking about mass casualties. Okay, in general, perfect. Do you mind first going into a little bit about your deployment history, and then if you've had any previous experience with mass casualty scenarios?

Kat Landa: 3:34

Yeah, actually, I would be failing my background by not mentioning my first deployment into Afghanistan, which actually 2018 to 2019 I was at the needle roll three, so a large scale Trauma Center, multinational medical unit, and I was actually just handed this job without any experience whatsoever of being a mass casualty coordinator, which was a training position where I worked not only with the hospital itself, but with EMS, for example, the Polish EMS and the Romanian role one and various different groups throughout the entire base, which was large, was in Kandahar, and kind of coordinating what the pre hospital looked like, doing the trainings between the pre hospital, getting to the hospital, where they go, if they're going actually to the straight trauma, are they lower level? Are they going to the army side of the hospital, and then even from there, we actually had some mass casualties. I do a lot of the after action reports. Work with our trauma surgeon, who was the chief of trauma for the entire region in what we could do better and how to better prepare for our next mass casualty. And eventually, actually, when we'd have mass casualties of multiple trauma patients requiring the operating room, he'd actually had me sub in from time to time as the triage officer, like I come off my my trauma team and be a triage officer, taking his place so he could go to the operating room. So that's really cool. That was a lot. Yeah, that was 2018 2019 so that was a lot of background experience. And so I took that experience for my second deployment, 2021 with the special purpose magtaf, marine, air ground task force into CENTCOM again, and that one was a crisis response deployment where I was the officer in charge of the shock tremolo platoon, which is basically like a, what I always tell people is like a austere, mobile mini er that does, like, very minimal things, but can do them well, mostly damage control, resuscitation and transport, yes, and I know you've had, you've had experience with that too, and correct?

Ann Long: 5:31

Yeah, yeah. We definitely had a shock trauma platoon during my time with 11th mu, and then with first medical

Kat Landa: 5:38

patella, exactly. And then coming out of that is, like, the en route care and everything else that happens with that. So I was the officer in charge of that. So for that deployment in 2021 and that was when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened, I ended up going back into Afghanistan in August of 2021 and was there for the withdrawal. Did a. Lot of first responder austere outside of the hospital care of first Afghan migrants and refugees. And then it was actually my unit that was part of the bombing at Abbey gate. That was my Marine Corps unit that was our best casualty as well. And we had kind of drilled with that group. I mean, we had practiced in Saudi Arabia, where we'd been previously, and so, yeah, that's kind of the background to that. Great. That's a very long answer. Yeah, no, no,

Ann Long: 6:30

that was, that was great. You know, going into that last deployment, what frameworks did you use to prepare and train your team for mass casualties?

Kat Landa: 6:38

Yeah, so that's also a two pronged question, because initially I just was doing mass casualty drills because I don't want my corporate to get in trouble. I was in charge of them. You know, you have a lot of downtime when you're on a crisis response platform, because you're literally just waiting for something to happen. And most of them, nothing happens. You do, you do training missions. You something might, small might happen, but you're not usually responding to anything. And so just the fact that we actually went into the Afghanistan withdrawal was atypical for that type of deployment, but that's why we were there for that type of situation. I was basically just doing mass casualty training with my corpsman, with the Marines, kind of gathering everyone together, because in my framework from my previous deployment, I saw the benefit and had experienced the benefit of having a solid plan. And so I think I'll probably touch on this a few times, is that shared mental model, you know, you can't have people coordinating and completing successfully, or even somewhat, you know, failing at a large scale response without them kind of sharing what that looks like in advance. So we really did a lot of training and just to kind of keep people busy for mass casualty. So we just started it off so we could actually get off base doing, for example, flight and route care evacuations on c1 30s, which are larger scale planes. And we just kept people busy. And then following that, when we knew for a fact that we might be going into Afghanistan, I was up in the air for a while. We started doing exercises for that as well. And I pulled out my NATO procedure from my prior deployment, and was like, Well, this is what it looks like on an airfield. This is what this looks like when it's good, when it works well. And since this is also Afghanistan, they should have at this NATO facility, a mass casualty plane looks like this. I never got that. So what I ended up doing is trying to train my corpsman or Marines. Because even more so than the corpsman really the letter going to first respond, or the people there on how to respond, what kind of procedure we'd go through for that. And so for better or for worse, that's what we kind of formed our plan.

Ann Long: 8:46

Cool, would you mind kind of setting the scene for the abbey gate incident? How exactly, like, kind of went down?

Kat Landa: 8:55

Yeah, it's easier with pictures, so I have to apologize, because it's easier to kind of show the picture. So just as a background, the Kabul evacuation happened at an airfield, right? So an airfield is basically the airport, and it's a big circle, an oval, for lack of better term, with a hospital on one side, and that was where, like the actual needle group. So I think it was the Norwegians and US Army Air Force. We're all up in that area, and we came in to actually support our Marines. And so that was the goal from the get go, is, hey, you guys shouldn't be doing a lot of Afghan care. We don't really want you folding into the hospital, but we don't want you to be uncovered. Kind of a nebulous question about where we were going to go before we even got in there, and even when we showed up and what we were going to be doing. So we show up, boots on the ground middle of the night, go to a meeting first thing in the morning. And nobody really knows what's going on from medical leadership, and I'm sure they did on their own parts. I'm not trying to throw shade on anybody. It just was a lot of chaos. And I think chaos is the best word for all of this, and any type of withdrawals is chaos. But it was chaotic, as in, no one was taking full medical leadership as to what was going to happen, because we had so many different units. We had, you know, special forces in the army, and we had, you know, the Norwegians doing their thing, and they were in charge of the hospital. But then you had us, you know, family practice, army people in charge of the task force of the Medical Group. And so it was just kind of all over the place. And then there was another Marine Corps unit there from the Mew, and so they had been there for a couple days beforehand, and so trying to kind of set up where people were going, what they're doing. And so ultimately, I decided, as the officer in charge that, hey, if our Marines are going to abdicate, which is where they were assigned to go, to do the processing and security for that area. We were going to go to the area as well. And so I worked with my own Marine Corps leadership and Operations Officer mostly to figure out where they wanted us to be. So off put a little bit from the actual bomb site, because, again, we wanted to be in a hardened structure. We commandeered a security building that. And abandoned. And we actually stole it back from the Turkish by just saying, We medical. The Turkish were so sweet. My nurse fell. I was like, Get out of here. So it's still, still loving the Turkish that were. They were very kind. They actually brought us food later in exchange for picture. And so, yeah, we commandeered this concrete building and set up this very austere makeshift resuscitation Bay on conference tables in a tiny room using the supplies that we had brought on our backs and blood that we had stolen, tactically acquired from the hospital. And luckily, there was a fridge there. And yeah. So we were set up not even, like, half a mile away. So we had actually been running patients through all the it was like 12 days worth of total up to the actual bombing at the towards the end of our stay there, they'd be bringing Afghan refugees through that had been trampled or had, you know, medical emergencies, or a lot of dehydration, there was a lot of malnutrition, there were a lot of musculoskeletal injuries, there were a lot of OB patients. It was overwhelming number of people that we saw. And so the Marines at Abbey gate had already kind of used this framework, because we were able to offload some of this transport over to the role two, which is the NATO hospital across the flight line, and actually kind of take care of these things. And in fact, we were actually told Afghans couldn't go there initially, unless we had been involved in injuring them. And so there was, kind of like we were just the shop for taking care of anyone coming through this area. And it wasn't just Abby gate at that point. It was also East Gate, which was with the other marine corps groups. So we had babies being passed over and that had been thrown or shot. It was, it was horrible, but we had the experience and also the groundwork because of the practice we had done in Saudi Arabia, plus just being there the Marines realized, oh, I don't have to lose my my Marine, my corpsman, to go all the way around this flight line and then get all the way back around, which adds up over time to get patients to us, and then we take care of either transporting, porting them eventually, or treating streeting and moving on. So that was kind of the background set up to the actual event. I believe you were asking about the actual data.

Ann Long: 13:18

Yes, yes, when the actual bombing did happen? Were you like, in the medical facility at the time?

Kat Landa: 13:24

Yeah. So we were in our tiny, little security building. We did shifts with, like, basically five and five of us, so one doctor, one nurse and three corpsman. So I had been there. I'd basically been living there anyway, but it was just us, and it was evening timeframe. Luckily, I had asked for communications Marines, which, again, this is a key piece to any mass casualties like you need to have communications. And because we were on a jammer where cell signal, even our like walkie talkie radios, weren't working, the only gear that worked was the Marine Corps, green gear like this, like Vietnam, you're looking at something. Who's using this, you know, older Ohio, but it works right, despite jammers. And so I had these adorable but amazing, responsible young men Marines that were with us, two of them the entire time. And I thought I heard something. I had the door open because, you know, the actual gate at East Gate was closed, and so they hadn't processed people towards us in a while. And so I had the door open because it stank in there, like their windows. It was like, no air conditioning. It's disgusting, no running water inside. Had the door open and running some air in, and I thought I heard something. Everything just seemed weird that day in general, in retrospect, a little bit off, a little bit slow, just kind of an odd day. And I thought I heard something. And then all of a sudden this Marine Corporal comes out of the closet where they've set up their whole like, communication scares, like there's been a bombing. And I was like, how many casualties? And he's like, incoming, we're not sure yet. I'm like, how many Marines? He's like, I don't know yet. And then all of a sudden, we started seeing vehicles like go by us, so we were kind of en route to the hospital. So certainly some of the people were just transported directly there, which is fine, because a lot of those actually ended up being, potentially, some of those that were killed in action, but maybe wasn't noticed yet and again, in chaos, right? People are going to do what they rely upon, and you don't have the ability to have a triage officer see everyone. And that's another story in itself. That's how that went with the triage officer I had there, which is one of my nurses that was there actually at Abby gate that day. But yeah. So vehicles, just random trucks, were just going by, and then all of a sudden, I saw them just dropping patients off to us, so, you know, incoming people. And so as soon as I heard that there were casualties, I was like, Everyone, get your bed bags out. We had very limited supplies at that point in time, not because we had used them on Afghans, but because we had actually borrowed many things from the mew who thought they were leaving that day. And so it was just like a just a stellar piece of like, everything that could have potentially been wrong at the. Time was already going wrong. So you really have to really rely on your training at that point and get your Med bags out, open them out. We have the little porch there. Just pull open everything, get your gear on, get stuff. Things were already kind of set up. We had like one PRO Pack, and we already had a couple trauma tables, and we knew we had

Ann Long: 16:17

blood. How many beds did you have? Oh, wow.

Kat Landa: 16:20

Okay, two. And then we actually had two conference tables that are more sturdy than the typical litter setup. You know how the litters are? Right? Yes. So we had litters, but on the litter stands, those are off to the side, because I don't ever want to resuscitate someone on a litter stand like you bump it the person a follow right, right. You turn a trauma patient into a multiple trauma so we have some on the floor where we had, like, one on a stand that we were mostly using for gear, just kind of put med supplies on. And again, we weren't going to be able to take tons of people. We had five of us, self, one nurse. And actually, no, I'm sorry I never nursed. Then it was myself, the other ER doctor, because I had sent our nurse to actually advocate that day. And the other one was at the role too. And then three Corbin. So yeah, it was just very minimal. We ended up getting seven or eight different casualties, kind of back to back and again, like they're coming in shot in the face, or it's not really shot, it's mostly frags, right, shrapnel, shot by shrapnel, right? So that became a whole point of contention afterwards, right? They had frags of something in their faces, arms. There's a lot of bleeding. And so McGowan jumped into action with that. And then we got some that were pretty sick back to back. And the last one we got was actually incredibly ill, probably the worst injured that lived marine and that point, I mean, we were very depleted, and did our best and package and go and right, how

Ann Long: 17:38

did you transport to the role, too.

Kat Landa: 17:41

So we, during this entire chaotic operation, we had been given a vehicle that was tactically acquired by our Marines, which just he got a lot of the Marines all, like, they'll figure out a hot wire vehicle. There was, like a hot wire, like, hand off, like it was just wires to actually move this vehicle. So, resource, yeah, exactly. But it was like a, I don't know, German Special Ops ambulance. So it was actually pretty cool. Oh, wow, yeah. So we had this. That's really nice. Actually, it is. But we actually tucked it over to the abbey gate during the mass casualty it was already there because they had asked for extra support. Again, like, in retrospect, I don't know, like, something was just off that day. You said, people down there like, hey, let's just help out. Kind of hang out, see how things go. And so our vehicle was there. So we transported people, literally by flagging down trucks as they came by, or if someone was dropping someone off with us, getting them onto that vehicle. The last patient we had that was so sick, literally, I was flagging down vehicles because I had packaged him up. And I was like, stay with him for a minute. And I literally, like, got in the road, and I was like, stop. And it happened to be a vehicle that had another Marine casualty that I knew quite well already in there with my chief that was already in there, and they were happy to stop. And I sent the other ER doctor in there to make sure that this patient wasn't left outside. This patient was known to be a priority to go in to get surgery, because that's only that was going to save his life, is go into the operating room. Into the operating room. And I knew, you know, from my experience, that if you're gonna have this many casualties, certainly there's gonna be a backup, like there were five surgical teams there, so you can't really do more than five surgeries, and plenty people needed surgery from watching all these trucks go by while I'm resuscitating. So yeah, I sent her with a, you know, a BVM, and packaged them up as much as we could, and they raced off with, wow,

Ann Long: 19:27

in this type of situation or environment, what does effective physician leadership look like? You know, in

Kat Landa: 19:35

emergency medicine, your job, and I tell this to people all the time, like, when I'm, you know, civilian er now, right, you're like, You're so calm, they're freaking out. And like You're so calm, like, my job is literally be the calmest person here, because the second time, second I get wound up, things just go sideways. And I can't say I was the calmest person that day. In fact, in my mind, I was like, like, half prayer, half F bombs. Like, half praying, half bombs. Your God, like, you know, but like, outside, you have to just say, Okay, I need this. I need this. I need this, and just move on it. And if someone can't do it, like we had a situation where someone just couldn't get it done, you know, get an IO in or whatever, and move on, get something else, do it without getting caught up in this situation. It's hard, I have to say, you know, I'd done a lot of mass casualties in Afghanistan at the role three when I was there in 2018 and 2019 and those were mostly Afghan special ops that we took care of, you know, some other governmental agency people, some Romanians, like there was a mixture, but it was never anyone from my own unit. And so that is a very different feeling to have someone in your own uniform, someone that you've seen at the towel Hall, someone that you've seen around in front of you so critically ill. And so I have to say, like, you rely on what you've trained for, but you also kind of get thrown for a loop. So I'd say, you know, ideally in any situation, and if I could say it's the best ideal, it's really just remain calm and keeping your instructions short and to the point. Without getting tested with people. I think that's true for all of us in the recess room, right? You're doing a pediatric code. It gets real, real chaotic very quickly if you can't keep your calm, and even then sometimes it goes sideways, but doing your best to do that, and then to communicate what you need, and in that situation, especially pre hospital, I think that's the best you can do. But also, I think in my hospital experience as a trauma team leader, that's kind of the same thing too. You have to just be able to communicate and at least separate your emotions for the time being. And I think as ER doctors, we generally do that. It just takes on different forms.

Ann Long: 21:35

How much autonomy did you give the corpsman all of it?

Kat Landa: 21:40

Yes, yeah. Because not you, you can't do everything right? And in fact, I was like, Here, watch this person here take care of this, and we had trained for this again. Like you can say, oh, in a mass casualty, you need to do this, and you need to do this. You need to do this. But if you haven't trained for it, that doesn't mean anything, right? Like, you can go down a list of procedures, but you have to experience the training for it at least. And better yet, if you've been through one before, it gets easier every time, or at least you have a construct and a skeleton on which to build things. But that's the whole purpose of training. And so if you don't let your corpsman do the training beforehand, if you don't train them on the little things, even just putting in an IO you teach them, you know, just anything that I knew how to do, I try to train them to do within we're not cracking chest. But then again, I don't want to crack a chest, not by myself, like we need to have an or available and a surgeon for that. But yeah, so, you know, chest tubes, all those things like, just at least getting them on board with it comfortable. And I think I just have always loved about corpsman, and teaching corpsman is that they're so teachable and they want to learn. Like I was in college when I was at age, and probably you too, like, right? We were in college when we were their age, especially the younger ones. And I can't imagine doing these things and be given that responsibility, but they take it and they like, run with it. And so again, it's just like you can train anyone to do anything, if they're teachable. And so just train them. Just do it.

Ann Long: 23:06

That's one of my favorite parts about being at my current command with med battalion, is just getting to teach the corpsman. Great. So I think you had mentioned your triage officer during this whole situation, that there were some there's some issues.

Kat Landa: 23:20

Oh yeah, not with the triage officer themselves. It's just to give a backup to the background to this. This is something I usually have only shared at uses when I've gone to do their ethics course. But our triage officer was actually just a nurse we'd put out there, and she's phenomenal, absolutely amazing, like, amazing nurse. All my nurses were phenomenal. I have to say that, like, we just had a great team, but I sent her out there with someone to drive the ambulance, and another corpsman, and basically three corps men, including our chief, and then also this nurse to kind of just go out and help support the Marines, you know, if they were sick Afghans, whatever else they were doing, because there's a link gate that was open. And so they were just kind of on call with our ambulance. And so they were actually in the middle of taking care of like Afghans in the middle of including the corpsman that were with the actual unit, that actual like infantry or sniper unit that was there, they were all doing like Afghan care, like taking care of sick kids and things like that when this bomb went off. And so they had to go from literally focusing on the patient in front of them who probably was just as vulnerable and sick, but having to redirect their attention to the Marines that were basically hearing marine down and, like, dropping everything right? And so that's a really hard part. I think the reason I brought that up in the ethics part, again, it's not really my story to tell, because I wasn't there. But I did a lot of I did the debriefs afterwards, and that's what I heard across the board, is like, hey, we were doing this afghan care, and we had to move. And again, the moral injury with that, and the difficulty with that is so hard. And then from there, you know, you move to where the location was, because they were just kind of off center, thank God, right? They weren't involved in it. They get over there, and people are trying to transport people that are already that are already, like, dead, you know, looking at someone and, like, knowing that they're missing part of their skull, like, those types of things, right? Like, this person's not gonna make it, and people are still wanting to do something, because they know them, right? And that's what gets really hard. And so again, they did phenomenal job, but a lot of it was like, trying to direct what needs to be done, but knowing that you're not gonna, you're not gonna be able to pry like someone's Gunny off of their sergeant or whoever else that wants to save them, right? Like that's not gonna happen. And so you just have to accept that nothing's gonna be perfect, and people are gonna people at the end of the day. And I think in that situation, if we were in that situation, and that was our forming. For example, we may be doing the same thing.

Ann Long: 25:46

So definitely, did you feel that your training during residency prepared you for this? Or was there anything during residency that you wish you had had that would have maybe prepared you more? Yeah, that's

Kat Landa: 25:58

a good question. It's hard a residency because you have so. Many wickets you have to hit, and there's so much limited time for military unique and as you remember, like, when I was active duty, I was doing the military unique curriculum, like that was my thing, and so trying to implement some of these basic things, like working with corpsman, going out and doing things with med Italian, those are so important. And the time is not always there. And it's been a couple years since I've over a year since I was active duty, so I'm not sure where that's gone in what direction, but it's important, if you can during residency, at least expose people. And I was lucky, because I've been a general medical officer. I had done GMO time and been out in the field a lot with Marines, and started doing this training with people that firsthand. Had been multiple times to Iraq, Afghanistan, with infantry. So I actually learned from my corpsman as a very junior doctor back in 2012 what it looked like to start doing mass casualties. So I think I had that background residency built on that, and gave you the tools to actually become the emergency physician need to be, and kind of pairing those up. So if we can, I think things like Gen X are really important, but just building up to that is super, super helpful to build emergency physicians that are ready to deploy to do

Ann Long: 27:16

any of this, right? Yeah, I definitely think that more exposure to field exercises and integrated training with corpsman while you're still in residency, would would be helpful? Yeah, I mean, for my deployment also, even though we didn't do anything nearly as kinetic as you guys, but it's just being able to work on a team is really important.

Kat Landa: 27:37

It's huge. We have the biggest team sport in medicine, but in the military, it just takes it to, like, the exponential layer of that, right?

Ann Long: 27:44

Yes, yeah, for sure. How would you advise commands to prepare for future events like this?

Kat Landa: 27:50

You know, I think, actually, I know that one of the short term benefits at least, and hopefully it's long term, but I don't have the connections at these locations anymore, but this one of the short term within, like, the first few years of this happening, was a huge appreciation from ground commanders on how important mass casualty planning and integration was. And I was lucky, because again, before this even happened, before we even knew we were going to Kabul, while we were just hanging out in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We were just doing these mass casualty trainings again, just to do them and get some cool pictures right, get people repaired. But honestly, then the day, I was like, nothing's gonna happen. Everyone told me that's gonna happen. And so like, okay, and our CEO would come, and he was actually supportive of it, because he liked seeing people doing stuff and medical oftentimes is seen as like, oh, they just sit there, right? Like they're just sitting there. They do nothing, right, you know? And that's not true, but also, you don't want us to be doing anything, yes, but, you know, training is big. So I think one of the initial benefits, I have to say, is that there were a lot of integrated training exercises on Camp Pendleton, at the very least, that I knew of with connection with nemt and one of the nurses that was there on our deployment together. She was actually one of the trainers there. And so that

Ann Long: 29:12

stands for naval expeditionary medical training institute.

Kat Landa: 29:16

Yes, I'm sorry, yeah. I just wanted to meet, yeah, yes, it is. So that's up in, you know, northern Camp Pendleton. And so they actually did a lot of integration with first brain division. With First Marine Division, which hadn't really been done in mass like that. And it was very cool to see. But yeah, I think just a reminder, right? Like most CEOs now, I think for ground combat or the air anything like that, haven't really seen a whole lot of

Ann Long: 29:40

combat, right? I mean on the medical side too, we really, since the since the yeah withdrawal, like, we haven't really had exactly, but that Yeah,

Kat Landa: 29:50

and so they haven't seen people injured or killed or see what medical does. And so having that integration early on, and having the ability to communicate with them the importance of that, and that means showing up at the end of the day, like, I went to all the meetings because I was bored, and I like to be present and to know how I can contribute. And so I did that a lot. I went to meetings I wasn't invited to with the Marines. I would just show up. Yeah. They were like, you know, command level meetings. I was allegedly under logistics. I was like, No, we're the shock 12 platoon for this whole whole task force. I'm actually gonna sit down here and wait for some, you know, family practice doctor to filter this down to me when they're not even going to be involved in it. So, you know, be involved. I had the benefit again, of working with the Marines previously, but knowing how to communicate with line officers is important, especially like when you're, like, a just a small girl, but I'm 40 years old.

Ann Long: 30:47

Yeah, especially, I mean, this was actually going to be my next question, which was like, like, what advice would you give to junior physicians, especially those who have never deployed before? You know, who may possibly encounter. Or this, like, in the future, but, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's so hard being like, especially like a junior officer, like a, you know, a female junior officer talking to this, like, line leadership, yeah, what advice would you network?

Kat Landa: 31:14

Network, always network so people that you absolutely need to network with, your operations officer, your logistics, officer, between those two, your EXO would be helpful. But if you can't, right, if it's a large task force, find the operations officers and work with them, because that's how you're going to get your training. That's how you're going to integrate the training in there. Logistics is like usually what you fall under. So you need that support as well, right? But you also need, you know, equipment or you need something else, right? And your operations officer can help network you to other opsos, right? So that kind of that's a really important piece of this. And then beyond that, just being open and knowing that you don't know everything and asking the right questions, and if they're choosing the right time to ask the right questions too, right? So ask the questions that you really don't know anything about behind closed doors, and just don't go in cocky. I think that's really just at the end of the day, like you don't know everything. Know where you're supposed to be, listen more than you talk. And again, a physician in a combatant command is an advisor. They are not the leader of everything. Everything doesn't revolve around them. There's a bigger picture, and being accepting of that is hard as a junior officer. I learned that as a GMO back with artillery in many years ago now is that you are just an advisor, and being okay with that, like You're not the boss, just because you're a doctor, nobody cares.

Ann Long: 32:34

Well, awesome. Thank you again. So much for taking the time to do this interview. Absolutely.

Kat Landa: 32:40

Yeah, my pleasure and have anyone else reach out. I'm still part of GS ASAP, even live step back a little bit, but yes, I'm happy to chat with anyone at any time. And you know how you get a hold of me?

Narrator: 32:51

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