A 20-year-old Buxton woman was recovering this week after being injured in an explosion in the Middle East Saturday, just five days after arriving for military duty.
Pvt. Allison Fernstrom sustained a minor injury in an explosion near a Humvee at a guard post, according to her parents.
“I believe it was a mortar shell,” said her father, Scott Fernstrom.
Ferstrom does not know the exact location of his daughter because she is in military intelligence, but he believes she is somewhere in Iraq.
Allison Fernstrom, who is an Army interrogator, required a stitch for a minor wound. She called her mother, Jeanette Fernstrom, on her cell phone at 3 a.m. Sunday to tell her she was all right.
Scott Fernstrom said his daughter was not in the Humvee but standing closeby during the explosion. He said another soldier sustained a broken arm but didn’t have any further details of the attack.
“We worry. She’s doing what she wants to do,” said Scott Fernstrom.
He believed his daughter would stay calm even under attack. “She doesn’t panic,” he said.
Pvt. Fernstrom left the United States on Sept. 18 and arrived at a duty station somewhere in the Middle East on Tuesday, Sept. 26, five days before the Humvee blast on Saturday, Sept. 30.
When she first called home after arriving for duty in the Middle East last week, her mother said she could hear what sounded like mortar rounds exploding in the background.
The American Journal published a story about Pvt. Fernstrom in August. Home on leave this summer, she had hoped for an assignment in Iraq.
“I want to go to Iraq. I volunteered to go,” Fernstrom said at the time.
After completing basic combat training in December, she attended the Army’s human intelligence school in Arizona where she learned to be an interrogator. She graduated with honors in July and was then assigned to the 525th Military Intelligence unit stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Fernstrom became a Buxton firefighter when she was just 16. She graduated with honors from Bonny Eagle High School in 2004 and joined the Army after a year at the University of Maine at Orono.
Scott and Jeanette Fernstrom live on Long Plains Road in Buxton.
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