The curious case of Gregory Button; the doctor who serves in Iraq

Rather than summer holidays with family in December, the emergency and retrieval specialist touched down at a multinational army camp north of Baghdad for a two-month stint with the Australian Defence Force.

Mr Button joined a couple of thousand others from Australia, New Zealand, the US, UK and Europe on a mission to better equip Iraqi national forces to defend their country against ISIS.

With Australia responsible for running the health care facility at the camp, the Orange doctor manages around 35 personnel who provide medical relief to troops.

Mr Button said his role at the camp includes training other doctors, offering primary health care and providing emergency care prior to and during transportation to an American-run hospital in Baghdad should disaster occur.

"If something major does go wrong we have the significant level of training and specialisation to respond," he said.

With men and women from all over the western world living together in close quarters outbreaks of gastroenteritis are to be expected and Mr Button said it does happen, as do broken bones from performing manual labour and respiratory illnesses.

He said most of the troops have their age and physical health working in their favour, and so far the armies have been fortunate enough to avoid any major incidents in the two stints he has spent with them.

"The camp itself is very well run and spread out over a large area so even though there are thousands of us you certainly don't feel like you're living on top of one another," he said.

In addition to state-of-the-art medical facilities, the camp is equipped with two gyms where officers spend a lot of their off time, in addition to personnel-run aerobics, Jiu-Jitsu, book clubs and salsa classes.

Mr Button said generally the internet works well enough for him to maintain regular contact with wife Marie and their four children over Skype and Facetime but his family is told not to worry if they don't hear from him for a few days.

"The army is very good at getting messages back and forth," he said. "Gone are the World War II days of sitting down and writing a letter and having to wait weeks for a reply."

Back in Orange  Mr Button will be employed to train junior medical officers to equip them with the skills to work in the army, as well as undertaking emergency helicopter rescues across NSW.

He will continue with the daily weight belt workouts, 20-kilometre walks and "mid- to long-distance runs" in preparation for the next assignment, wherever that may be.

"It could be anywhere the army want me to be," he said. "I'm in the lap of the gods a bit at the moment."