126th Med Co Album

126th Med Co (AA) Album

Some Snapshots from the 126th Medical Company

On 13 August 1998, the 126th Med Co got activated to be sent to Bosnia. We're there now and what you see below will change as we continue moving through the 270 days for which we were put on active duty. We're past the halfway point now.

Assembled, written, and photographed by CW4 David A. Rosenthal

January-February 1999: Dead of Winter at Camp McGovern

The 126th Med Co still maintains two aircraft and crews on MEDEVAC standby here at Camp McGovern, located about 35 miles north of Tuzla in the northeastern corner of Bosnia. McGovern is sort of a forward "outpost," situated on the outskirts of the city of Brcko (pronounced "BIRCH-ko") where the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia all come together.

The last month or so has been pretty quiet here--and everywhere else in this part of Europe--now that the snow has fallen and temperatures plunged to the teens and below.

Typical days this time of year tend to be kind of dreary and foggy with visibilities below a half-mile.

And though we do see some good days...

...when we come out in the morning, we're usually greeted by scenes like this.

Fortunately, the frigid temperatures have solidified the mud, transforming the streets into uneven sheets of slippery ice. And it certainly makes getting around less messy.

The aircraft are, more than anything, quasi-animate sculptures nowadays but the icy weather and frost produces some beautiful and striking visual effects.

Despite the weather and the cold, MEDEVAC operations continue.

Every morning we preflight the aircraft and run them up to make sure we have both on continuous stand-by. We maintain a 24-hour capability to launch within 10 minutes of receiving a call.

During winter, though, we spend most of our time standing-by in our Flight Operations room, sipping coffee and, for me (on the right in the picture), working on the computer.

One rewarding activity for me is operating my amateur HF radio transceiver, using the license I received from the Bosnian government. The U. S. and Bosnia have a reciprocal operating agreement allowing visiting ham radio operators to use their equipment in the country. My special callsign here is **T9/N6TST**
I'm using a Kenwood TS-440SAT transceiver sending 100 watts into a Windom multi-band, offset-fed dipole antenna up about 30 feet. I can operate on the 80, 40, 20, 17, 12, and 10 meter amateur radio bands. I've contacted the U. S. many times and enjoy making friends in other countries around the world.
Propagation "windows" to the U. S. generally open about 1600 and run until 2000 hours UTC. I try to work 12 meters and the bottom end of the 20 meter Advanced Class frequencies.	The only way I could get a shot of my 132-foot single-wire antenna was to rest my camera on top of its support rope. It's pretty hard to capture an image of a thin wire in a resolution-limited digital photo.

Spending Christmas and New Year's at Camp McGovern was very much like the rest of the holidays we've experienced here (Labor Day, Veterans' Day, and Thanksgiving).

It's my observation that people here seem to try to ignore holidays in an attempt to avoid the emotional toll exacted by thinking about home and family. This surely occurs at the everday working level--and especially at Camp McGovern where one day is like the last far more than in a more "sophisticated" installation like Eagle Base in Tuzla.

But, as a fairly remote outpost with a reasonably-sized indoor gathering place, we also enjoy visits from USO shows.

Just before Christmas, Bluegrass Music great, Ricky Skaggs and his group dropped by...

...accompanied by songwriter and performer, Paul Overstreet.

They put on a great show and it felt very nice to share the presence of extraordinarily talented people again.

But far more than that, seeing who was motivated to leave the comfort of the real world at Christmas-time to entertain a bunch of people stuck sitting in the middle of muddy nowhere, profoundly illustrates one of the main reasons why we, as a nation, remain great. You can bet these guys didn't come here for the money.

We also had a visit from (four-star) General Henry Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who dropped into our Dining FACility (DFAC) as part of a pre-Christmas sweep of Base Camps here.

Then there was New Year's Eve. Someone fashioned a Christmas light-covered ball and put it at the top of a crank-up radio mast. As midnight approached, the 1SG came out and lowered it little by little until everyone cheered right at twelve and people on the bunkerline launched illumination flares into the incredibly dense fog.

People opened their bottles of de-alcoholized champagne and the 1SG coiled up and took away the extension cord to the lights on the ball.

That's about it from here for this time (mid-January). Stay tuned since I'll be continuing to update this page until we leave (we're told) in late March.

Good old Camp McGovern might be an isolated mud hole with abysmal Internet service (we're still struggling along with our 4800 bps dial-up and still hearing promises of improvement "soon"), but it's not a bad existence. The job here is very real and the people seem oriented to that same reality.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in an alternate reality, it exists back in Tuzla on the "Air Force Side."

So drop a line with your comments or suggestions. We'll surely be here...

The address is n6tst@ridgenet.net.

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