Veterans Month
November 2003
NS Veterans Remember
Paul Heymann
product manager aggregates
Roanoke
A high point of my 22-year Army career was a 6-month deployment for Operation Joint Endeavor. As part of Philadelphia's 304th Civil Affairs Brigade (Army Reserve), I was assigned to a NATO multi-national headquarters in Croatia, supporting operations in the three sectors of Bosnia (US, UK, French). Four projects that my CA team worked on included:
1) Evaluating the rail line linking Bosnia, Croatia and Hungary, so donor countries could sponsor repairs of war damage. Interestingly, the evaluation team also included NS Knoxville locomotive engineer Terry Gamble (while assigned to IFOR in Sarajevo);
2) Supporting the Croatian Red Cross's effort to distribute firewood to elderly Serbs left living alone in the Croatian Krajina (hinterland) region, after the "ethnic cleansing" of the war. British and German engineer units split the firewood, and delivered it to homes and town centers;
3) Obtaining approval for the NATO Franco-German field hospital in Croatia to treat civilians on a space-available basis. After the war, many hospital clinics were damaged or under-staffed, so this was a great project, but it required approval of the German Ministry of Defense. One of the first patients was a 5-year old Bosnian girl, a refugee, whose eyesight was saved by surgery; and
4) Coordinating medical care and claims settlement for a Bosnian family whose 7-year old boy was struck and critically injured by a U.S. vehicle in Bosnia. The family was relocating from a Serb area to a Muslim area, so the children could enroll in school, when the accident happened. The neurosurgery, medical care, and physical rehabilitation would easily have exceeded $100,000 in the U.S., but the medical bills from the Croatian hospital came to less than $6,000. As an added bonus, the injured boy's brother received a 'gratis' hernia operation from the field hospital, while his brother was undergoing evaluation before going to a nearby civilian hospital for the neurosurgery.
One final note, the 304th is again deployed - this time to Kuwait in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.