A Preface

This is an account of Task Force Med Eagle, from muster in Würzburg, Germany in April 1998 through our deployment in Tuzla, Bosnia to our return in Oct of that same year. My source material is those daily emails I sent to family and friends. They were not always coherent, not edited and certainly not teeming with punctuation and grammar. Those were the days of ASCII email only one step up from line editing. Rather than inflict the original emails on you, I have turned those notes into a more coherent recitation of my/our experience.

The chapters are set by activity rather than by calendar month. Even so, I have included dates, times and specific locations where relevant. Given that we are more than 15 years beyond when the events chronicled herein, there remains little that could have potential security implications. Even so, the names of most individuals have been replaced by their duty positions. This is not just to protect both the innocent and guilty but to avoid tracking down everyone for releases. Whenever possible, I have removed military abbreviations and expressions in favor of normal English. Even so, there are times when only the technical term will suffice.

My format of emails was fairly consistent: each day I would fill in anything from the previous evening not already reported, discuss the day and mention what I thought was on the plan for the following day. Obviously when I string all of that together it makes for more redundancy than any reasonable person would want. In editing, each day has been condensed and some of the extras left in only when they help set the stage or contribute to the mood.

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