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Monday, August 28, 2000
National Guard soldiers kept
Bosnia communications going

By Anthony Burgos
Bosnia bureau

EAGLE BASE, Bosnia and Herzegovina - With any military mission, it's always smart to have a backup plan.

Sprint, the company in charge of communications for SFOR troops in Bosnia, had to take their equipment off-line Sunday for yearly maintenance. The work is done in several phases to avoid having the whole network down at one time.

The outage would have left troops at three SFOR camps out of touch with the rest of the multinational forces in Bosnia for the day, had it not been for a group of active-duty and Army National Guard soldiers that teamed together to hook them up.

Guardsmen from the 249th Signal Battalion out of Dallas and soldiers from the 40th Signal Battalion from Fort Huachuca, Ariz., have the equipment and personnel to provide tactical communications support in situations just like Sunday's outage.

Russian troops at Camp Ugljevik, the Nordic-Polish battle group headquarters at Doboj and the Turkish Task Force in Zenica all received American guests over the weekend.

Sgt. Jeff White, a team chief for the 249th, runs a small extension node, a piece of equipment much like a mobile telephone switchboard, at the Russian camp in Ugljevik.

"This is the same exact rig I use back home in Texas," White said. His familiarity with the equipment helps make his job easier.

"I make sure all secure and encrypted data and voice calls get routed correctly. And since it's my rig, it's not too difficult."

The active-duty soldiers from Fort Huachuca receive and transmit data, voice and encrypted signals through mobile satellite dishes. These signals are fed to the mobile switchboards run by the National Guardsmen from Texas. Troops don't handle each individual call, they just keep the lines of communication open.

Together the two teams form a mobile tactical satellite communications station that keeps troops connected to the rest of the SFOR communications network.

Sgt. Carlos Coonrad, a guardsman from Texas, is an electrician in his civilian life. He's on an eight-month deployment to Bosnia.

He said that the biggest challenge was proving that being in the National Guard didn't make him a slacker.

"Working with the active-duty guys, I had the feeling that they thought we were lazy," Coonrad said.

He also admitted that he and other guardsmen felt the tactical satellite operators of the 40th Signal Battalion were a little conceited.

"But once we overcame those stereotypes and realized that our job fields had a lot in common, we formed a good working team," Coonrad said.