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desert, and personnel around them were affected. This attitude of adaptation and 
flexibility meant constantly doing work-around. Work-arounds meant scrounging, 
modifying concepts and equipment (where possible), re-examining how we did things 
in CONUS exercises, and doing what we could to meet mission requirements with 
less or something different. It meant leadership taking a fresh approach and 
instilling this approach in their subordinates. It meant sleeping on a hangar 
floor upon arrival in the first couple of weeks of the operation, pitching your 
own billeting tents, receiving ASF base operating support (BOS) from the Marine 
Corps, using a litter and sawhorse for a field bed, using vehicles other than 
ambulances for mass casualty response, ATH personnel volunteering to run the MWR 
program, doing hair cuts or sponsoring the beddown choir, mental health officers 
being proactive doing stress management and suicide prevention workshops and 
making their office the flightline or at Security Police (SP) guardposts, MAC AE 
medics leading a Christmas play, and on and on -- the list is seemingly endless. 
Those medics who made the work-arounds happen were truly our best leaders during 
the operation. 
 
	During the critical first six weeks of the operation we were building by 
what seemed leaps and bounds. Colonel Randy Randolph, USCENTAF Surgeon, was the 
first Air Force medic in, followed by aeromedical evacuation personnel from the 
1st and 2nd AES, 1st and 363rd Tactical Fighter Wing SME's, and Surgeon's Office 
personnel from TAC and USCENTAF [1]. The initial task for 6 

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