My two-weeks length embed with “Dustoff” Medevac team, C Company, 1-214 Aviation Regiment, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, based at Camp Dwyer in Afghanistan’s war-torn Helmand Province is over. But I’ve been still looking around trying to find my two-way radio. I haven’t heard “Medevac, Medevac, Medevac” call signs for a long time already. Those calls mean that something bad has happened. Created in the 70th to airlift casualties from battlefield Dustoff still exists. The legend says, when the US army deployed the 57th Medical Detachment to Vietnam in 1962, they were given the radio call sign Dustoff. The main idea of its existing hasn’t changed. But in Afghanistan over 70% of Medevac missions are to pick up Afghans, be they civilians, soldiers or even militants. In country where life costs nothing and every forth child dies before reaches five their attempt to improve statistic and help every wounded or diseased looks utopian but so humanity. As Sergeant Farrell said to me: “We try to do all we can.” And they can do a lot, indeed.

The new multimedia category has been created. South Ossetian slideshow ‘Survivors’ is the first one.  

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After weeks of low-level hostilities, the conflict in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia backed by Moscow, escalated dramatically in the early morning of August 8, 2008. Georgia declared that it intended to restore constitutional order and launched a large-scale military offensive. Russia sent additional troops to South Ossetia, saying they were reinforcements to Russian peacekeepers who are in the area to monitor a 1992 ceasefire between Georgian and South Ossetian forces.

The 2006 “Second Lebanon War” began on July 12, 2006 and concluded on August 14 with a UN brokered cease fire. The conflict began when Hezbollah terrorists opened fire with rockets on mortars on the Israeli border towns of Zar’it and Shtula, wounding several civilians. During the war, about 1,200 Lebanese were killed, of whom about 500 - 700 were estimated by Israel or the UN to have been Hezbollah guerillas. About 149 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians were killed. Upward of 4,000 civilians on each side were injured, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes temporarily or permanently. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 terminated the hostilities by securing Lebanese agreement to take control of Southern Lebanon from the Hezbollah with the help of an enlarged United nations emergency force. July-August 2006