Thanks for that Stan....you should have also mentioned the absolute criticality of comms for the guys on the ground: you were the reason I was able to talk for more than 45 minutes on a standard battery for the cell phones in use in Zaire.

Stan, as an excellent NCO pack rat, had a case of SATCOM batteries; he modified a DC power adaptor for the cell phones and taught me how to use them without blowing myself up. As a result of the pure luck that the Goma refugee festival took place where thete was a cellular base station and the use of those SATCOM batteries, I could and did call the Joint staff as many as 8 times a day, running up a phone bill for some $27K for the last 2 weeks of July 94.

Even as all the discussions over message transcription took place and we ended up spending 40 days out in Goma, DIA attempted to get an IMRSAT to us. I finally got the thing in Rwanda; it was the size of a medium foot locker and you had to have a power source (no batteries included). In contrast, the USAID DART that was on the ground had laptops that doubled as SATCOMs for voice and email; so did the PAO on the JTF.

Where DIA did come through was really not DIA's initiative; my 2 biggest breaks in Rwanda were getting an Navy chief who volunteered to come out when he heard a rumor that a slot might be available--I had him for 14 months. Second the DIA analyst on Rwanda--then MAJ Rick Orth--volunteered to come out on an analyst support to attache burst that lasted 60 days. Rick was superb; he ultimately became the 1st official US Defense Attache to Kigali after I left; he later was attache in Kampala, Uganda and is now I believe in Ethiopia.

All of us on this site know the truism that it is people NOT organizations that make things happen; I was very lucky that I had Stan Reber in Zaire and Mickey Dunham in Rwanda. Rick Orth was critical in backstopping us from DC. There were others in the same organization who were minor and on occasion major hindrances. One of the benefits of being far from the flagpole was you could use that to your advantage as others used it against you. That sounds like politics and it is. But it is a fact of life (or perhaps a fact of humanity) as organizations are frameworks of common purpose for different and therefore disparate people, with multiple agendas.

Again, Stan, you made it happen before I knew I needed it

Tom