***IN PROCESS***

Introduction

Your deployment experience will be highly variable based on a number of factors in and out of your control. It all starts with your position: you may be an embedded physician in your unit, a MAP doc, at an MTF in an unmapped position, and I am sure there are others I am not familiar with. Obviously, if you are embedded like I am, you will be much more significantly involved in the planning process and have different responsibilities before, during, and after the deployment. I am going to cover as much as I am familiar with on this page, but for perspective, I am going on an Operational Deployment (or a "rotation," as you will commonly hear), serving as the Brigade Surgeon. This could drastically contrast with the experience of a MAP physician going on a Combat Deployment (there aren't many of those around the time of writing this intro - NOV2024).   

This deployment to Eastern Europe will entail scheduled exercises involving various parts of the Brigade at Various times. This will include JMRC (an exercise similar to NTC, but in Germany) and various gunneries where our heavy armor units will train with simulation and live fire. 

Operational deployments get far less street cred than combat deployments, and rightly so, however, it won't make the 9 months away from home and family any easier.

At the time of writing this, we are still in our preparatory phase. As always, I will update this page as I go and try to be as detailed as possible. 

Pre-Deployment

If you have the pleasure of being embedded in your deploying unit, you will not only get the pleasure of a several month's paid vacation, you get to help plan the trip as well! Looking back after writing this section, I definitely did not paint a solid picture of how much work this process entails. Consider yourself lucky if you are just along for the ride!

1. SRP (Soldier Readiness Processing)

   • A requirement of all deploying Soldiers is a pre-deployment health assessment (PDHA). It is similar to a PHA, and part 1 is completed in a similar fashion on MEDPROS. During the SRP, Soldiers will get their necessary vaccinations, a basic exam, medical history, and will be marked as requiring a medical waiver, if necessary, based on the deployment criteria of whatever region they are deploying to. This also includes getting everyone "Green" on all readiness metrics, including vision, hearing, and dental. Usually, they will incorporate some administrative processing, such as S1, finance, etc., since they have everyone together at the same time. 

   • Your role in this will vary depending on your position and support staff. As the Brigade Surgeon, my medical operations officer (MEDO) and my Senior medic took care of just about everything in conjunction with my installation's dedicated SRP site. I took the opportunity to be proactive and get a list of every chronic medication our Soldiers were on. I could work with the pharmacy to get everyone a sufficient supply of personal medications to last the entire deployment. 

2. Medical Concept of Support (MEDCOS)

   • This will only apply to you if you are the Brigade Surgeon, but if you are, you get to participate in creating the MEDCOS. This is the high-level overview of your entire Brigade and highlights what medical assets you have where, how long the travel time is between medical assets, what host-nation medical assets you can count on (given that you can't fix everything with the stuff you bring), and more. 

   • This is a living document that you present to your senior leadership to point out strengths and weaknesses and to request support in places as needed.

3. Communication with the local facilities/outgoing unit

   •  Prior to your flying out, you will make contact with either the unit you are replacing (if it's a rotational unit) or whatever facility you are falling in on. 

   • Hopefully, you will get a warm handoff and be able to plan well enough to accommodate your own people when you arrive.

Deployment

This is the meat of it. As I mentioned in the introduction, these things come in all shapes and sizes with different groups, in different places, and with different missions. I can only speak for myself and my experience with it. As with everything I talk about, your experience will likely vary. I probably cannot discuss too much about what I am actually doing or where we are rotating but that really won't take away from the picture I am trying to paint for you. The time of writing this is FEB2025. 

My Brigade is broken up across several countries. We fall under a different Division out here and technically report back to them while we are OCONUS, which is an odd change of pace. I still keep in contact with our home Division; it is still important to be in the loop on plans and changes ongoing at home station while we are away. 

The BEFORE time

JMRC (see below) is our largest training event and is right in the middle of our rotation, so our planning has focused on our time before, during, and after JMRC. 

The before time is primarily focused on getting everyone on ground, getting all equipment and supplies situated, and planning for JMRC. 

Personally, I have spent much of my time dealing with medical issues in the rear: those who have last-minute medical issues (or who are pretending to have them), coordinating our medical coverage during JMRC and after, working on getting various individual prescription medications taken care of, some projects in the Rear for when we get back, and just a million other small things. 

All of our Battalions have different living situations that vary by location. I am happily in a college-dorm-like set-up where everything I want and need is less than a 2-minute walk away: my office is downstairs in the building I sleep in, the gym, laundry, DFAC, and even a little PX w/barbershop are all conveniently located. 

I switched my phone provider to Google Fi for this trip - they have by far the best international plan of any US phone provider. A lot of people have purchased Sapphire brand Wi-Fi pucks and purchasing additional data through that. There is free Wi-Fi around the installation, which works well enough for being free. I plan on buying an E-sim for my phone for additional data when I need it possibly for JMRC. 

Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC)

The biggest training event of our operational deployment. This is going to follow a similar plan to how we ran NTC. The planning will run similarly to everything else: we see the plan and come up with the MEDCOS. JMRC is a much smaller training area compared to NTC, so things should be a bit easier to plan out, logistically.

Post-Deployment