So there I was in Kosovo

 Once upon a time, in a land far away, young SGT McChuck was newly arrived in Germany.  Right after finishing inprocessing, I was told to go to war with these two others whom I had never met, because they were still inprocessing.  The regular teams were away, training to be deployed, so they couldn't be deployed to war.  No, I'm not kidding.  So the few people still there at the base helped me collect all the broken gear that nobody else wanted.  I found an Albanian phrase book in the base library, and copied the map out of a thirty year old encyclopedia set.

Our little team of three ended up doing more than any other CI team in theater, just by sheer bad luck.  I got to sit on an actual Serbian prisoner, with orders to tell him to shut up.  I later saw him on the news, standing with President BJ Clinton at the White House.  Then they sent him and the other prisoner back to Serbia, where they were tortured to death.

One day, we were told we had 20 minutes to load up the truck and meet a convoy going out for an overnight trip.  We spent the next six weeks tooling around northern Albania with the MLRS battery.  Why yes, it did completely suck, thanks for asking.  But I got to watch a B52 strike on the other side of a mountain, across a lake, at night.  It was glorious.  I drove the truck up a logging path that was a few inches more narrow than the truck, against a 2,000 foot cliff.  And then go back down the next morning.  (Our civilian girl 'terp from Manhattan had no idea that you could actually see the sun rise in the morning.  She was cute but dumb.)  I got a close view of a battalion of T-55's.  One day the convoy stopped in a river valley and a helicopter landed on the stony shallows.  A US Special Forces team came over and abducted our older male US civilian 'terp.  They abandoned him in place a couple days later (assholes), and we eventually rescued him.  

But what reminded me of all this was:

https://borepatch.blogspot.com/2022/03/what-is-it-with-air-force-and-bronze.html

I was one of the troops in Albania (day 4) and Kosovo (day 2). I got a coin, a wart, and a NATO medal with star. What a stupid war. We got involved to keep it from spiraling into a regional conflict (and so BJ Clinton could show what a strong President he was). Albania was preparing to invade Serbia to defend their Kosovar cousins. Greece was preparing to attack Albania to defend their Orthodox brethren. And Turkey was threatening to attack Greece because two thirds of Albanians were Muslim. (And because Turkey/Greece, of course.)

In the end, Russia won, and used Kosovo as an excuse to invade Georgia. But I got to play with a Russian BRDM at the Pristina airfield. (It sucked to be the only Serbian/Russian linguist. Especially when you've been speaking Serbian so much that you can't speak coherent Russian any more. And your little team of three is sent cross country alone, to go ask the Russians to leave before Secretary Albright's plane lands.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Pristina_airport