“I was deployed to Bosnia in the late 90s with a Swedish Medevac company, our mission was to help out wounded SFOR-troops (NATO Stabilization force) from the AO with our APC ambulances and with the aid of US Dustoff Blackhawks when needed. All in all it was a pretty slow mission with not much to do.

Our company was stationed right next to the SFOR HQ with troops from many nations, among them the SFOR MP-coy. The very first day we arrived one of our guys had some errand to the MP-coy and he came back all excited telling us about this amazingly beautiful Norwegian female MP. As you all know, at least back then, there were few females in the military and good looking ones were even more rare, so I didn’t really believe him at the time.

Anyway, I was in the gym a few days later and then I saw her, and damn, she was all that, and more!
We slowly got to know each other but it took a lot of patience, the whole MP-coy (all men of course) acted as her personal body guards so I had to befriend pretty much all of them first, just to have a cup of coffee with her. We had this 9 km trail around the camp that we could run or power walk along, and when we did, the MP had two guys in a car driving 10 meters behind us. Talk about being protective…

Anyway, we soon found out that we were both deployed 5 years earlier with the UN-forces in Lebanon, at different places and without meeting, and then we were both back home as civilians until we did another tour and met in Bosnia. What’s the odds on that..?

At the end of my deployment, we both agreed that we wanted to continue seeing each other at home, her contract in Bosnia lasted another 7-8 months so it was a long distance relationship for a start. But once she got back home we lived in Oslo and Stockholm, which is a 5 hour drive, for about a year, and since about 20 years we are still happy together and we both live in Stockholm with our two kids.

If nothing else, it’s a more fun story to tell rather than meeting on Tinder, and we are both thankful for our common military experiences. And sometimes we wonder if there is something called fate!
– Sgt 1Cl Engdahl, Swedish Med coy, Bosnia
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This story was documented by Battles and Beers (TM) Every soldier has a story, and every story deserves to be told.