Special duty for Reserve members

By CPL Damian Shovell

COL Jeffrey Rosenfeld at a US air base hospital.

ONE the ADF’s newest enlistees, Squadron Leader Andrew Rosengarten, and one of the ADF’s most operationally experienced surgeons, Colonel Jeffrey Rosenfeld, share more in common than being part of the 19-member medical team attached to the US Air Force’s No. 332 Expeditionary Medical Group at a major US air base north of Baghdad.

Both are members of the ADF’s Specialist Reserve scheme and hold senior appointments within civilian medical professions.

SQNLDR Rosengarten is the Director of the Victorian Adult Emergency Retrieval and Coordination Service and COL Rosenfeld, the sole Australian surgeon on the ADF medical team, is the professor/director of neurosurgery at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and Monash University.

Emergency physician SQNLDR Rosengarten’s first involvement with a military operation was in Bali, when he conducted a patient transfer from Darwin to Melbourne.

Having just completed the paperwork and primary internship to join the Specialist Reserve in July, SQNLDR Rosengarten had a phone call asking if he was interested in going to Iraq.

“Then I had to go full-throttle – BFT completed, physical done, paperwork done. I still haven’t worn a uniform properly yet or done most of the courses and I had to get my weapons training up to scratch within a week,” he said.

The hospital facilities in Iraq are bigger than he expected.

SQNLDR Andrew Rosengarten says the hospital facilities in Iraq are bigger than he expected.

Photos by CPL Neil Ruskin

SQNLDR Rosengarten is also involved in some of the medical Disaster Planning and Australian Mass Casualty Plan disaster scenarios in Victoria.

“I think it’s a good experience both from a logistic and emergency department perspective looking at what Australia can offer as a service when we go overseas,” he said.

COL Rosenfeld, an Army Reservist since 1984, has previously deployed to Rwanda in 1995, East Timor twice, Bougainville twice and once to the Solomon Islands.

He said the ADF medical personnel in Iraq were gaining an invaluable understanding of working with US forces and their medical system. They were also gaining experience treating injuries on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War.

“We’re doing true war surgery here. We’ve done that to some degree on other deployments over the past decade, but more so here,” he said.

He said the theatre hospital was a first-rate field hospital with a broad range of surgical specialties represented.

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