In early January my younger brother Mike, a Corporal in the Canadian Army, was posted to Bosnia on peacekeeping duty. Our family knew that there was a possibility that he would be going, but after a few previous false starts, his departure took us by surprise. With only a few weeks' notice and being so close to the Christmas and New Years holidays, it was a very hectic and emotional goodbye.

We are normally quite scattered and rarely have the opportunity to get together. Mike is stationed in Winnipeg, Manitoba with his fiancée, I live in Southern Ontario, near Toronto, and our parents live in Eastern Ontario near Ottawa. Since we are so spread out, there was no way that we could be with Mike when he left for Bosnia. His fiancée saw him off at the Base in what was no doubt a very emotional scene. As his plane took off, she suddenly realized that none of us had an address where we could reach Mike.

When she asked the officers in charge of the departure she was told, "Ma'am right now addresses are the last thing we are worrying about. We just need to get these troops over there safely and efficiently and THEN we'll worry about mailing addresses." She was asked to leave her name and number at the central depot and was assured that within a week she'd receive word about how we could contact Mike.

A WEEK!! When someone you care about is heading off into the midst of an armed conflict a week might as well be a year! This was especially so when we considered what he would be doing. "I'm driving a bomb!" he told me when I asked him at Christmas. His role on the force is to drive a large tanker truck of diesel and refuel equipment in the field, potentially in the midst of hostilities! My parents were understandably distressed at the fact that their youngest child was going to be involved in such a situation half a world away. They called me the day that he left and told me that they had received a call from Mike's fiancée with all of the details of the departure. My mother was particularly anxious about not being able to write for a week. I sympathized with her and shared her concern.

Bosnia. To us it was a mysterious land about which we knew little except from the horrible images of hostilities that we had seen on the news. We knew only that Mike was to be stationed in Zgon. We had no idea what part of Bosnia it was in, much less if it was a city, town, village or simply a military base in the middle of nowhere. We weren't even sure of the capital of Bosnia. As my father poured over his old reliable atlas he was at a loss to find the country, born from the remains of the former Yugoslavia.

Following my parents' call on the day that Mike shipped out, I decided that perhaps the Internet could help us with this terrible lack of information. After all, where else would you look to find the most current information on any given subject, right? I had already used the Internet to relieve the pain and discomfort of a hernia and now I fired up my modem in an attempt to help relieve the pain and discomfort of the family's uncertainty. And once again, the Internet delivered - in spades!!

Within ten minutes of carefully directed searching, I had located a site designed by the Department of National Defense to provide information about the missions of Canadian peacekeepers in Bosnia. Another few minutes and there it was: "Mail To Canadian Peacekeepers" This page included the mailing address, and e-mail address [!] as well as the phone number for the toll-free information hotline. I quickly printed these out and then called my parents. While Mike was still somewhere over the Atlantic, my mother began her first letter to him!

Once off the phone, I got back online and continued my fact-finding mission. A few hours later I had discovered so much information about Bosnia! I was also armed with printouts of maps and fact sheets, which I sent off to my parents. We were all relieved to find that Zgon was not near any of the "hot-spots" that we are accustomed to hearing about on the news.

I even found a page created by some of the troops in Zgon. It helped all of us tremendously just seeing pictures of happy and healthy soldiers smiling in the same place that Mike is stationed. The media has conditioned us to have a certain image of troops in a battle zone. They are either sharing their last pack of cigarettes in a muddy trench, or covered in camouflage and tree branches crawling through a strange jungle. The Internet had helped dispel these mythical images and had given us a window on the life that Mike is leading. Since then, the good folks of the Second Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry [Mike's unit] have put together a most amazing site complete with sections designed especially for family and friends back here in Canada.

My parents write quite often. The mailing address is in Canada and the military fly the mail to Bosnia twice a week where it is sorted and delivered, by convoy to Zgon. The Internet gives me a distinct advantage over snail-mail. E-mail is retrieved and printed out in Bosnia regularly and sent out in the next convoy. So my messages to Mike get to him within a matter of days, rather than weeks. He still has four months left in Bosnia, but thanks to the Internet, Bosnia and Mike don't seem so far away.

As an Internet Consultant, it is my job to help people achieve results with the aid of the Internet. Normally my success is measured in dollars and cents. In this particular instance, my success was measured by piece of mind.