Operation Second Chance Prepares for 3rd Medical Mission to Balkans : Humanitarian: Founder and Huntington Beach resident Sonja Hagel decides to go as planned despite the threat of NATO air strikes on Bosnia.

As Sonja Hagel made last-minute preparations this week to take a team of physicians on her third medical mission to the Balkans, she was wondering if the threatened NATO air strike on Bosnia would alter her plans.

If the Bosnian Serbs did not comply with NATO’s disarmament ultimatum, she knew she wouldn’t be able to fly safely into Sarajevo.

“But I have other options. There would be alternative locations for us to go in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” said the Huntington Beach resident who is determined to help that war-torn region through Operation Second Chance, the medical aid organization she founded.

“Our compulsion is to keep going back to help them,” said Hagel, who leaves today. “If we were in their shoes, we would want the outside world to reach in.”

As it turns out, convoys of Serbian artillery began pulling out Thursday after Russian President Boris Yeltsin promised to commit Russian troops to new peacekeeping duties in Sarajevo if the Serbs would withdraw.

Nevertheless, the 17 surgeons recruited for the mission are aware of the risk of continuing warfare, Hagel said, noting, “I have had heart-to-heart talks with all of them.”

Hagel said she also has given them the World Health Organization’s security guidelines for traveling in Bosnia, which recommends, among other things, that they pack flak jackets and helmets. She said the group also will pack dried food with them because of a severe shortage of local food supplies. And they will take flashlights so they can work after nightfall in field hospitals that lack electricity.

Hagel, the associate director of Century City Hospital in Los Angeles, said the physician volunteers, most of whom are paying their own travel expenses, are trained in specialties needed by the war-wounded: emergency medicine, orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery and plastic surgery.

The doctors come from various parts of the United States and three have been recruited from Hagel’s hometown of Klagenfurt, Austria.

The physicians have been divided into two groups, Hagel said: One team will be deployed to hospitals outside the war zone in Zagreb and Split, Croatia, where many wounded Bosnians have been transported. The other will help at makeshift field hospitals somewhere in Bosnia, depending on where the United Nations will permit the team to go.

“The objective of the trip is to provide relief to local doctors and to take care of patients in their homeland,” Hagel said.

The doctors expect to perform 80 to 100 surgical procedures during their two-week stay, Hagel said, with a special focus on treating children who are war victims.

In addition, she said, visiting physicians will take with them medical supplies donated by American vendors and provide educational materials and mini-lectures to local physicians who have been unable to keep up with advances in their specialized fields during wartime.

Hagel said that while the physicians will strive to treat war victims in their homeland, “every time we go, we bring patients back.” She said that “inevitably” the doctors identify difficult cases that require more sophisticated medical attention in the United States.

Hagel last August found American hospitals and doctors who agreed to accept and treat without charge 19 disabled Bosnians who were airlifted from Sarajevo.

Since then, she said, Operation Second Chance has brought four more patients, including a 10-year-old girl and 11-year-old boy, to the United States for free medical treatment.

Dr. Antoine Kazzi, an emergency medicine specialist at UCI Medical Center in Orange, planned to board a Delta Air Lines jet with Hagel this morning at Los Angeles International Airport. The first leg of the journey will take them to Frankfurt, Germany. From there they will fly to Zagreb.

Kazzi, who will turn 31 while on the trip, is going to Bosnia for the second time. He said Hagel arranged for him last December to spend three weeks at a field hospital.

Kazzi said he was impressed by the dedication and skill of the Bosnian doctors, who have learned to make do with a shortage of ventilators and other equipment. “Some are very exhausted,” he said.

Kazzi also observed that at the Balkan hospitals, doctors of diverse ethnic backgrounds are working side by side to save the lives of ethnically diverse patients, despite the inter-ethnic war raging around them.

“What we are doing is just a drop in a sea of pain,” Kazzi conceded, but emphasizing that the trip is still worthwhile.

“It is a gesture to people who are in severe suffering and distress that other humans care,” he said.