On a mission to save long lost messages from members of the U.S. Air Force

"This has a great significance for them," Sigurður Björgvin Magnússon says, but he has recently recovered souvenirs from an old hangar at a former base of NATO at Keflavík Airport in Miðnesheiði in Iceland.

For example, Sigurður Björgvin is now packing tiles on which members of the helicopter rescue team of the US Air Force wrote messages during their stay in Iceland. Sigurður posted among other things photos of these tiles at the Facebook-group NASKEF, but it includes three thousand members who at some point worked in the base in Miðnesheiði.

Sigurður has received a lot of messages from the widows of those who left messages on the tiles in the hangar and the helicopter rescue team that was here in Iceland on behalf of the US Army. The rescue team is now located in Lakenheath in the United Kingdom and has requested good photos of a wall in the hangar, showing all the rescues and assists performed by the team in Iceland from 1971-2005. The U.S military left Iceland in 2006.

The plan is to remake this wall in Lakenheath, but Sigurður sends the tiles to Lakenheath and there it will will be sent to the relatives of those who left messages in the hangar.

"When I came here I had two daughters. No I have three. This happens when it is 20 degrees fahrenheit," sergeant Kirsch wrote on one of the tiles, but he was located in the base from February 2002 til July 2004.

"1.115 days and only one D.U.I.," sergeant Jimmy Ford writes, who stayed in Iceland from April 2001 to April 2004.

Then there was one person who ended his stay in the US Army in Iceland with these words: "Thanks for a great finish to my flight career," Jim Hamblin writes, also known as "The Glacier Man."