Arctic Eagle soars away
The Alaska National Guard’s Arctic Eagle/Patriot 2022 exercise has come to a close. Participants vacated their snow caves, packed up their prototype medical tents and returned to their homes in Alaska and the Lower 48. Unseasonably warm weather and a rise in COVID-19 cases in the region caused the exercise no end of changes, but Joint Task Force Nome adapted to the situation and the needs of the community.
First there were in-person town halls to have a dialogue with residents. Then COVID switched them to be held online. Then participants from the Lower 48 learned about unique challenges to operating in rural Alaska like connectivity issues.
The first town hall, on March 1, was led by Master Sergeant Esterle of the Kentucky Air National Guard. His unit, the 123rd Contingency Response Group, does what is called “command and control,” or C2. The 12 to 15 personnel do the “behind the scenes” jobs and are the first ones on the ground to open up airfields, unload and set up gear. C2 is like the central nervous system, he said; they make sure that information flows from the ground to the bases and back, and that everyone in the operation knows what they need to know. Here, they’ve been practicing a post-earthquake scenario, looking at what lines of communication work and don’t.
Before arriving in Nome, the 123rd went through Arctic Survival training at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks. The course starts with two days in the classroom, followed by two and a half days in the field building fires, digging snow shelters and making water. The weather in Nome hasn’t been quite what Arctic Eagle participants expected, but members of the team still slept – and played board games during down time – in snow caves dug northwest of the airport.
Esterle, a Physical Therapist when he isn’t on National Guard duty, has been activated since July of 2021 doing COVID-19 response in Kentucky.
On March 2, this reporter, had the opportunity to spend the day at the Army Aviation Operations Facility, known to most Nome residents as the National Guard Hanger.
The originally planned medical exercise addressing a mass casualty
event was cancelled, and the teams instead practiced a smaller scenario in which two crew have been ejected at high speeds.
First, Master Sergeant George MacEachern, of the 366th Operational Medical Readiness Squadron in Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, talked about his day. For Arctic Eagle, he has been working on integrating many of the medical specialties. The training they went through was to treat the pretend plane crash victims and get them ready for surgery, which is a different team, the Ground Surgical Team, and that meant new collaborations.
Lieutenant Colonel Erik DeSoucy, from Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, and Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Mahoney, from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, explained how they try to have most of their surgical suite fit into six bags for deployment anywhere. Surgery or other medical procedures in tents in the Arctic are considerably different from a desert, and part of this exercise was find out if adjustments to those bags need to be made for future deployments. Listing the injuries they might need to treat, they were insistent that those were more specific to high-speed military aircraft with ejection capabilities, and that the small aircraft used to fly from village to village have a much more controlled descent in the event of engine failure.
Outside of the official exercise goals of collaborating with other National Guard or active-duty military units, the participants spoke with Nome’s Assistant Fire Chief Kevin Knowlton, and discussed visiting the Norton Sound Regional Hospital to learn about some of the unique medical challenges in rural Alaska.
MacEachern, DeSoucy and Mahoney hoped to test some of their equipment, but because it was unseasonably warm, there were other equipment that they weren’t able to test. MacEachern specializes in bioenvironmental engineering and had wanted to test of his chemical detection equipment beyond their recommended limits, for example.
The big piece of equipment they were able to test, however, was their prototype tent. The tent, a one-of-akind prototype which the medical team thought was called a UTS TM60. Tall, 34 feet long and almost 11 feet at the ridge, the tent flap was heavy with thick insulation. Outside, next to the stakes which exercise participants had struggled to pound through the snow and ice, a generator hummed.
Inside the tent, where most participants were wearing only a light jacket, Nome’s Volunteer Ambulance Department also had the opportunity to speak about some of the challenges they face. Staff Sergeant Venus Cruz, an Independent Duty Medical Technician, IDMT for short, who does everything from water testing to medical triage to dental fillings, didn’t really know what injuries to expect aside from frostbite and hypothermia. He said it was interesting to learn about the myriad of fractures and other snowmachine injuries. At the other end of the spectrum, Cruz was previously stationed in San Antonio, Texas, and had to treat hyperthermia, speaking to the broad range of skills that IDMTs need. She also learned about the mental health aspect of life in the Arctic.
Heading out through the hanger, participants got a sneak peek at the evening’s town hall event with the Air Force Research Lab at WrightPatterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Captain Danny Hicks and Mike Moulton were testing the viability of commercially available body temperature sensor technology in the cold. But since the weather wasn’t quite what they were expecting, Hicks stripped down to a cotton t-shirt, and went for a ride as fast as the MRZR could go. A wind chill chart would suggest that he only experienced -10°F.
During the town hall, they expanded on the work that they do. Hicks is the lead investigator at the hypothermia prevention systems and Moulton is a research engineer at the human performance wing. Together, they have been working on a system to alert a leader or medic if someone starts showing signs of deteriorating health.
Right now, they are working on making sure that the sensors work in a variety of situations and with people with different body temperatures. They are programming a number of alarms into the system, progressively alerting people. It isn’t designed to be used when traveling alone or in place of an SOS beacon, they say.
Another problem the Air Force Research Lab has worked on is extreme heat and dehydration. Moulton and team put ice in a CamelBack and extended the tubing around the user, effectively cooling them down, too.
The final town hall on Thursday’s was with members of the services group, which serves in a support function. They make sure participants are fed and housed. Even with exercise participants coming and going, they said they had already prepared over 750 meals. With the weather variability and the exercise downsized, this team wasn’t able to get their kitchen truck to Nome. They explained that the VFW graciously stepped in and allowed them to use the kitchen there, which meant new teammates working together in a new environment, all while trying to feed hungry service members.
Their day started at 4:30 a.m., cooking breakfast, serve it up, clean, cook lunch, serve it up and finish the final clean about 2:30 p.m.. Despite all that, Airman Dishneau said that this was the second mission she’d worked on where the food was complimented. Master Sergeant Bowen explained that they brought two pallets of food with them. First, they create a menu, then worked with JBER to make the orders, and finally the Logistics and Readiness Squadron loads it on a plane. In this case, Kentucky’s 123rd CRG unloaded everything, put it into the back of the SUSV and delivered it to the Nome Rec Center and divided cold, warm and dry storage.
And then, just as quickly as they all swooped in, they took to the skies again. Except, they were having difficulty getting the last small contingent out on Sunday evening.