Why I needed Back Surgery

My first memory of injuring my back was during my 1989-1990 overseas tour in South Korea. I would like to say this injury occurred while I was doing something brave and daring. The truth however is pretty mundane and actually reflects how most of these type injuries occur.

My roommate, Steve Perkins had encouraged me to join the bowling league with him and some of his friends. There wasn’t a lot you could do on base at Camp Humphreys, South Korea, that didn’t cost a lot of money and league bowling gave us something to do one evening a week. Activities not costing a lot of money were high on my list of priorities as my budget was $300.00 a month.  I earned spare cash by covering Staff Duty Officer (SDO) for those who liked to sleep at night and making Australian fold map books for new pilots in the unit. ($50.00 for weekday staff duty and a map book, $100 for weekend duty.)

The bowling alley was about a ten-minute walk from our Bachelor’s Officer Quarters (BOQ) and like most buildings on post it had been repurposed from another use. It had eight lanes and was otherwise pretty much the same as any other bowling alley. It had beer and bar food, and the place was fairly noisy.

We’d been in the league for five or six weeks and we were in the middle of the pack as far as our scores. Steve was the best bowler and I was making progress and becoming more consistent with my throws. About half-way through the second of three games, Steve bowled a strike. I was at a table behind the pits, eating a piece of pizza and I leaned over the row of seats behind the pits to give him a high-five when I felt a small twinge in my lower left back. It really didn’t seem like much, maybe a pulled muscle and I tried to ignore it. I managed to get through the next game and a half without a great deal of pain and then I started walking back to the BOQ. After walking around 100 yards or so, the pain became so intense that I had to stop in the Burger King parking lot and squat to get some relief. I’d get up and walk another 50 to 100 yards and repeat this process until I made it back to the room sometime after 2300.

I woke up the next morning and the problem and my back problem was unchanged, so I went on sick call where I was seen by our flight surgeon CW2 Glenn Farris. Glenn put me on 72-hours bed rest in my quarters and of course he grounded me. He prescribed Flexeril and told me to get some rest. The next 72 hours were pretty much a blurry haze. I remember getting out of bed, going to the bathroom and crawling back to bed. After the third day, I was feeling better and I was really bored having seen nothing more than my glorified hotel room. I decided to go to the Gym when it opened at 0600 that Sunday morning just to get a change of scenery.

The gym was pretty well equipped for a small base and they had a weight machine circuit that I used a lot. There was a laydown back machine and I had tried that first with no results one way or another. I then moved through the different upper and lower back and abdominal exercises without any progress. I continued through the circuit to the hip abduction machines where you were either pressing your legs apart or pressing them together. The inward press required you to pull on a lever to spread your legs as far as you could comfortably stand to get the largest leg motion for your press. I pulled until I had tension as far as I could spread my legs naturally, and then I gave the lever a tug to get just a bit more tension. As I pulled to get the tension, I heard a loud pop and felt an intense stabbing pain I accompanied with a loud yell. It was a good thing I was alone in the gym at the time.

After the pain had subsided and I caught my breath, I noticed that the nagging back pain I had been suffering was gone. I had managed to do my own chiropractic adjustment and apparently re-aligned a slipped lumbar disc. I went on sick call that morning and Glenn cleared me for flight since my issues were resolved. That was the end of my back problem for the moment. I continued serving my tour for the next six months and had no residual after effects.

In May 1990 I was transferred back to the United States for an assignment at Fort Campbell, Kentucky with the 101^st Airborne Division, (Air Assault). I was barely in readiness training when we started to prepare for deployment in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf War in August 1990. We deployed and I spent all of Desert Shield/Desert Storm in the desert with no issues with my back. We returned in April of 1991 and my next encounter with my back occurred around October 1991 while training at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC).

We had staged for this exercise out of Little Rock where we’d setup on the 1000-yard rifle range with our Chinooks. From there we were flying missions to Chaffee and then we’d either return to Little Rock or land at a local site on Chaffee waiting for the next mission. I’d been sent back to Chaffee on a mission with instructions to return when the mission was complete. We were hauling internal cargo so we only took our ruck sacks to leave room for the cargo. So of course, when we completed that mission we were given a mission change and told to meet with five other aircraft for another mission the next morning. Since most of our equipment was back in Little Rock, we were left with what little we have kept on the aircraft for our equipment that night.

I ended up sleeping on the bench seats that lined the sides of the cargo area in the back of the aircraft in my sweats and wrapped in a poncho liner. In the middle of the night I can remember rolling over and twisting around to keep from falling off the seat and I felt a familiar twinge in my lower left back. I didn’t think much about it and went back to sleep. The next morning, I walked over to the next aircraft to gather intelligence on the mission I was diverted there to fly, only to learn we were only a backup in case something went wrong. Disappointed that I had spent the night freezing in my aircraft for no really good reason, I started the walk back to my bird. I again encountered back pain so severe I had to stop and squat. I repeated my walk, squat, walk, squat routine until I made it back to the aircraft.

The next twelve hours were the most miserable period of my life. I was trying everything I could to find some position where I could just keep the pain at bay. From about 0600 to 0800 I tried every sitting, standing, squatting, and laying position that I could think of with ever-increasing levels of pain. Nothing was giving me any relief. I have no recollection of how it came about, but I do remember finally finding that laying over a full rucksack, face down with my left knee pulled up to my chest was the position of choice that finally, allowed me some relief. It was quite evident that I wasn’t going to be flying the aircraft and the other 5 helicopters flew off for their mission leaving me and my crew behind in a big field.

Sometime during that endless afternoon, we figured out I could lay face down on a cot, again with my left knee pulled to my chest. I guess some where in that period I dozed from time to time. I managed to eat a Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE) in a face down position which was creative and I can clearly remember putting off going to pee as log as possible. I wanted to avoid the pain of standing up. At about 4PM another aircraft returned and I had hoped it would be with another pilot to fly us back to Little Rock. I was right about the pilot, but wrong about going back to Little Rock. They wanted the aircraft for a mission and I was moved into the tree line with a couple of crew members and our equipment while the aircraft took off for parts unknown. They told us someone would come and get us before dark. This day was getting better and better. Finally, another Chinook showed about 1830 to take us back to Little Rock.

The problem I encountered when I walked up to the aircraft was that the helicopter was nearly full to capacity with cargo. There were three seats available for us and I had to make some awkward gyrations just to get into the seat. I finally managed to get into the seat and I was concerned how I was going to deal with the pain of a very turbulent hour-long flight back to Little Rock. We finished the passenger briefing and we were told to buckle up for flight. As I cinched up my seat-belt, I felt a familiar pop in my lower back and the discomfort was somewhat relieved, but not resolved like it had been in Korea. At least I wasn’t howling in pain on the flight back.

The best part of being back at Little Rock was having my cot and sleeping bag back, but the back issue wasn’t resolved and the had officially grounded me. The next day, our unit recovered back to Fort Campbell and I was tasked as navigator on my flight (I don’t remember why). I managed to get us there in just about record time thanks to an internal 600-gallon tank of fuel that allowed us to make the flight non-stop. Once were got back to the base, I called my wife to come get me and she showed with the van and all our kids. This was good because I needed the boys carry my equipment to the van and they later carried it into the house for me. I can remember Anna did me one of the biggest favors of my life when she took off my boots (Something she’d never done in my military career.), because she could see how much effort it was taking me to reach them. She also helped me get my one-piece army flight suit off.

I laid down on our living room floor because it was carpeted and I wanted to try and give myself a hip roll to get some relief. Anna was playing on the floor with my youngest son Timothy. I was lying on my back with my left leg bent and I rolled to my right to try and get my back to relocate. Timothy was being quite aggressive wrestling with his mom and the next thing I know she fell backwards onto my leg. I heard a loud “POP” and howled in pain. Anna turned over to me and was telling me she sorry for hurting me. I told her that is was okay and that it hurt he right way. She had gotten my back aligned again. From there I got up cautiously and took a shower. I’d been in the field a week, I was pretty grungy.

Unlike my last encounter, the flight surgeon wasn’t letting me get away without further medical attention. After a plethora of x-rays and an MRI, I was sent to physical therapy three days a week for a month. Therapy was interesting. I was given pelvic traction for thirty-minute sessions and then ice for ten minutes and heat for another ten. I quickly learned how to configure my table for traction and the attendant would only check my setup and setting before turning it on. I had become a “regular” in the PT clinic. The traction was extremely relaxing and it was not unusual for me to sleep through a 240-lb. pull (the table cycled every two minutes.) After my course of treatment was completed, I was given a temporary physical profile but I was allowed to fly again.

In the months following, I learned that while my back was manageable, it meant that I had to take some steps that could be (as was) career challenging. I had learned that running long distance greatly aggravated my back injury and that many other army exercises were contributing to my problems. I was approved for a permanent physical profile (P3) which essentially said I didn’t have to run, do push-ups or sit-ups.  For my physical fitness test, I was allowed an alternate test with a 6.2-mile bicycle ride. While the profile was not an issue for my command, the army promotion board was another story. My flight surgeon told me straight up, I could walk or get promoted, my choice. I chose being able to walk.

I had no major issues for a couple of years of years and then the next episode occurred while I was in the Degree Completion Program. After three years with the 101^st Airborne Division, the army saw fit to send me for more formal education For eighteen months, my duty station was Austin Peay State University. It was the easiest change of duty ever, I didn’t even have to move out of my quarters at Fort Campbell as Austin Peay was the local college. My back problem arose again doing a favor for my neighbor across the street.

Jeanne was the wife of an Air Force officer who was on assignment with the 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) and her husband was deployed overseas. Jeanne had two boys, one in Kindergarten and the other an infant. She had developed a stress fracture in her right foot and she couldn’t drive. My wife Anna was often her driver. One day, Jeanne needed to make a trip into town and I volunteered to watch the baby, Mark, (her other son was at school) while they were away. We always kidded Jeanne about her going out and not turning on her cell phone so she made a rather large production about turning it on before she left. (This was the early 1990’s and you only turned on a cell phone when you thought you might need it as the batteries were so lame.) I placed Mark in his playpen and sat down on the loveseat as the ladies walked out the door. As I started to get comfortable, I slid my left foot forward a few inches and all hell broke loose.

It is hard to explain a massive back spasm to anyone who hasn’t experienced one. If you have ever had a cramp in your calf, imagine that pain, magnified by a factor of ten, in your lower back. Unlike the calf, you have no way of stretching it out to relive the pain. Your vision goes white, maybe it seems like 100 strobe lights are going off all around you, and you collapse on the floor screaming because it feels like someone has just stabbed you in the back with a glowing red broadsword that was recently pulled out of a blacksmith’s forge.

Anna and Jeanne are just pulling out of the driveway when this occurred. Mark was in his playpen screaming because I had scared him to death. I was lying on the floor whimpering and trying to curl up in a ball to find some sort of relief for a pain. Pain so intense I had no reference of how it could hurt so bad. Apparently, my previous experiences had been a mere warm up.

After an eternity of blinding pain (in reality maybe a minute or two) I was able to move, somewhat. Standing up was out of the question, but I could manage a very awkward low crawl with my knee pulled up to my chest. My mission of the moment, was to find the telephone. Jeanne and her husband always had all the newest, greatest toys. So of course, they had a wireless home phone. (Yeah, common now, but it was fancy then.) Unfortunately for me, Jeanne also had a bad habit of leaving the handset just about anywhere. She walked and talked a lot and when she was finished, she’d just set the handset down where ever she was at that moment. Often, she left the phone on the dining room table. I was only a few feet away, so I made that my first place to look.

I slithered across the tile floor to the table, then I gathered up my courage and pulled myself up on the edge of the table. It was similar to the way the toddler I was in charge of would on the coffee table. Alas, there no phone on the table. The cradle for the phone was on a desk in the kitchen, again a few feet away, and into the kitchen I crawled. I pulled myself up on the desk, to see an empty cradle. Defeated, I collapsed on the floor and dreaded what was coming next. There was a wired land line in the house, in the back of the hallway and in the far corner of a very crowded bedroom. The thought of trying to maneuver through that room was haunting me. I started my journey crawling to the back of the house by crawling through the galley kitchen to the front foyer.

I managed to get the fifteen feet to the foyer before I collapsed again from the effort and I rolled onto my back because the cool concrete slab gave me some mild relief. As I did this, I spied the antenna of the house phone sticking out over the edge of a decorative table in the foyer. As I reached up and grabbed the phone I immediately panicked because didn’t know Jeanne’s cell phone number. My fortunes improved as I looked at a whiteboard Jeanne kept in her kitchen with emergency numbers for babysitters and there was Jeanne’s cell at the top of the list.

I called Jeanne and the girls were laughing at the novelty of Jeanne’s  and I let them know that I was in a bad state and needed some help. They had just left post and were only five minutes away. I just tried to move to the end of the foyer where I could talk to Mark in his play pen. (I’d managed to crawl maybe thirty feet in a circle and I was just on the other side of the playpen where all this started.) Finally, the girls came in the door with another friend as they thought they might need some help getting me off the floor. They took one look at me and Called 911.

Living on post in quarters, we were about a half-mile from the hospital and the ambulance showed up in just a couple of minutes. The paramedics came in to find me on the floor, on my back, with my knee pulled to my chest. While checking me out, one of the paramedics tried to get me to straighten out my left leg. I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him face to face with me. I told him I thought that would be rather unhealthy for him to try and that he should leave the leg alone. We compromised, I let go of him and he left the leg alone. I was efficiently strapped onto a back board, and lifted onto the gurney. They even strapped me down with the strap over my leg (That was nice as I didn’t have to hold on to it anymore.) and off we went for my first and only ambulance ride to the emergency room.

The ER was just a long, long, long, afternoon for me. After I was checked, in I was some valium and sent to x-ray. When I came back, and I was still in pain, I was given some Tylox (Codeine & Tylenol). A couple hours later, I was given a shot of Demerol. Finally, after four hours in the ER, I could straighten out my leg. The ER doctor wanted send me home with some pills and my wife enlisted the assistance of one of our chaplains and together they convinced the doctor to at least keep me overnight for observation. That night I was introduced to the wonders of a Toradol injection, and for the first time in my life I can remember looking forward to shot. I was given Toradol every four hours that night.

This time, the back pain was slower to resolve and it took some weeks of therapy and exercise, but I managed to get myself back to some sort of a happy place. I do not recall any further issues during degree completion and I was given an overseas assignment to Germany after I completed my degree.

When I had my next issue, I was stationed in Giebelstadt, Germany. My unit was deployed to Kaposvar, Hungary in support of the US mission in Bosnia and I had been sent back to Germany with by platoon leader for some task(s), I really don’t remember the specifics. What I do remember was a very ironic event where I injured my back again, while trying not to injure my back.

I needed to move an old 1950s era metal army desk (super heavy). I only needed to move it a few inches so I just walked up to it and tried to nudge it over a bit with my thighs. No bending, no twisting, no awkward movement, just a nudge with both thighs and the dreaded “pop” was heard with that little twinge that I just knew would get worse. Unfortunately for me, it did. For the first time, I had a disc dislocate to where no matter the therapy, I could not get the issue to resolve. Exercise, physical therapy, nothing was relieving the problem. I was grounded and for the first time taking some pretty heavy pain medications just to function. Even then, I wasn’t functioning very well. Every morning it was like a mini-test to see what the day was going to bring. If I could stand up, it was going to be a good day. A bad day usually consisted of my placing my left foot on the floor and then collapsing into a spastic pile on the floor, overwhelmed by a blinding unrelenting pain. (Similar to the episode at Jeanne’s house). I decided it was time to do something about this.

The local hospital had orthopedics and the doctor I saw there was a reservist on active duty. His specialty was back surgery, but in the European Theatre all back surgery was done in Landstuhl and I was quickly given a referral to the Neurosurgery clinic there. At the Neurosurgery clinic I met Dr. (Maj) Gary Flangas, Dr Flangas had worked as a neurosurgeon in Houston for almost a decade before he decided to join the army and he was the head of neurosurgery in Europe. He evaluated me and he determined I was a surgery candidate so then we discussed my options. We could do the minimum necessary, a partial discectomy or we could do a spinal fusion. He noted we could do the discectomy and if needed go back and do a fusion, and if we did a fusion, then there was no more to do. I chose the discectomy.

My next surprise was to be scheduled for surgery within eleven days. Originally, it was going to be a four days, but he was already booked up that Thursday and we had to wait another week for him to have an available operating room. (He had the OR every Thursday morning.)

I made the trip back to Landstuhl and the actual surgery was fairly uneventful (for me) as I was wheeled in for surgery at 0700 and I woke in the recovery room around 1130, I was slow to wake from the anesthesia and the nurse was continuously telling me to breathe as my blood oxygen was dropping below 80% causing an alarm to go off. It was when Dr. Flangas came to the recovery room that I learned my case was more difficult than he’d expected. I was scheduled for a forty-five-minute procedure and I was in the OR for over two hours. He mentioned that the two cases behind me would be unhappy as they would have to wait another week. I was back to my room a little past noon and the nurses had me walking the halls two hours later. It was a wonderful feeling. For the first time in ages I had no issues with back pain. I was so relieved and I thought that all my problems had been resolved. I went home after two days and all seemed to be good. Five days after surgery, I woke up and couldn’t feel my left leg.

Fearing the worst, we called Dr. Flangas and I was given some steroids and told to stay in bed for seventy-two hours. They were figuring I had some swelling around the spinal cord and that it was causing the paralysis. I did get some feeling back and most of my motor function (I could walk fairly normally after the bedrest), but I could no longer lift up my toes and foot more than a couple inches. My dorsiflexors were not working right on the left leg and most of the foot felt like it was asleep. As soon as I was able to move and walk again I had a dye-contrast MRI and the results were inconclusive. Dr Flangas could see nothing that going back in would help and he hoped in time the issue would resolve. (It didn’t.)

The pain was gone and I was now permanently grounded. My aviation career was over in the army. My career was already in the toilet anyway as I had been awaiting my results from my second opportunity for promotion to Chief Warrant Officer 3 (CW3) and I was turned down again about the time I had surgery. In a way, the leg problems were beneficial as I could now apply for a disability retirement instead of just being discharged. I had to apply for disability through Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington as they were the approval authority for Europe. The disability process went from the end of 1996 through the summer of 1997 and I was placed on the Temporary Disability Retired List (TDRL) effective 1 August 1997.

I was given the impression that my medical retirement, at 30% disability from the Army was a done deal. I only learned afterward, during an appeal of the Army decision to reduce my disability rating to 20% and give me a Disability Discharge, that what Walter Reed decided was not the final say in the issue. All TDRL assignments were reviewed by the Army Medical Board at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, mine included. It also appeared that for the past thirty years or so, one of the main tasks the medical board undertook was to overturn decisions made by Walter Reed. In my case, since I had not run to the doctor every two weeks whining about how much pain I was in and that I could hold a job, I didn’t need the 30% retirement, with insurance for the wife and kids, and base access and the like. I was given a 20% disability discharge (capped at twelve years for pay even though I was being paid at a rate for over twenty-one years, and almost fifteen active.) Thank you very much, here is a check and go away. Oh, did I mention that if I’d had sixty-nine more days of active duty I would have qualified for an early fifteen-year retirement? That was an extra special, added bonus.

Once out of the army, I did apply for my Veterans Administration (VA) pension and learned much to my chagrin that I qualified for a VA disability pension, but that $278 a month of my pension from the VA will go to the US Army to pay back the severance pay I received for my disability discharge. At least that little special part of this story was paid off in January 2019.

I still have the foot drop to this day and I have had occasional episodes where I slip a disc ,but those are fewer and fewer as the years go by. I never had any additional surgery because no doctor could give me any decent assurance that the outcome would be significantly better than the situation I have now. It is something I have chosen to live with rather than battle in another surgery.

Checking out the ole ticker.

When you are a pilot in the US Army, you spend a lot of time interacting with your flight surgeon. As a result of this, most pilots will either try to avoid seeing the flight surgeon at all costs, or, like myself, embrace the process. Most of my life, I have been either borderline hypertensive or hypertensive. It runs in my family, regardless of my health, I’m always on the upper limit. As I got older, my ability to manage this without medication (and seeing the flight surgeon regularly) was no longer an option.

I always managed to get on well with my flight surgeons and I managed good relations with them. This did not mean I could avoid some circumstances though and in 1986, while in Germany, My Blood Pressure was too high on my flight physical and I had to start medication to maintain it. Because of some other irregularities in my physical, my flight surgeon decided he should be cautious and sent me to get checked out by cardiology. This was no big deal to me as I had been sent there before. This was nothing to get all excited about, just routine, I or so thought.

The cardiologist also decided on a cautious approach and he felt that I needed a stress test to ensure that there was nothing wrong with my heart. Okay, I’ve done this before too.  Running on a treadmill, wired for sound, no big deal, again. Aside from the blood pressure, I was in pretty good shape and I was feeling good about myself too. The stress test was just another let’s get this done moment I had to endure to get on with the flying business. When started the test, all was going well. The speed of the treadmill increased and the incline increased, and slowly, my pulse started to rise from a resting 56 beats per minute (BPM), toward the 130 BPM goal of the test. I’d worked up a pretty good sweat and felt like I was getting a workout when I hit 102% of the stress goal and the doctor said I could stop. Before I could even begin to slow down on the treadmill, the doctor started cursing. When I caught my breath, I asked him what was the matter? He replied you just threw a PVC.

Premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) are extra, abnormal heartbeats that begin in one of your heart's two lower pumping chambers (ventricles). In pilot speak it meant; “You’re Grounded”. I started inquiring with him what all this meant. I had over 15 minutes of Electrocardiogram and one errant heartbeat, no big deal, right? He said, that if I hadn’t been a pilot, no one would have cared. But, since I was on flight status, we had to follow up on it. He told me that for most people, they would simple do an echo-cardiogram as an outpatient and I would be good. He told me while that was fine for most normal humans, because I was a US Army pilot, the Army Aeromedical Board, had to approve my flight physical, would require a cardiac catheterization as well, just to be sure. He told me there was no point in doing the echo test as the cath was going to occur if I still wanted to fly.

I was stunned! There had never been any question about my heart, even. I had to admit that there could really be something wrong with my heart and until you’ve had that realization yourself, you really can’t understand what that meant to me. Sadly, concern about my heart was secondary to my concern about my flying career. I had been passed over for promotion shortly after arriving in Germany and I only had this one year left before I would most likely be passed over again and out of the Army. Every flight counted and any grounding was less opportunity to fly. This also brought about a second round of health concerns (The first time had been in flight school when I had been diagnosed with a Parathyroid Tumor that nearly ended my flying career before it began.) Would I get cleared to fly again? Could this permanently ground me? Might this prevent me from a civilian aviation career? These thoughts began to keep me up at night.

Since I was in Germany, none of the required testing could be done in the local clinic or the Wurzburg field hospital. I had to go to the Army Medical Center in Landstuhl (4 hours away) for the test. This required a temporary duty assignment (TDY) to travel to the hospital and once there it couldn’t be an outpatient procedure either. I had to be admitted, and the test had to be performed in an operating room. The only good thing was that I was scheduled for the following week, limiting my angst to a few days instead of several weeks or months, which I considered a minor miracle in and of itself.

The trip the Landstuhl itself was uneventful. Landstuhl was a huge sprawling medical complex that had been built after the second world war. Like all hospitals of the time, it was a group of 50 or so buildings all connected by hallways. I managed to check in without any problems and was ushered to my room to spend the night alone and hungry. I could have nothing to eat (the Latin medical term is nil per os or NPO meaning "nothing through the mouth") as I was going to be under anesthesia the next morning. Food in the tummy and medically induced sleep tended to cause you to be nauseous and should be avoided. I woke the next morning and followed procedure to bathe with the antiseptic soap and put on a clean gown sans skivvies. (You can’t every have your underwear in the OR you know.) and then I waited for the appointed time. (8 AM sounds about right.)

The test almost didn’t happen that morning. The nurse came to tell me that an orderly was on his way to transport me and asked me if my pre-op medication had taken effect. I soberly replied “What pre-op meds”? It seemed that I should have been given two Valium at 6 AM so that I would be good and relaxed by the time they began the procedure. The nurse started to call the whole thing off and I somehow managed to convince her that I should go ahead and take the Valium now then and that it really didn’t matter much because the test didn’t scare me and I was pretty chill to begin with. With just a minor bit of coaxing, I managed to get my meds about ten minutes before the orderly arrived. It was at this point that things began to get interesting.

I was wheeled into the operating Room and got to make the obligatory less than graceful transition from the gurney to the table in front of two cardiologists and five or six nurses. You can never move around in a hospital gown horizontally without displaying your private parts to all concerned, apparently, it was a rule of the medical profession that had to be followed. They wanted me to be awake for the catheterization process, but they didn’t want me paying too much attention to what they were actually doing. To facilitate this, they had one nurse, whose only task was to keep me occupied and distracted from the mechanics of the catherization. She was wearing full scrubs and a mask when we met, so all I ever got to see of here were her gorgeous eyes. I must admit, looking into her eyes was a distraction. She was very pleasant and she had a warm contralto voice, I was giving her a great deal of my attention. We did have a good view of the fluoroscope monitor though, so we could see all that was going on.

They started the process by installing a shunt in my right femoral artery. Just a poke of the local anesthetic was all I felt, then some pressure as the shunt was inserted into the artery. This in itself is a pretty major even, as one mistake and you can bleed to death before they get the flow stopped. They used the fluoroscope to see the catheter insertion and the dye injections. The cardiologist inserted the first catheter (It was kind of imposing to me as it was over three feet long) and she very quickly slid it up into my aorta. This part is painless as your veins and arteries have no nerves, so there is no sensation inside your body at all. She injected the dye and Viola! My left coronary ostium (Arteries of the left side of the heart) was displayed on the screen. The doctor quickly took some video and still photos with the equipment and slid the catheter out to insert the one designed for the right side. This is the point where things got extremely interesting.

With the second catheter in place, the she injected the dye just like the first time. The only problem was that nothing appeared on the screen. Puzzled, the doctor injected dye a second time with the same result. Finally, she injected the rest of the syringe, and still nothing appeared upon the screen. My distractor was trying to do her job and keep me occupied as she was concerned I was getting nervous. By now, the Valium had kicked in and I think they could have cut off my foot and I would have only commented that it would have been interesting to watch. Then the cardiologist had a minor epiphany and she removed catheter number two and reinserted catheter number one. (She did this very quickly and it seemed like she was just slamming that catheter back in like it was nothing unusual at all to do.) She attached a full syringe of dye and said “watch this”! She injected the whole syringe in one big push. (Her saying “Watch this was reminiscent of an army joke. What are the three scariest things you can hear in the Army?  A lieutenant who says: “I have us on the map.” A Captain who says: “I’m in charge!” and a Warrant Officer who says:” Watch this!”) As the dye went in, the left ostium lit up like a Christmas tree. Then the image appeared across the bottom of my heart, the right ostium started to appear. Soon all the arteries of my heart showed up. The Cardiologist commented that I had “unique plumbing” and that this situation occurred in about one of every 300 or so patients.

In a normal heart, the left and right coronary ostia receive blood from the aorta. In my case however, the left was the only connection to the aorta. There was a large arterial branch from the left to the right ostia and in essence I just had one ostium and it connected from the left side. She also commented that it was one of the largest coronary arteries she’d ever seen. More film and still photos were taken then the shunt was removed. My heart was fine. The PVC that had been recorded was a result of my unique plumbing and that the aero-medical board should have no issue clearing me for flight.

The post-operative experience was also a trip. It turns out that the actual procedure is not the most concerning part of a cardiac cath, but making sure that you don’t bleed to death after the procedure. They have just poked a rather large hole on one of the largest arteries in your body, now they had to keep you from bleeding out. To do this, someone had to place direct pressure on the artery for twenty minutes, after which they placed a compression bandage on the site. They chose an orderly who could have easily been a lineman for a football team for this task. For twenty minutes I laid on a gurney while a 280-lb. guy had his hands pressing firmly on the femoral artery just a few inches from my groin. This was “disconcerting” at the very least. They finally put on the compression bandages and I was released by Bubba so he could go crush someone else. Then came the best part of my day, lying flat on my back for SIX HOURS!

Somewhere around 2PM, I was treated to a late lunch which I devoured without much thought to the flavor as I was starving. I was released from the hospital the next morning and put on light duty for a week before I was finally cleared to go back to doing pilot stuff again. None the worse for the wear. Oh, the things pilots will go though so they can fly!

Fixing a brake line at Minus thirty

Field training for Alaska army units is conducted almost exclusively in the winter. Anyone can fight when it is warm but surviving and operating in sub-zero weather takes training, endurance and a lot of preparation. It was not unusual for us to be out in the field for over a week and never see a high temperature above negative 10 Fahrenheit (-10F). As a wheeled vehicle mechanic, my mission was to make sure that the vehicles were prepared for the weather and to also fix them when there were breakdowns in the field.

There were always the normal items you would run across in the winter. Dead batteries were by far the most common issue since batteries have no love of the cold. There was also the heater will not work or other mundane things like changing a flat in a foot of snow. One of the more challenging fixes I had the pleasure of doing involved a busted brake line on a M35A2 two-and-a-half-ton truck when were ready to return to the base at the end of our latest exercise.

M35s used a hydraulic brake system with an air assist. (Not my design) This brake system was touchy at best and required you to treat it with the utmost respect (Draining the air tanks every night after you were finished for the day, etc.) In this case, the timing was lousy. We’d already packed up and were ready to move out when the driver noted the brake pedal going to the floor. As this was an indication of a fluid leak, we troubleshot the hydraulic portion of the brakes and not the air assist. We quickly identified the point of failure as a broken flex line from the chassis to the center axle on the driver’s side.

As luck would have it, we didn’t have the line in spare parts, so we had to improvise. We figured out that we could disconnect the flex line at the junction box and all we had to do was come up with some way of blocking off that connection. Once blocked, we could refill the brake fluid and bleed the air from the hydraulic lines, and use the brakes on the five remaining wheels to get the truck back to base.

The truck is sitting in a couple feet of snow. This would normally have been a handicap, but in this case, it gave us a place to lay where we had easy access to the junction block. It was getting to be late afternoon and the biggest challenge was the falling temperatures. Staying warm was getting harder and we were trying hard not to have to spend another night in the field.

As it is always said, necessity is the mother of invention. After we’d exhausted all possible spare parts scavenging among other local units, we looked hard at what we had available and the solution was to use part of the failed hose assembly. Hydraulic flex lines have a metal fitting and line on each end and it was the braided rubber hose in the center that had failed. We cut the metal line as close as we could to the hose and made a plug out of it. Using a vice mounted on our wreaker, we crimped, then folded and then crimped the cut end of the metal line, closing the end of the line. Then we placed the line upon end up in the vice and heated the line with a torch and filled it with solder to seal the crimped end for high pressure.

Once it cooled with a quick dowsing in the snow, we had a pressure solid seal for the missing line at the junction. We quickly blead the air out of the lines and we were rolling in about 30 minutes. This allowed us to return to base just before dark and sleep in a warm bed for the first time in over a week. Field expedient repairs for the win again!

The Hip-Shoot

As I have mentioned before, that when I arrived in Alaska I was assigned to Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 37th Field Artillery (ARCTIC). (A-1-37 FA for short.) I’d never been in the artillery before and I quickly learned that this unit was going to be quite the learning experience for me. Here is one quote that pretty much sums up the Artillery’s attitude to the rest of the army. "Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl." Frederick II of Prussia

This unit had six, M101-A1, Korean War vintage, 105mm towed howitzers. These were all pulled by a Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV) rubber tracked vehicles as their “prime mover”. The Battery Operations Center (BOC) was the computerized control center for the guns. The entire system was mounted in the back section of another SUSV. There were other SUSVs for the Tactical Command Center (TOC) and other unit functions. I brought up the rear of every convoy with the maintenance section Prescribed Load List (PLL) truck, an M35A2, 2 ½ ton truck. I was a wheeled vehicle mechanic and this was our only “wheeled” vehicle.

No one I had ever known in the Army liked to go to the field, until I arrived in the Field Artillery. Since it is the only time they ever get to fire their guns, the artillery lives to go to the field. I had never seen people in units get so excited to go out and live in tents in sub-freezing weather, so they could stand in the snow, behind a gun, and shove 105mm shells into the breech. But there I was, a truck mechanic, in the artillery. This was about as third wheel as you could get, I truly felt out of place there.

I need to explain how an artillery battery works so that if you are unfamiliar with “guns” you can understand how a battery operates. The six gun-crews (Gun Chief, Gunner, Assistant Gunner, Loader, Ammo bearer and Driver at a minimum) all compete regularly for the title “Base Piece”. Base Piece is the most accurate and efficient gun crew and all the other guns are set into the firing position or “Laid” in reference to their position on Base Piece. Of the six guns, Base Piece is always gun three, in the middle of the firing line. When the battery is traveling In convoy, Base Piece is the first gun in the convoy. (3, 4, 2, 5, 1, 6 is the normal traveling order of the gun crews.) The Battery Operations Center (BOC) receives mission requests from forward unit and converts the map grid coordinates of the targets into elevation, range, azimuth, shell type and fuse settings for the gun crews. This information is transmitted electronically to the guns and then the commands to fire are sent by the Chief of the Firing Battery.

The advent of radar systems that can track artillery shells in flight, made dramatic changes in artillery operations. While I was in Alaska, this radar was named “Firefinder”. Firefinder had the location information of each of our guns and could track the trajectory of each shell, plotting exactly where the rounds impacted. If the battery fired all six guns, the radar could tell you and print out where each shell landed. This was great for grading gun crews, but it also had a secondary function that was downright frightening. Firefinder could also track incoming artillery rounds back to the location they were launched from, allowing for Counter-Battery fire. 

Counter-Battery fire is where you send a salvo of shells at the enemy artillery batteries that are firing at your force. Before this technological marvel, you needed an observer call in the location of the enemy guns. Now all the enemy had to do is fire one shell and the radar operator could plot the position the shell originated from in seconds. 

Previously, Artillery would setup batteries in one location for weeks or months, depending on how fast the battle was moving. Nowadays, artillery is more fire some shells and get moving before some incoming rounds are fired back at you (They call this; Shoot, Scoot, Communicate). One of the missions that we trained for in the artillery was an emergency suppressive fire mission also known simply as a “Hip-Shoot”. The term “Hip-Shoot” was a variation of the phrase “Shooting from the Hip” where a cowboy would draw his gun and shoot while his pistol was at his hip to get a shot off fast without using the sights. 

Any job we did in the Army was defined by an Army Training and Evaluation Program (ARTEP) standard. Your unit’s overall readiness was determined by specific ARTEP tasks and the HIP-SHOOT task definition was to have a “battery, one round” on target within eight minutes of the incoming radio call requesting emergency suppressive fire. All six rounds had to land within 200 feet of the designated target. (“Battery, one round”, meant that each cannon in the battery fired one shell and they are all fired at one time as a salvo.) Not too hard, right?  Did I mention that the fire mission request comes in while we were convoying from one firing position to another?

This is where the purpose of the convoy order of the vehicles came into play. When the BOC got the radio call, they immediately stopped, and the Chief of Firing Battery (CFB) got out with a device called an Aiming Circle. An Aiming Circle is similar to a transit used by surveyors and is designated in 6400-Mils, instead of 360-Degrees. The CFB first designated the direction for the guns to line up, using a compass with his arm extended. Base Piece pulled off the road and into the firing position along that general direction. Once this is established, the CFB set up the Aiming Circle and gave exact alignment directions to Base Piece. The Gunner on Base Piece aligned the sights of the cannon on the Aiming circle and once properly aligned, the Gunner called out “Zero Mils!” When this was completed for all six guns, the CFB called out that "The Battery is Laid!". Meanwhile, the BOC was plotting the battery’s exact location into the ballistic computer to be ready to compute firing solutions.

It takes longer for you to read that last paragraph than it took to accomplish the tasks I described. While all this is happening, the other five guns were turning off the road and taking up their assigned spots on the firing line. After they pulled into the position, they started aligning their guns with the CFB. Meanwhile, Base Piece had already been given a firing solution from the BOC and fired the first sighting round. (Total elapsed time about 3 to 4 minutes so far.) I had seen Base Piece fire the sighting round before the last of the six guns had pulled off the road. Once all six guns were laid and the forward observer (FO) had given firing corrections based on the sighting round(s), the radio call “Battery one Round, Fire for Effect” was given.

The BOC informed the FO the shells are on the way with the call “Shot, over” and the FO replied “Shot, out” that he knew to be watching for the rounds to hit the target. When the rounds arrived, the radio call from the FO was “Splash over” and the BOC replied “Splash out”. It was quite an impressive sight. The last Hip-Shoot we completed during our ARTEP evaluation, all six rounds landed within 50-feet of the target. This included three direct hits, “Steel on steel”, all in less than six minutes. Even the evaluator was impressed by the speed and accuracy of the battery.

What was I doing during all the excitement? My truck had a M2 50-Caliber machine gun on a 360-Degree articulated ring mount. My job was to block the road and to provide security cover for the rear of our convoy while the gun crews were having fun. 

I don’t know exactly why, but Alaska is on my mind.

Sometimes you just end up thinking about some things, this morning it the topic was again Alaska. I have to admit, Alaska was quite an adventure. I have always said that if it had not been for my assignment to flight school, I could have seen myself trying to stay in Alaska as long as I could. In army vernacular, they call that “Homesteading”. While I was only there for two years, I got to do some pretty cool things. One of those things was a deployment to Kodiak Island.

Kodiak Island is one of the largest islands in the Gulf of Alaska and the only larger ones are in the eastern archipelago along the coast near Canada. Kodiak is near the beginning of the Aleutian Island chain and is the home to the largest US Coast Guard base in the country.

After I was promoted to Sergeant, I was re-assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company (HHC) 5th Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment (5/327 IN) where I went from doing artillery stuff to infantry stuff. 5/327 IN had a battalion consolidated motor pool and I was assigned as the Services Supervisor. To deploy to Kodiak Island, there were two options to get there, plane or boat. Since Fort Richardson was located adjacent to Elmendorf Air Force Base, deploying by plane was a logical option.

Like just about all training the Army does in Alaska, this deployment occurred during the winter months. “Train like you live” was the motto. For the most part, you lived in Winter in Alaska, so training exercises also occurred in Winter.

Airlift operations are the epitome of the army tradition of “Hurry up and wait.” You bust your ass getting the vehicles in tip top shape (the tiniest of oil leaks will get a vehicle barred by an aircraft loadmaster.) Then you have to go through a weight and balance inspection after which you go sit on the flight line, in your vehicle, freezing your ass off, in a snowstorm, and wait for the plane to arrive.

Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity, a C-130 Hercules taxied up and dropped the cargo ramp for you to load. The Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV) it great for getting around in Alaska, it can conquer virtually any terrain, but it isn’t the most comfortable thing to spend hour upon hour waiting in for your plane to arrive.

Loading the SUSV on the plane was no problem. We were glad to have the ramp up and the SUSV strapped down and taxiing for take-off. Of all the Air Force planes I’ve flown in, the C-130 is my favorite. It literally jumps into the air and these planes are damn near indestructible. Definitely reliable and they are my choice for most Army operations. We didn’t have too much cargo and only three or four passengers so there was a fair amount of room.

Once in the air and at cruising altitude, we could move about and the crew chief even offered us coffee. (Yeah, they have a built-in coffee pot among other pleasantries.) I got to see the cockpit and one of the more interesting jobs of the flight engineer was to manage the fuel in the various tanks. The view was little to see, as flying over the ocean is not the most exciting view. The only really good parts we couldn’t watch as we were strapped in for takeoff and landing.

We landed at Kodiak Benny Benson State Airport and to my surprise we quickly convoyed onto the Kodiak Island Coast Guard Base and setup a vehicle shop in a bay of a retired power plant on the base. We had lights and shelter from the wind but this was unheated space so we were kinda roughing it, but just barely.

The base itself was built in 1939 -1941 and was a US Naval base until 1972 where it was turned over to the coast guard. We spent a lot of time exploring the building. It was like a museum in many ways as the building for the most part had been left as is on the last day of use. We looked around at these massive generators and the control stations just wondering what it had been like when it was in operation.

Once something is built in Alaska it is rarely torn down or completely abandoned. Most building are continually repurposed. In this case, while it was no longer the primary power station (The original purpose) the building contained a fairly large diesel power backup generator for the base. The 8-cylinder engine was massive, over 12 feet tall and the size of a large delivery truck.

I puzzled as to how the engine was started as I could not see any starting device. That question was answered a few days later during the operational test where generator is fired up and tested for a couple hours every two weeks. (It is started with compressed air and has an operating speed of 400 RPMs if you are curious.) A group of about four Coasties came in and ran the system. It is also quite loud so for that two hours we wore our hearing protection and tried our best to ignore the noise.
This turned out to be one of the most interesting field exercises I did in the army because we really never went out of any built-up area except one trip for supplies after about a week on the island. It felt strange to leave a built-up area and drive to a field site to get supplies from a tent, then drive back to base. It was a novel experience but it beat a five-man tent and snow, we weren’t complaining.

Aside from the Coasties, we also got to meet a maintenance tech for a US Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) detachment. They were deployed without any support team and he was scrounging parts where he could. He needed a short-shaft that connected the transmission to the transfer case on a 2 ½ ton truck (M35A2) and we had one. In the spirit of inter-service cooperation, we traded the shaft for some Long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP’s) rations. Not that they were anything better that what we had, but they were something different to eat (and older, leftover from Vietnam). The SEAL mechanic was a cool dude and really appreciated the help.

The exercise was deemed a success whatever they did. (Except for that one supply trip we stayed in the shop and just fixed things brought to us.) then we loaded back on the C-130 and returned to Elmendorf. The best part of returning from the field was that our Motor Officer was Filipino and after every exercise he’d cook up egg rolls he’d frozen earlier while we cleaned all our equipment during recovery. I never got tired of his cooking.

There was nothing really dramatic about this story, just another interesting (at least to me) part of my life and the only time I deployed by an Air Force asset that didn’t drop me in an actual war zone.

Incredible, I finally quit smoking.

Okay, this doesn’t sound too earth shattering, unless you’ve tried to quit smoking yourself. I smoked cigarettes for more or less for twenty years. When you do the math, noting I was born in 1958 and quit in 1986, you can see I started quite young. I was the child of two smokers and both my older brother and I were smoking while still in grade school. He got smart, and quit before I figured it out. My mother quit after a debilitating stroke, my father never really figured it out. Both my parents died at the age of 68, six-weeks apart. I’m hoping to do better on that part.

Smoking is vile. Nicotine tops most lists of addictive substances in the world. It ranks with or above:

• Alcohol
• Heroin
• Barbiturates (Speed)
• Cocaine

That is quite a list. I think it is also pretty clear that I inherited some addictive tendency since both my parents smoked and my father was an alcoholic. I did manage to dodge the bullet with alcohol. I’ve been drunk, and I am a light drinker, but witnessing my father’s alcoholism and that of others seemed to steer me clear of that addiction. Cigarettes, that was an entirely different story.

In the 1960’s, when I started smoking, cigarettes were still a cool thing. Yes, there was some talk about cancer and smoking being addictive, but there was also advertising everywhere. Cigarette makers sponsored everything. Golf, Racing, tennis, just about every sport. Television, radio, billboards, the advertising was everywhere. And for me, the best part was cigarette vending machines. No ID, no clerk to ask questions. Even then, most the time you could say you were getting cigarettes for your mother and no one would raise an eyebrow. So, access to cigarettes was easy. When I was twelve, I took over the local paper route from my brother. Now I had both a source of income, and three hours away from home every day, logistics was also solved. It is no wonder I was smoking a pack a day by the time I was fifteen.


It was about the same time that I started smoking in front of my parents, the last taboo was broken and the one thing that had somewhat moderated my smoking was I’d done it out of the house. So now I was smoking without many restrictions and of course I started smoking more. When I turned sixteen, I started driving and had a car, so ever the trip to and from school I was smoking. I didn’t smoke while dating because my girlfriend didn’t like it, but I smoked before and after our dates. I smoked all through the engagement and of course I had one just before entering the church to say; “I do.”

I’d been married for seven years and during that entire time my lovely wife been urging me to quit smoking. It was inconvenient, expensive, and we really didn’t have the money to spare. Like so many others addicted to these foul devices, I braved the weather outside and forfeited other items so I could have my smokes. While we lived in Alaska, I didn’t smoke in the house or in our truck. This meant that I had some really cold smoking sessions.

The most remarkable thing about the day that I quit smoking, was the fact that I had no intent to quit smoking until I did. Quitting was a very spontaneous decision and quite frankly I surprised myself when I finally quit. Every smoker has recalled tale after tale of trying to quit and returning to the habit. I was no saint, I’d quit smoking with miserable results at least a dozen times.

The day I quit was Wednesday, May 28, 1986. It was a normal workday in Alaska which entailed my getting up at 04:30 or so, getting dressed and arriving at PT formation at 06:00. After the formation, I had a a quick breakfast in the dining facility (We couldn’t call it a mess hall anymore), and the I was off to work in the motor pool. I was reviewing DA Form 2405 trailer maintenance records in preparation for an upcoming inspection by 07:00. I was alone in the office and at my desk when I lit my eighth cigarette of the day. Do some quick math and you’ll figure out I was going through about two and a half packs a day.

The time was 07:45. I’d just opened a pack of Marlboro Menthol less than an hour before and this was the third cigarette from that pack. These were kind of a treat as I’d been buying generic cigarettes at the commissary for $3.25 a carton and these were more expensive, but tasted better. The only problem is this cigarette didn’t taste good. It just tasted bitter (If you ever accidentally got your tongue on the filter of a cigarette you know the taste) and with every puff it seemed to taste even worse. Finally, about halfway through the cigarette, I put it out in the ashtray and pushed the ashtray to the far edge of the desk and went back to work on the maintenance records.

Shortly before 08:00 I paused and thought for a moment. Then I reached into my pocket and pulled out that pack of cigarettes. About the same moment, the Motor Sergeant (my boss) walked into the office from my left. I looked at that pack for a moment, then crushed it in my right hand and made a three-point toss into the garbage can, in front of the Motor Sergeant, as he was walking to his desk. He stopped and gave me an astonished look asking “Why did you do that?” I casually replied that I’d just quit smoking. He said that was bullshit and that was the end of that conversation.

The amazing thing was, I had really quit smoking. I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t have urges throughout the next few days to smoke, but it seems that the memory of just how bad that cigarette, and several other previous cigarettes had tasted, bothered me more than the urge to smoke another one. I also noticed that after about three days, my craving for tobacco had greatly subsided as the minimum time required to get nicotine out of my system had passed. It took a few more days, but soon my wife noticed that I didn’t smell as strongly of smoke (I worked in an office where three others smoked.) and that I wasn’t going outside for five minutes at a time anymore. A carton of the generic menthols with 7 packs in it sat on top of the refrigerator. This carton was exactly at my eye level. I just left it there and after a couple more weeks, my wife asked me if I wanted to throw them away. I told her I was going to leave them where they were at. If I couldn’t walk by that carton every day, on my way out of the house, and leave them alone, then I hadn’t really quit smoking. It was sort of a badge of honor to be able to sneer at them as I left for work.

Those cigarettes occupied that place of honor for seven months until one afternoon when our next-door neighbor, Yvonne, was out of cigarettes and didn’t have access to her car to go get some more. I showed her some mercy and asked my wife to go get the carton off the refrigerator. I warned Yvonne that they were probably stale, but stale cigarettes were better than nothing.

I think the process of quitting was just one of the steps in my personal development, during that tour. Shortly after I quit smoking, several events occurred in my life that individually were only minor achievements, but as a gestalt, they were evidence of a change in my personality. A change that I think helped me to be more successful than I had ever thought I would be. These events included:

·              I was promoted to Sergeant (E-5)

·              I passed the Flight Aptitude Suitability Test (FAST)

·              I completed my Associates Degree

·              I was selected for the Rotary Wing Aviator’s Course on my first application

Not long after I quit smoking was another small personal event that had major consequences the rest of my life. I had always struggled with self-confidence. I’m not sure of the root of why I felt this way, but it had always been a struggle for as long as I could remember. I was bullied some when I was younger, but I really don’t think it was a lot more than most other kids endured. I could be wrong, I only have my personal frame of reference on the subject. Regardless, there I was at 26 or so, married with two kids in Alaska. I can remember sitting at the kitchen table. For no apparent reason that I can recall, I was thinking about how I felt insecure about life in general. I suppose I started taking stock of how successful I had been recently and I realized somewhere in that jumble of thoughts, I was making myself miserable for no justifiable reason.

I was exceeding all the standards that I was being evaluated on at work. I had a fairly meteoric rise in the Army (E-1 to E5 in less than two years) and I’d just completed my application packet for flight school. The epiphany that occurred to me was that if I did everything in my life to my own personal standards, then I would be successful. My personal standards were higher than the standards I was being held to. I realized that It really didn’t matter what other people thought (This was my most overwhelming concern doubting myself.) It was this realization, more than anything else that I can define, that changed my life. I’m not going to say this was an overnight change in my personality or my outlook on life. It was more a catalyst of personal change that slowly occurred as I continued down the path of my life.

I have to credit my wife Anna, and here unflagging support. Anna is the mainstay of my life. Like most Army wives, she has made countless personal sacrifices allowing me take advantage of career opportunities. She managed to scrape together enough money from a ridiculously tight household budget for me to start college while I was still a private. She gave me the encouragement to slog through the classes to get first my Associate’s Degree and later, my Bachelor of Science.

When I read in the post newsletter that flight school had finally opened up and they were accepting application packets again, I absently commented that it was too bad that I couldn’t apply. (We’d agreed years earlier that she would never have to live with the fear of being married to a pilot, she is scared of flying.) She replied calmly, in an almost offhand manner, and told me to go ahead and apply. She just made it clear that if I was going to go kill myself learning to fly I should get more life insurance. This way, if I died, she could still feed the kids. This started a discussion where she wisely explained to me her rational for this change of heart. When the Army wasn’t accepting flight school applications, it wasn’t an issue. But now that the opportunity was available to me, if she stood in the way, her preventing me from following my dream would always be a wedge between us. She said she’d rather lose me to my passion than to make me miserable keeping me from it. Two and a half years later, she was the one who pinned the wings, on her newly minted, Warrant Officer, husband.

Some of the most inconsequential moments can have some of the most profound effects upon your life. Don’t discount them. They may well shape your future.

Tales of the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade (ARCTIC) (Part 2)

Most of my time in Alaska, my duty Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) was as a Wheeled Vehicle Mechanic (63B). I found it wryly amusing since most the vehicles I worked on was the M978 Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV). The SUSV was made by Hagglunds and Sonner (A Swedish Company) and is a two-car tracked snow cat with hydraulically actuated steering between the cars. Each car has a pair of two-foot wide rubber tracks with steel inserts and there was a driveshaft through the interconnecting link giving all four tracks drive.

My initial reaction was “What the Fuck (WTF)?” I’m not a track mechanic! But being in the army is mostly doing what you were told and I quickly learned all I could about this critter as they kept me busy repairing them. I can’t blame the SUSV so much as the Army for forcing a re-design of something that wasn’t broken. The Swedish version uses a six-cylinder gasoline engine. The US Army wanted all Diesel-powered vehicles. This resulted in a re-design with a Mercedes-Benz TD 300, five-cylinder turbo-diesel engine. The engine itself was great, but some design changes used to make it fit, those caused problems.

The problems were two-fold; vibration, and an off-set auxiliary drive shaft for the hydraulic pump. The cooling fan for the radiator was offset from the centerline of the engine and was mounted on an X-brace with a tensioner pulley on one leg of the brace. The vibration of the diesel engine caused brace welds to crack and the fan belt tensioner would then lose tension, causing the engine to overheat. Additionally, there were defects in the fan hub design that caused the fiberglass fan blades to come loose from the hub. What made all of this so special, was limited access to the front of the engine, due to the swim capability of the vehicle. The hydraulic pump was just left of the radiator and its drive shaft was offset ten-degrees from the engine drive line. The original T-type universal joints didn’t fare well and were replaced with flex packs that were much hardier. I became adept at pulling the radiator, replacing the fan, the fan brace and universal joints. (You had to remove the radiator to access any of those items.) Once those design flaws were fixed, (an improved fan design, a substantially reinforced X-brace and the flex packs), the majority of problems with the vehicle design were resolved. But in other ways, the vehicle was financially lucrative to me personally.

Like many companies, the Army had a suggestion program. I first learned how nice these programs could be from my father who earned over $4000 from Keebler on a suggestion he made. In general, most suggestion programs have a payoff of say ten-percent of what is saved in the first year using the suggestion. I had two suggestions payoff for me. 

The first one was easy. I noticed that we were replacing the brake light switch on SUSV’s, somewhere between 12 to 18 months after they were built. It was a plunger switch and when you braked, the plunger was released and the brake lights illuminated. When you took your foot off the brake, the plunger was depressed and the brake lights were turned off. Between 12 and 18 months after they were built, the brake lights would not go off, running down the battery. Installing a replacement switch resolved the problem. It was a five-minute job and the switch was like $12 so it didn’t involve a lot of money, but it was an annoying problem. 

After I replaced my third switch or so (My unit had about a dozen SUSVs) I noticed that the jam nut for adjusting the switch was all the way down on the failed switches. When you installed the new switch, there was an adjustment. The new switch, when properly adjusted, had the jam nut exposing about five threads. It appeared that during the assembly process at the manufacturer, the person installing the switch wasn’t adjusting it during the install, just screwing it all the way in. The switch would work for a while, but over compression the spring in the switch eventually caused the spring to fail. I suggested a one-time inspection of the entire SUSV fleet to adjust the brake light switch per the service manual. Viola! Problem solved. My net income from the suggestion was the minimum payment of $50.00. Not bad for a simple observation.

The next suggestion was more convoluted, but also more lucrative. This suggestion involved scheduled maintenance services on the SUSV. All army vehicles have a service schedule. Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annual, Annual and Bi-annual are the general service periods. But there is also a mileage maximum you might exceed triggering the same services. Services were triggered by either meeting the mileage requirement, or the time requirement, whichever was met first. The monthly service was simple and only took about 20 minutes. However, one check required a mechanic (The rest of the monthly service was done by the vehicle operator.) and that one check required scheduling someone to come in with the vehicle and having a mechanic make that one check. These monthly services were waste of time for both the crew and the mechanic. They also really annoyed me as I was the vehicle service supervisor for the battalion.

I also noticed that all the services for SUSVs were triggered by the calendar requirement. We had never met the mileage requirement for any service. (One year or 15,000 kilometers for example.) We were spending about half the total manpower available for service, scheduling these monthly services alone. These manpower requirements were starting to add up. I did some math and the distance required for a quarterly service was rarely if ever met in a year of use. The vehicles were averaging about 2800 KM a year and the quarterly service was required at 300 KM. I pondered this for a few days, did some research with other motor pools and made a suggestion. Incorporate the Monthly service into the Quarterly service and change then cut mileage requirements for the remaining services 50% to align the service scheduling with real life usage. The hardest part of the suggestion was figuring the math in a way that couldn’t be argued. I was able to show that across the 172d brigade, applying these changes would save over $24,000 in man-hours and materials. End result was $2,400 bonus ($1200 after taxes but still free money) and at that time over a month’s net pay. Not much physical labor, but some serious skull sweat.

Tales of the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade (ARCTIC)

I woke up this morning and it occurred to me that while I had documented my travels to and from Alaska, I never really talked about living there. I have met several people who have lived in Alaska and I can honestly say that I have never encountered anyone who seemed indifferent to the state. You either love it, or you hate it. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground. I suppose this is because Alaska is a land of extremes. Everything is kinda the same in Alaska, but yet it is different. 

Okay, what do I mean about kinda the same, but different? Sometimes it was the little things. One of the first things I noticed driving around Fort Richardson was there were these six-foot tall red metal bars with a three inch “Flag” welded on the end, attached to every fire hydrant. These were laying over (It was June) and my wife asked me, “What is their purpose?” I replied, “They turn them up to a vertical position in the winter, so that the fire department can find them in the snow.” In most places, you don’t have to be concerned with so much snow on the ground for so long that you lose sight of important things, like “Where is the damn fire hydrant?” 

Another insight that I was moving in to a brave, new world was when I went to the Central Issue Facility (CIF) to draw my field gear. At every military post, you were issued your standard field equipment for the region (your field equipment issue varied from region to region) and Alaska was no exception. What was unusual was the volume of equipment we were issued. At most posts, CIF issue required a duffle bag to hold all your specialized field equipment. Helmet, pistol belt, load bearing equipment or LBE (A harness you attach to the pistol belt to allow you to carry several pounds of equipment on it.) a liner for your field jacket, sleeping bag, a rucksack and mat to sleep on, were all part of this equipment. The difference here was you were issued so much more equipment. 

Aside from the basic stuff you got at every assignment, here you also received:

• An ARCTIC sleeping bag (rated for below negative 20 F)
• Field Shirts (Similar to old army green fatigues but made out of the same material as a wool army blanket.)
• Field pants with suspenders. (Worn over your normal uniform pants to form a second layer.)
• Arctic parka
• Arctic over-whites (White covers for your parka and field pants)
• Trigger-finger mittens (Mittens with one finger for your index finger so you could fire your rifle in the cold.)
• Arctic mittens (For when it was so damn cold you didn’t worry about firing the rifle.)
• A full-face balaclava
• Arctic face mask (for when the balaclava wasn’t enough)
• Arctic boots (Also known as Mickey Mouse boots. Cold weather boots to keep your feet from getting frostbite in sub-zero weather)

We were issued a bunch of other items, (total issue was five large bags of equipment) and when you were finished, you signed a hand receipt with a value exceeding a month’s gross pay.  So, okay, this place was a tad bit different than I was accustomed to, when I was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas. 

Next came some specialized ARCTIC training which every newly assigned soldier was required to complete. The first training requirement upon arrival was your Cold Weather Indoctrination class (CWI). CWI was a two-week class on how to survive in an arctic environment. It felt weird taking the class in the middle of the summer. It was 65 degrees outside and you were learning how to avoid freezing to death in the winter. Then I occurred to me that while it was mid-July, winter in Alaska started a mere six weeks later, in September. CWI was taught in the summer, but the final exam was not given until later in the fall. 

The final exam required one thing, cold weather. On the first night, when the weather was forecast to be minus 20, all the “Arctic Cherries” (People who had not experienced the Alaska winter.) were informed that after retreat (5 PM for you civilians), to report for their final CWI exam. You brought your rucksack, sleeping bag and mat etc., and you had to be ready to go at 1800 hours. The exam was simple. We were trucked out to a field site in the local training area and dropped off in the woods. We would be picked up in the morning in time to go to breakfast, have fun. Our task was surviving the night and not getting frostbite in the process.

The senior Non-commissioned officer (NCO), a Staff Sergeant, was in charge and he merely told us to stay within eyesight of one another. We all picked out our spots to bed down for the night. There were no tents, cots or heaters, only a porta-john because pollution regulations and the impracticability of trying to dig a latrine in the frozen ground. We were all on our own to deal with the elements. I didn’t like to take chances with the weather so I chose a spot to bed down under an evergreen (just in case it snowed). There I laid out my bed roll and sleeping bag. We didn’t waste much time milling around as it was soon dark. As night fell, all you really wanted to go was curl up inside that sleeping bag and get/stay warm. 

We were taught dressing in layers. Everyone was wearing long underwear and several layers of cold weather clothing. I took off my mountain boots, then climbed into my arctic sleeping bag fully clothed (it was below zero already. The temperature dropped fast as it was a clear night). The one thing you could not do, was sleep fully clothed. Sleeping fully clothed resulted in your sweating and moisture condensing in your clothes was one of the fastest ways you could freeze to death. I waited until I was warm enough in the sleeping bag to almost break into a sweat, then I opened the bag and removed a layer of clothing. I laid these inside the sleeping bag alongside my legs, laid back down and zipped up again. You repeated this process until you were down to your skivvies and then you zipped up for the night. I slept well enough and woke up all warm and toasty. I unzipped the sleeping bag and sat up, lit a cigarette (I had that nasty habit then) and basked in the morning light until I started to get chilly, then I dressed for the day. Passing the CWI test gave you confidence in what you learned and we were signed off on that requirement when the platoon sergeant picked us up that morning.

Fort Richardson is located in the suburban shadow of Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska. One of the other survival techniques we were strongly encouraged to follow was to keep adequate survival supplies in our personal vehicles. Food, clothing, blankets, spare parts for the vehicle, extra spare tires, were all recommended. If you drove ten minutes out of the Anchorage city limit, in any direction, you were five minutes into the wilderness. That doesn’t seem like a lot until your vehicle breaks down and you hike five miles back to civilization in four-feet of snow in sub-zero temperatures. It was always in the back of your mind that this place was always trying to kill you. Alaska knows no mercy, it was up to you to know how to survive.

Alaska was one of the first places I was stationed with a standardized physical training (PT) uniform. When I joined the military in 1978, we were still old school and the standard PT uniform was fatigue pants, tee shirt and combat boots. Somewhere between 1978 and 1984, some genius decided that combat boots and a duty uniform was unhealthy to run in. Physical training needed running shoes and sportswear. At my first assignment, PT uniform was civilian sportswear. (Running shoes, shorts and tee shirt, sweatshirts and sweatpants when it got cooler etc.) At Fort Richardson, there was a specified uniform. Artillery Red (Yes, this is a real color) sweatshirts emblazoned with the battalion logo and navy-blue sweatpants (you still could pick your own shoes). The only modifications were as it got colder, the balaclava and trigger-finger mittens were added. I also learned through painful experience also to add a sock strategically located in my underpants to keep a prized appendage of mine warm too. PT was conducted no matter how cold, no matter how much it snowed. If there was snow on the ground, then exercises were done inside the motor pool shop. (It had an open area the size of a small warehouse and was heated.) The only time I ever saw PT cancelled was when it rained.

We ran in formation to cadence just like everywhere else, but there were little differences. Take a four mile or longer run for over half an hour period. In freezing temperatures, you will see and experience some interesting things. We wore knit blue full-face balaclavas, red sweatshirts and blue sweatpants. At the end of the PT run, we’d all be covered in frost. (We looked like snowmen.) As you ran and worked up a sweat, the sweat evaporated and passed through your clothing. There it would condense and freeze and, you ended up covered in frost from the top of your head to your feet. You learned to run with your head turned slightly to one side so you didn’t run through your breath. This was to prevent freezing your eyelashes shut from the moisture you exhaled.

We’d been in Alaska a few weeks and we’d moved into housing on post. My assignment had been changed on arrival and we were re-directed from Fort Wainwright to Fort Richardson. Our household goods however, had been shipped to Fairbanks thus delaying their delivery. For a while, we lived using temporary furnishings from housing. My wife, only had a radio for her source of news and entertainment. (Our household goods were still in Fairbanks.) One day she was telling me about a reported problem with Aleuts she’d heard on the radio news. She wondered why game wardens couldn’t just shoot them? (Aleut was an unfamiliar term and she assumed they were some sort of indigenous wildlife.) I had to break it to her that Aleuts were Alaskan Indians and that they might take a dim view of being shot at.

Nothing humbles you more than the Alaskan winter. Alaska has four seasons, just like the rest of the world, they are name them differently; June, July, August, and Winter. This became very apparent to me the day I planned to winterize my trusty Ford F-150 pickup truck. It was a Saturday morning in late October, 1985, a day that I’ll never forget. The Friday before had been a beautiful fall day and then I woke up to a deep freeze. The plan was to change to a lighter weight engine oil (In Texas I’d used fairly 10w40 weight oil) to avoid any trouble starting it during the winter months (Another lesson from CWI). The sudden temperature change had caught me by surprise and now, just like I’d been warned, the engine wouldn’t crank. I assumed the battery was old and weak (I’d bought the truck used, the summer before my Alaska assignment.). My neighbor took me to the post auto parts store to buy a new battery. Lo and behold, after installing the new battery, the truck still would not turn over. 

We tried to jump start the truck without success and when It finally occurred to us that the 10W40 was so thick that the starter could not turn the crankshaft through the oil. This was confirmed as it took four hours to drain most of the oil from the engine. After adding enough warmed 5w30 winter weight the engine finally started. By noon, since the temperature was slightly above freezing, we took that opportunity to also install a coolant heater. The coolant heater percolated coolant so that the truck engine would stay warm at night. In Alaska, power outlets mounted on posts in front of your primary parking space for that purpose. In winter months, when you parked your car for the night, you turned on the defroster and left it set, before you shut down the engine. This allowed coolant to circulate through the heater core. The heat would rise up the open defroster vents and keep the windshield free from ice and the cab toasty warm too.

To be continued ….