Who Knows What It Will Take to Convince People That Drinking and Driving Kills!

His mother saw the boots in their usual place, next to the weightlifting bench on the front porch. Even the peanut butter cookies his sister made for him remained untouched on the kitchen counter.
As her family saw this somber scene when they returned home from the hospital, Beke Bruntz thought her brother couldn't possibly be dead. But William "Chip" Vause was fatally injured as he rode home from work with a co-worker in the early morning hours of March 11, 1998, in Rockledge, Fla. The other driver's blood alcohol content was .234.
The family would have been celebrating Vause's 22nd birthday today, a date he shared with his mother, Patricia Vause.
"I couldn't understand why someone would be so irresponsible, that drunk, and not even think they could possibly take someone's life," said Bruntz, Vause's sister and a 319th Air Refueling Wing spouse. "Besides anger, I also felt kind of sorry for him and his family, to have to live with the fact that he killed two people who had families themselves.
"But I got angry again because he seemed to have no remorse."
Two months after the wreck, the driver was arrested, but his father bailed him out of jail the same day. Since then, Vause's mother has attended two hearings on the blood alcohol content evidence, but he's yet to go to trial.
She's joined Mothers Against Drunk Driving and has a website dedicated to the memory of her son.
Shattered dreams
If Bruntz could talk to the driver, she would tell him about her brother, so he'd understand the life he took, she said. Her brother was a young man who was still searching for his place in life.
"Every week, he had something else he was going to do," Bruntz said. "One week, he was going to Nashville; another week he wanted to play basketball. One week, he was saving for a motorcycle; another week, he wanted a big truck. He had a lot of dreams."
Last week was also a bitter anniversary of a drunk driving tragedy for another base member. On Aug. 11, 1985, Lance Ross told his mother he would see her later when he left their house in Aberdeen, S.D. But Karen GreyEyes never saw her only son again. Shortly after midnight, a 16-year-old drunk driver ran a stop sign and slammed into his motorcycle.
Like Vause, Ross had his dreams, too. He was a football player, with two specific goals in mind - joining the military and becoming a coach. Instead, he also died before reaching his 20th birthday, and is buried on the Spirit Lake Reservation near Devil's Lake.
"I wouldn't wash his clothes for a long time because I wanted to smell my son," said GreyEyes, who's now a family advocacy outreach manager on base. "He would be 32 now, and I think of what he would be now, probably with his own family. She robbed him of that. He never got to get married and have children.
"But I still have his picture hanging in the living room, with an eagle feather he received when he graduated from high school. I look at him every day."
Searching for forgiveness
The driver who killed GreyEyes' son was convicted of drunk driving, and GreyEyes would not accept a settlement because she wanted to make certain the driver would pay high-risk insurance for the rest of her life "to remember she took my son," she said.
"Not once did she call to say she was sorry," GreyEyes said. "But my son would have forgiven her. He was such a good kid.
"He wouldn't have wanted me to carry this anger toward her. I think one of these days, when she has a child, she'll understand what she did."
A drunk driver's guilt
This week represented another painful anniversary for Jerry, a former servicemember who can speak of the effects of drinking and driving from the opposite perspective.
Like his father, Jerry, who wanted only his first name used in this article, joined the military after high school graduation. Unlike his dad, Jerry never re-enlisted. Bu the loss of his military career wasn't the highest price Jerry paid for driving drunk. It was the death of his best friend in the accident.
The memories of his buddy, coupled with the knowledge that he's the one responsible for the fact there's nothing else left of his friend, bring the depression, guilt and even nightmares of that terrible night of Aug. 11, 1990.
"There are times when the spirit hits me and I cry, but I don't do it as a show," Jerry said. "It comes from the heart. But when this happened, my goal was to one day make something positive out of a negative situation because I know that's what my friend would have wanted."
Since his release from prison a year after the accident, Jerry has talked to youth in his area about his experiences. He tells them he knows they don't think it will ever happen to them because that was exactly what he thought.
He still says the drink he took the night of the wreck was his first in 10 months, but he was so drunk he still doesn't know for certain he was actually behind the wheel, although state troopers who responded to the accident said they knew he was the driver.
"I just hope society doesn't always look at me as a bad person," Jerry said. "Everybody makes mistakes. I just pray I don't make another mistake that costs somebody his life."
Life is precious
For families who face the heartbreak of losing fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters to alcohol-related automobile crashes, they discover how precious life is. They realize how fast it can change, so they take advantage of every moment they have with their families.
"We make more out of every moment because we think this could be the last time we're going to be together," Bruntz said.
"So much more now we talk to each other on the phone and make sure we say we love each other. We know you just can't take each other for granted. We were always close, but we really know that now."

Saved by Seatbelts

Brianna White hasn't even reached bicycle-riding age, but she already knows to wear her seatbelt. Each time the 5-year-old gets into the car, she not only puts on her own seatbelt, she makes certain her mother Jenny is also safely buckled.
Mrs. White, a friend of base family advocacy outreach coordinator Karen GreyEyes, inadvertently taught her daughter the importance of seatbelts. A July 31 automobile accident  near Larimore left White a quadriplegic. She said a seatbelt would have probably saved her from serious injury.
White was on the way back from Devil's Lake early that morning with a friend, who fell asleep while driving. When the 1997 Grand Am began veering off the road, White grabbed the steering wheel, but the car rolled over into the ditch, and she found herself trapped.
"I know I wasn't wearing a seatbelt and I was the one who got hurt - my friend didn't even have to be admitted to the hospital," White said.
More Air Force people were killed in the first six months of 2001 - 53 - than in either of the previous two years, according to Air Force safety statistics. The majority of fatalities were caused by off-duty automobile accidents, with not wearing seatbelts one of the most common causes.
Lt. Col. Glenn Rousseau's wife discovered a unique method of teaching their children to always wear seatbelts. She once traveled with Rousseau on a military airplane and was amused to hear her husband and his co-pilot repeat the word "check" as they did their pre-flight checklists. So she taught their four children to go through their own checklist whenever the family piles into their van.
"One of those things that they respond to is when the 'pilot' of the family van challenges everyone with a 'seatbelt check,'" Rousseau said. "The rapid, disciplined succession of 'check' responses from all our little 'crewmembers' is not only cute, but very reassuring. Our family has fun with this, but more importantly, we know we are all strapped in and ready for the unexpected, which is serious business."
Seatbelts are a problem on base. During a recent seatbelt inspection, more than 15 percent of passengers in 500 base automobiles were not buckled in, said Rousseau, 319th Air Refueling Wiing chief of safety.
"For my entire military career, I've heard about the benefits of wearing seatbelts and how they save lives," Rousseau said. "How anyone in this day and age can read the reports, see the statistics and hear the personal testimonies that say wearing seatbelts is the right thing to do, then choose not to wear them is beyond my comprehension.
"Seatbelts help to prevent accidents and greatly increase your chances of surviving. Since you can't predict when you will have an accident, make seatbelts a habit and live."
White has adjusted to life as a quadriplegic, with the assistance of her "little helper." But Brianna isn't the only one who learned a valuable lesson through her mother's paralysis.
"A lot of us didn't wear them, but my family has adjusted to wearing seatbelts since then," she said. "My life could have been taken away. I want everyone to know its very important to wear their seatbelts."