Frozen Tundra Warriors: Airmen Cope with Extreme Weather to Maintain Their Missions at Two North Dakota Bases

FROZEN TUNDRA WARRIORS

Airmen cope with extreme weather to maintain their missions at two North Dakota bases

STORY BY RANDY ROUGHTON

18 May 2015

Airmen from the 5th Maintenance Group prepare a B-52H Stratofortress for takeoff on Minot Air Force Base, N.D., Jan. 12, 2015. Aircraft maintenance Airmen provide maintenance and upkeep to the jets, even during the cold winter months. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Brittany Y. Bateman)

Within seconds of exposure to the North Dakota cold, painful things begin happening to unprotected skin. The nose and lips begin to tingle before numbness sets in. Throw in the brutal Midwest wind on top of sub-zero temperatures with ice and snow-covered roads and sidewalks, and accomplishing the mission while keeping Airmen safe becomes serious business at both Grand Forks and Minot Air Force Base in the Peace Garden State.
Andy Swenson, the 319th Air Base Wing safety manager at Grand Forks AFB, thought of the 264 Critical Days of Winter as his answer to the Air Force’s 101 Critical Days of Summer after he arrived on base 11 winters ago.
“If you’ve ever been off base at a deployed location, you know you’re the odd man out there, and you feel like you’re the target, and your awareness is naturally heightened because of it,” Swenson said. “Well, up here, I think everyone understands that the winter is really the bad guy, and we can’t afford to ever lose sight of that. But those of us who work inside and occasionally go outside have it easy. It’s the cop at the front gate and the civil engineer going from building to building who have it hard.”

Airman 1st Class Patrick Boylan, 91st Missile Security Forces response force leader, performs an outer perimeter check on a launch facility in North Dakota, Feb. 12, 2015. Security forces have several layers of cold weather gear for warmth. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Brittany Y. Bateman)

Grand Forks AFB leaders call their Airmen the “Warriors of the North,” while Minot AFB commanders call their people “Tundra Warriors.”
The missions are different, but both North Dakota bases recognize a different type of war their people must fight more than half of the year – a war against some of the most extreme winter conditions in the nation, which can often last from October, when the land becomes a sea of white after the first snowfall, until May and sometimes early June, when spring finally arrives in North Dakota.
“As Warriors of the North, we take great pride in getting the mission done despite the harsh conditions,” said Col. Paul E. Bauman, the 319th ABW commander at Grand Forks AFB. “Our Airmen are our greatest asset and ensuring their safety in this climate is a top priority. I am extremely proud of the way our Airmen adapt and innovate to accomplish our mission each and every day. I am honored to lead such remarkable men and women.”

A member of the 5th Security Forces Squadron Delta Flight, awaits further instructions during a recapture exercise in the Weapons Storage Area at Minot Air Force Base, N.D. Jan. 30, 2014. Airmen in the area respondto a simulated security incident at a structure in the WSA with their fellow 5th SFS defenders to hone their skills in regards to recapture procedures. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Stephanie Sauberan)

At Grand Forks AFB, Airmen 1st Class Julio Duran-Sangabriel and Dylan Harrison, 319th Civil Engineer Squadron pavements and equipment technicians, clear snow from the flightline to keep the RQ-4 Global Hawk ready to fly. Members of the 319th Security Forces Squadron check identifications at the base gates, search vehicles and conduct perimeter checks, along with supporting Cavalier Air Force Station an hour and a half away.
Across the base, Staff Sgt. Victoria Dames, a 319th SFS military working dog handler, showed off the “dog booties” used to protect MWD Arco to keep his paws from being cut by ice and hardened snow. One night, during his first month after arriving at Grand Forks from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana last winter, Capt. Kendall Benton, the 319th SFS operations officer, spent more than four hours rescuing motorists who had slid into the ditch on an icy Highway 2, between the city of Grand Forks and his home in Larimore.
About 200 miles west at Minot AFB, 94th Missile Maintenance Squadron members fight the elements to keep satellite and land-based communications available for crews working underground at missile sites. Members of the 91st Maintenance Operations Squadron often have to shovel their way just to get to missile sites to do their work a couple of hours from Minot AFB. When winter settles in at Minot, the maintainers sometimes leave the base in morning darkness, and by the time they return about eight hours later, it’s already dark again, the end of another one of North Dakota’s short winter days.

Airmen from the 5th Security Forces Squadron Delta Flight perform a security sweep during a recapture exercise in the Weapons Storage Area at Minot Air Force Base, N.D. Jan. 30, 2014. During every shift, Airmen perform a minimum of one exercise in the WSA to ensure they know the proper procedures should a crisis arise. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Stephanie Sauberan)

Airman 1st Class Joseph Ryan Houseman, a 5th Security Forces Squadron response force member and installation entry controller, tries to keep warm in his Humvee. His upper body is warm enough, but a bottle of water is frozen in the floorboard because the vehicle doesn’t have ground heaters. At the gate, 5th SFS members rotate each hour, but when the temperature drops to minus 40, they have to switch every five minutes. They can only stay so warm, even wearing a parka, hat, mask, thick gloves, thermal underwear and two layers of socks.
“They say our main mission in security forces is to provide uncompromised security for America’s strategic forces,” Houseman said. “That’s what we do, and we try not to let the weather bother us.”
Across base, the B-52 Stratofortresses sit on a flightline usually covered by snow for much of the winter. Maintainers in the 5th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron perform heavy maintenance, such as brake and tire changes on the B-52, taking advantage of work and rest cycles to help each other avoid frostbite and hypothermia. Breaks are encouraged because of the conditions on the flightline. When the conditions reach a certain point, as they did when the base faced minus 45 wind chill temperatures throughout a two-week period in February 2014, maintenance has to be temporarily shut down. Jobs that normally take six hours to complete in warmer weather take twice that time during the winter, said Senior Airman Dylan Walls, the 5th AMS aircraft assistant dedicated crew chief.

Senior Airman Steven Fisher, 5th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron weapons load crew members, prepare to move a Cluster Bomb Unit 103 at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., Feb. 10, 2014. B-52 weapons loaders are trained and certified to load a variety of nuclear and conventional munitions in support of combatant commander requirements. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder)

“During a normal duty day, we’re looking at six hours to be out in the cold, performing our job,” Walls said. “If the mission requires us to stay outside longer than that in order to get our planes ready to be fully mission capable, we do it. We have work and rest cycles, depending on the cold and its severity, and we try to adhere to that as best as we can, but we also have to continually work on the aircraft.”
While the missions are quite different, with Minot AFB remaining focused on the B-52, and the Global Hawk now the mission at Grand Forks AFB, both bases rely heavily on cold-weather clothing and the wingman concept to protect their Airmen during the harsh North Dakota winters.
Civil engineers keep the flightline cleared of snow, which can be especially challenging after a heavy snowstorm, like the blizzards that usually hammer the state each winter. The squadron is manned 24/7 from the first week of November through early April, with the addition of 15 extra winter overhire civilian employees, said Greg Stoik, the 319th CES horizontal section construction foreman.
“We are maintaining an active runway here, and we have to keep it as such,” Stoik said. “It has to be open at all times, and our mission is to keep the runway and taxiways open so when the Global Hawk and (unmanned aerial vehicles) are prepared, they can go.”

Airmen from the 91st Missile Security Forces “trip-out” to a missile alert facility in North Dakota, Feb. 12, 2015. Security forces have several layers of cold weather gear for warmth. The Humvees they travel in are heated, and they’re able to switch out if necessary so that individuals don’t have to stay in the cold for dangerously long periods of time. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Brittany Y. Bateman)

No matter what the conditions are, there are some jobs that have to be done regardless. Civil engineers and security forces members at both bases are some of the Airmen who don’t have the luxury of staying in their dorm rooms and homes when the North Dakota winter deals its worst to the area.
“The most important thing about security forces is our job doesn’t stop on account of the weather,” Benton said. “We do the exact same job regardless of the weather conditions because we have to. We don’t have a choice. But to mitigate that, we do our extra training – peer and leaders at all levels, we make sure people are dressing and layering appropriately for the cold.”
Just because the state enjoyed a considerably more temperate winter this year, Airmen at Grand Forks and Minot know better than to be complacent.

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2015/05/frozen-tundra-warriors/#sthash.jLEB6d0h.dpuf

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."

Saved by Seatbelts A View from a State Trooper

If you want an honest opinion on why people should wear seatbelts - you go to those who are on the front lines of seatbelt enforcement. North Dakota Highway Patrol trooper John Clemens has seen just about everything and he'll tell you that seatbelts are a form of safety you can't live without.
"Seatbelts greatly increase your chances of surviving a crash or avoiding serious injury," Clemens said. "Anybody who has seen those crash test dummy commercials know what happens in a car crash. The car stops once it hits, but the body continues in motion until it's stopped by the steering wheel, dashboard or the windshield. If you have your seatbelt on, your body is going to be held in place, and you won't hit anything."
North Dakota's seatbelt usage rate has improved from its lowest ranking in the nation at 48 percent a few years ago to 58 percent in 2000, Clemens said. But still, 75 percent of people killed on North Dakota highways last year weren't wearing seatbelts, according to statistics provided by the North Dakota Highway Patrol. Forty-six people were killed in single-vehicle rollover crashes, and all but four were unrestrained. Thirty-eight of the victims were ejected from the vehicles.
"I've seen a few crashes where one of the occupants was wearing a seatbelt and the occupant in the other vehicle was not," Clemens said. "There have also been fatalities in the same car with the people who hadn't been wearing their seatbelts, and the people who had been wearing their seatbelts unbuckled their belts and walked away.
"Seatbelts not only keep you in your seat, but when you have to take evasive action, you're able to control the vehicle better. Seatbelts, coupled with airbags, dramatically increase your chances of surviving the crash."
Seatbelts are especially important for children. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics show more than 50 percent of all infants and toddlers through age 4 killed in vehicles were not restrained. The death rate jumps to more than 55 percent for children ages 5 through 9 and to more than 67 percent for ages 10 through 15.
North Dakota seatbelt laws require all occupants below the age of 18 be restrained, either in a child safety device, or by the use of seatbelts, Clemens said.
"This is a primary offense, which means a law enforcement officer can stop a car if they observe occupants below the age of 18 are not restrained," he said. "Occupants over the age of 18 are only required to wear the belts if seated in the front seat of the car. If stopped, this is a secondary offense, meaning there has to be another reason why the officer stopped you."
A seatbelt ticket in Grand Forks will cost $71. If ticketed by a NDHP officer, it's $20. A child restraint law violation carries no fine, but one point will be assessed against your driver's record.
Drivers not only are responsible for buckling their own seatbelts, but also for all passengers, Clemens said. This is not only for the safety of the other occupants, but for the driver's as well. In a recent Japanese study, research showed up to 80 percent of front-seat occupants who die in car crashes could have been saved if their back-seat passengers were wearing seatbelts.
Their study found that the risk of death to drivers or front-seat passengers who wore their seatbelts was nearly five times higher when back-seat passengers did not buckle up. The unrestrained occupants end up being projectiles in the car, causing injury to other occupants who may be restrained or other unrestrained occupants.

Painful Pictures

The photographs George Wise took in a Nazi concentration camp remained in a shoebox for 40 years. But the images from those pictures never left his mind.
Wise continued to see the starving people, smell the stench of death, and he still heard the screams. He even chose to work as a bricklayer so he would work hard enough to sleep heavily and avoid the nightmares.
Finally, a friend helped convince Wise to take the pictures out of his shoebox. He uses the photos, which he took at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany after American infantry forces liberated it on April 29, 1945, to educate people about the Holocaust.
Wise will bring his message to the base at the Holocaust Remembrance Luncheon Thursday in the Club for Holocaust Awareness Week. He will tell the same story that had a National Security Agency audience in tears, as American generals were when they first saw the Nazi death camps.
“General Eisenhower, Patton and Omar Bradley all cried just like we did,” the 77-year-old Wise said in a telephone interview from his home in Lakewood, Colo. We didn’t know there was a place like that in the world. I couldn’t imagine any human being could do this to another human being.”
“If the war had lasted another six months, there wouldn’t have been a Jew alive on the continent of Europe, and the world would’ve never known if they had won the war,” Wise said.
Many people still didn’t want to know when Wise returned home. They didn’t care about the Purple Heart or his two Bronze Stars, but they especially weren’t interested in the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe. So Wise put his pictures away and didn’t take them out again until his Jewish doctor asked him to talk to a reporter about what they saw at Dachau.
“They didn’t want to hear my story,” he said of family and friends. “That broke my heart. It made me feel so bad, I put the pictures in a shoebox.”
Wise, an Army combat medic in World War II, arrived at Normandy after the D-Day invasion. He thought he’d seen the worst war could offer. He was wrong. He saw the worst at Dachau.
Wise saw the piles of corpses and the wall where the Nazis executed about 9,000 prisoners just before the Americans arrived. Everywhere he looked, there were signs of cruelty, suffering and death.
“You can go there 56 years later and still eel death there,” Wise said. “You hear the cries of the people begging to touch you. American soldiers were the only ones to every smile at these people. You wanted to feed them, but you knew it would kill them immediately because they were starving.”
Wise used a camera he had taken from a German soldier and photographed everything he saw.
His one regret is he didn’t have a picture taken of him in the camp because of the doubters. Wise, who is not Jewish, has had to resist throwing punches at people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen.
“These are people who weren’t even born, and all they’re doing is taking what they read from hate literature and believing somebody’s bologna,” Wise said. “I call them liars when they say it didn’t happen. I say where are the kids? There’s a whole generation of Jewish kids that just aren’t there.”
The pictures say it all. Each one has a story, Wise said. But there’s also a central theme in what Wise tells his audience, which includes many children. He wants people to know, not only what the Nazis did to the Jews and other people they tried to exterminate, but the damage hate can do.
“I tell people they really never knew what the word hate means,” he said. “I wish we could take it out of the dictionary because it’s the worst word in there. You don’t have to love every person, but you don’t have to hate him. Just respect every person, regardless of race, creed and color.”
There have been many emotional moments because of the nature of Wise’s message, but his appearance at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has a special place in his heart. Jewish people lined up for blocks to give him a kiss and hug for his part in their people’s liberation.
“It took me 48 years to come home, and that was when I got my welcome home,” Wise said. “They cried, and I cried. It was wonderful.”
Since then, Wise not only has his pictures out of the shoebox – he also feels the need to share them in hopes no camera will have to capture those disturbing images ever again.