Medical Airmen return from 'Arctic' mission

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  • By Tech. Sgt. Jason Schaap
MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. --  Technically, they were still within the United States. But to Lt. Col. Cheryl Hooper and Lt. Col. (Dr.) James Clark, it seemed like another world.

The two Airmen from the 931st Aerospace Medicine Flight returned in late March from a two-week deployment supporting Operation Arctic Care, a joint military medical readiness exercise that brings no-cost health care to underserved residents of rural Alaska. Conditions during the two-week deployment were, as Colonel Hooper put it, "austere."
 
"It's like the last frontier," she said.
 
The staging point of the mission was Bethel, Alaska, a city 340 miles west of Anchorage only accessible by air and river. From there, Arctic Care personnel were sent to 11 villages in the remotest regions of Western Alaska.
 
Colonel Hooper was part of a joint-service team sent to Alakanuk, a small village of about 600 people. It took about an hour and a half in an Army Black Hawk helicopter to get there from Bethel, she said.
 
Her team lodged and worked inside a village school still in session. It was an appropriate setting for Colonel Hooper, a nurse practitioner and commander of her 931st medicine flight. She spent much of her time as a public health instructor to the school's students. In a place where there is no doctor or dentist, topics included basic CPR, nutrition, suicide prevention and anti-bullying education.
 
Many of the health problems her team encountered were nutrition related, she said. Food that the villagers don't hunt has to be flown in. Vegetables and dairy products are almost non-existent.
 
"All they eat is meat," Colonel Hooper said. "They don't get enough calcium ... (and) they're hungry most of the time."
 
The lack of meal options also meant her team usually dined on military Meals, Ready-To-Eat, she said, "and maybe school lunches if it didn't look too bad--I always ate with the kids."
 
In many ways, the Arctic Care team members were students as much as they were instructors at the school. They learned about the obvious, that life there is cold and harsh, and the not so obvious, that basketball is so popular villagers will travel four hours by snowmobile to attend a game.

They learned that the Alakanuks are fighting to preserve their culture and language. They learned that proper methods in seal hunting are taught in elementary school and that all parts of a seal, to include the head, are consumed.
 
"They really immersed us into their culture," Colonel Hooper said.

Dr. Clark said he left Alaska with a deep appreciation for any culture that can survive in remote Alaska. His Arctic Care team stayed in Bethel, the supply hub for villages like Alakanuk. The central location, with its own population of around 6,300 people, allowed for a steady stream of patients.
 
Bethel had few more amenities than the outlying villages, to include a Subway restaurant that servicemembers tired of MREs were happy to see when they returned from the villages.

But conditions in Bethel were, by most U.S. mainlander standards, still very cold and very barren.

"I couldn't live up there in that environment," Dr. Clark, an Oklahoma native, said.
 
Dr. Clark treated 82 patients and performed 244 dental procedures in support of Arctic Care. Cavities from the plenty of sugar-filled sodas and junk foods in the area were "rampant," he said. Colonel Hooper said he later described to her how many of the children's teeth were so decayed that he could easily "rocker" them back and forth to pull them out.
 
Both officers also talked about the benefits of working alongside medical personnel from other military branches. A main reason Arctic Care, an annual exercise, was started 15 years ago was to enable medical personnel to operate in a joint environment. The Navy led the 2009 exercise.

"Those Navy guys were just fantastic," Dr. Clark said. "Everyone worked together great. There was a lot of camaraderie between the services."

Each branch of the U.S. military takes turns leading Arctic Care. The Army led in 2008. The Air Force is scheduled to lead the exercise in 2010.