American Heroes

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I’m currently in Alaska, where I’ve been spending time with some unsung heroes – the men and women of the U.S. Coast Guard and the Alaska Air National Guard.

Two days ago I had the privilege of accompanying a crew of Coast Guardsmen on a high-tech helicopter patrol over Kodiak Island.  The rescue pilots spend lots of time responding to emergencies in the area, since some of the communities around them are so remote that travel to medical facilities would normally be measured in days.  But with these pilots willing to go at a moments’ notice in all kinds of weather, hundreds of lives are saved each year. 

Further north, the 212th Rescue Squadron is an air guard unit of pilots and pararescuemen who perform similar functions in Alaska’s rugged interior.  Over the weekend, this team was busy working one of more than a hundred real-world missions they do each year when a small plane went down in bad weather 150 miles from Anchorage. 

Many of these “PJ’s” are veterans of multiple combat deployments in the Global War on Terror.  Their experience saving the lives of their brother soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan makes them perfectly prepared to respond to even the most grisly and dangerous rescues in the last frontier. 

In Alaska, the weather is their worst enemy, but at least here, nobody is shooting at them.

Stay tuned for some great video from our embeds here in Alaska.

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Staff Sgt. Christopher Fessenden is a remote-controlled vehicle hobbyist, so when he was deployed to Afghanistan, he took his toy truck, outfitted with a small video camera with him.  There, the truck became a valuable tool for scouting ahead of convoys and patrols, looking for improvised explosive devices.

This week the truck found one.  A big one.  Fessenden said in an interview that “at least 500 pounds” of explosives rigged with a tripwire in the road in front of an Army patrol went off when the truck got tangled in the tripwire.  The six men in the vehicle who would have been victims of the bomb credit the tiny toy with saving their lives.

The man whose Rochester, NY store provided the original truck – appropriately named “maximum destruction,” immediately sent a replacement.  Fully outfitted, the trucks cost about five hundred dollars. 

The military has spent truckloads of money looking for ways to mitigate the threat of IEDs, the number one killer of US troops in Afghanistan.  Perhaps they should invest in a few more of these.  I predict in coming years, robotic versions of trucks like this will become standard issue for troops heading to the war zone.

Of course, though, if the military is buying them, you can be sure they’ll be paying a lot more than $500.