JBER Public Affairs
12/19/2014 - JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska -- I woke up at 0530 and rolled out of bed, awake, but not quite conscious. One cinnamon roll and a zero-calorie energy drink later, my father (who was visiting for Thanksgiving) and I were on our way to the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Marine Corps Reserve detachment for my first extended military mission.
Just three months out of tech school and I was going to embed with a team of Marines above the Arctic Circle where we would conduct arctic survival training and community support.
We were going to fly up north of the Arctic Circle to deliver toys to children by traversing hundreds of miles of frozen water in subzero temperatures on snowmachines.
Not being one for the pursuit of adrenaline, I knew that the bigger issue was going to be keeping up with the pack so I didn't end up offering support to the local wildlife instead of the local community.
This was certainly an exciting experience many would be jealous of, and the excitement was there, sure, but having been born and raised in Florida, I had no idea what I was about to get myself
into.
As I started layering up, my stomach churned as it tried to digest the traitorous butterflies that had somehow found their way in.
I said goodbye to my father, apologized for cutting his holiday visit short, and began to make sure I had everything I needed for the trip.
The plan was to load up the snowmachines that would serve as our primary mode of transportation onto a C-130 Hercules aircraft and then fly to Kotzebue, Alaska, where we would spend the first few nights of our 10-day trip.
We arrived in Kotzebue around 5 p.m. and began a mad rush to unload the snowmachines as quickly as possible. I had no idea what the hurry was, but it was surprisingly difficult to breathe behind the plane. It was like the air was being sucked from my lungs as the force of the engines pushed me backward along the icy runway.
We unloaded all five snowmachines and three sleds in a matter of minutes and drove them into a nearby warehouse where we called and asked the two team members who arrived the day before us to come get their snowmachines.
The first thing I noticed about Kotzebue was where I would normally expect to see cars or trucks, there were snowmachines and ATVs. Kotzebue, though large for the villages in the area, only had a few roads and there were many more snowmachines than cars on them.
Our guide, Brad Reich, was an Alaska Native who was born and raised in the area and had a personality that was larger than life. Five minutes' conversation with this man and I had no doubt this was somebody who lived life to the fullest and loved every second of it.
He met us and excitedly told us it looked like we'd have a nice, warm ride as the temperature was only about 7 degrees.
I laughed a bit to myself, as I remembered people back in Florida bundling up for anything below 73.
I thought 7 degrees was cold. To people north of the Arctic Circle, cold is apparently 56 degrees below zero.
We stayed in Kotzebue for a day and a half and began the 55-mile ride to Noorvik on our snowmachines. We used water as roads; land was a flighty interruption to the otherwise smooth consistent ice under our tracks.
To say I was bit nervous would be an understatement. The only time water freezes in Florida, is when you leave it in your freezer for too long. I had no comprehension of riding a vehicle over a river, or sea even.
Understand it or not, I was going to do just that the next day when we began our trips to the villages to deliver toys, starting with Noorvik.
As we rode out onto the bay and I began to lose sight of land, I just kept thinking of Marine Staff Sgt. Brent Seawright's words before I left.
"If you feel yourself start to break through the ice, just nail the throttle," he cheerfully said with a laugh. "It's called water skipping."
I couldn't tell if he was joking, so I just assumed he wasn't and wondered how long one could skip.
However, the ice proved to be more than strong enough to support us and was actually a lot more comfortable to ride on than the trails we had practiced on in Eureka, outside of Anchorage.
After seeing a Native drive a sports utility vehicle over the Kotzebue Sound, I didn't think what I was doing was odd anymore. It's fascinating how quickly humans can adapt to drastically different circumstances.
On the way to Noorvik, we passed by some Natives going the opposite direction who saluted us as we drove by.
Not only were we not in uniform, but we were bundled up in so many layers, I'm fairly confident my own mother wouldn't have recognized me. The significance of the fact that these people saw us and immediately knew who we were was not lost on me.
I wasn't sure how to react to that, so I just waved as I drove by, but had to quickly put my hand back on the handlebars to keep from getting thrown off the ever-tumultuous snowmachine.
Upon arriving in Noorvik, the Navy corpsman, Petty Officer 1st Class Anthony Dickinson, senior medical department representative who simply went by "Doc" was the first to don the Santa suit while the others began unloading the gifts and sorting them by grade.
The kids were like small tornadoes of excitement as they interrogated us in an attempt to ascertain which one of us was Santa.
About two hours later, we were back on our machines and headed to the next village.
This scene was repeated with each village we visited with one small exception, Kiana.
Kiana is where we would be staying for the next few days and also where Reich had, until recently, been the mayor in addition to his job as Inutek manager, wherein he provides tech support for 10 villages in the area and one farther away.
While we were in Kiana, Reich and his family cooked for all of us and we ate breakfast at the school. These courtesies carry a lot more weight when there's not a conventional grocery store for hundreds of miles.
At the school in Kiana, it was apparent that the kids remembered the visiting Marines from the previous year as they called Martin "Papa Joe" and asked about others that had come last year. They were excited for the presents, but more so than that, it was obvious the kids looked up to these Marines.
"This is what it's all about man," Doc said as he drank in the view around outside of the Kiana school building. "Bringing smiles to kid's faces, there's nothing better."
After handing out presents, we went over to help tear up carpet that had apparently sustained some kind of water damage in one of the nearby houses and was frozen to the floor. You know you are above the Arctic Circle when you have to pry a box spring mattress off the carpet with a crowbar.
The Marines go out of their way to help the community like this however they can while they are in the area. Last year, they helped build cold-weather storage at the school and were able to save the city $2,000 and two weeks of work, said Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Martin, operations chief for Detachment Military Police Company D, 4th Infantry Battalion on JBER.
I found the support the community provides to each other eye-opening. If something breaks, your neighbor comes and helps you fix it. The construction of new homes in the village aren't just construction, they're more like community events where everyone helps however they can. If someone knows how to fix a snowmachine and their neighbor's snowmachine breaks, they don't recommend a mechanic, they go help fix it for them.
Reich took us out to some local ice fishing spots, and fishermen with sleds full of fish frequently stopped by to offer bits of advice, swap stories, or share an area that they found to be productive.
They didn't take these fish home as trophies. If they caught too much they would simply start giving them out so others could eat too. Some talented fishermen would fish for the express purpose of giving them out.
With visiting these villages so often, it's no wonder the Marine detachment on JBER has such an apparent sense of unity.
I've heard of this kind of community and brotherhood before, but until I spent a week and a half with some Marines in Alaska Native villages, I didn't understand it.
I'm back from the Arctic, and I now know how to ice fish with nothing more than some line and a piece of wood; I was able to help a unique community, and in the process, learned a bit about what community really is.
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