OPINION: National Guard bureaucracy threatens a vital Alaska service

For the last 10 years of my career as an Air Force Pararescueman (PJ), I was stationed at the 212th Rescue Squadron at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The 212th is a squadron within the Alaska Air Guard. While most people’s conception of the National Guard is that of well-meaning citizens playing soldier one weekend per month, the reality of what Alaska’s guardsmen do to rescue anybody and everybody on a 24/7/365 alert schedule is antithetical to that perception.

Due to Alaska’s remoteness, complex rescue is a job that requires the Guard to be proficient, trained and ready at all times; this requires its guardsmen to work continuously. Unfortunately, the Pentagon does not see Alaska’s nuanced need for its rescue assets and has threatened to “streamline” job positions within the Air Guard in a manner that threatens the careers of many public servants as well as something very special — Alaska’s own special ops team that is doing work which directly affects the lives of its residents right here at home.

PJs are the Air Force’s special operators. They are tasked with combat search and rescue and they are among the most highly trained operators in the military. They are largely unknown as a group when compared to the highly marketed Navy SEALs and they prefer it that way. However, their capabilities are equal, if not more refined than most of the special teams within the military and that is exemplified by the missions they and their associated aircrews carry out in Alaska on a fairly regular basis.

On March 21, a two-man team of PJs parachuted to the village of Kotlik to provide medical care to an ill patient. The decision was made to forgo helicopter evacuation because the weather was too bad for low-flying aircraft. On average, Alaska’s PJs parachute into rescues around the state once every year, which makes them America’s special operations team with the most operational parachute missions — a coveted standing among the military’s operational community. They’ve parachuted into bear maulings, plane crashes, and a host of medically ill patients stuck at homesteads and in villages. They’ve been hoisted out of helicopters onto cliffsides, into flooding rivers, and between crevasses on glaciers. They’ve skied and climbed for days to access survivors. And they are all paramedics, bringing advanced prehospital care to places inaccessible to anybody but the military’s most advanced practitioners. They and their peers who operate the Pave Hawks and C-130s, those who maintain the aircraft, and the professionals who pack their parachutes and keep the paperwork in order have always dealt with the Pentagon’s seemingly careless approach to its people — and the National Guard Bureau’s misconception that its guardsmen aren’t asked to do a job that requires their lifestyle to accomplish.

America obsesses over SEAL Team Six and its high level of operability. However, SEAL Team Six is not here in Alaska hoisting onto Bird Ridge with shotguns to find a 16-year-old who is being stalked by a bear, nor are they parachuting into blizzards to provide post-surgical care in a village, nor accessing a sheep hunter on a cliffside and then carrying him in a litter to the valley bottom through steep alders — all accomplished by aircrews and teams of two PJs alerted of the situation only a couple hours prior.

The stories go on and on, but you won’t often find them published in detail, because PJs never talk about their heroics. They just show up, do their jobs, and go home to their families. And that lack of self-promotion has caused them and their teammates in the Air Guard to struggle through years of neglect from the National Guard Bureau. During my career, we fought with NGB for years about an outdated computer program that left around 40 operators in the 212th Rescue Squadron with an aggregate of $300,000 of unpaid salary. One PJ rescued a snowmachiner by parachute while he was still owed $30,000 of unpaid wages. We had to threaten NGB with a news release for anything to be done in a timely manner. They also deal with a minefield of convoluted regulation involving their qualification for disability and the military’s equivalent of worker’s compensation when they’re injured that active duty troops don’t deal with. And now, the Pentagon is pushing a broad-stroke change that threatens the careers and the hard-earned retirements of people who have been assisting their fellow Alaskans on their worst days for decades.

I’m writing this as a retired PJ because nobody else in Alaska’s Air Guard rescue community is going to break their vow of silent professionalism to do so. Rescue is a sacred act — it requires humility on the part of the rescuer. So, if you care about the practitioners who are always there, ready to come get you if your adventure in the backcountry goes south, then call our congressional leaders and tell them to fight hard against the National Guard Bureau’s policy changes that threaten to send our Guard members’ careers into the detriment of bureaucratic carelessness.

Pat Gault is retired from the Alaska Air Guard and lives in Anchorage.

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