Operation Arctic Care

It’s 15 degrees below zero and the snowdrifts are head high when the New Hampshire Army National Guard Medical Readiness Detachment lands in Kotzebue, Alaska. As Capt. Brent Hallenbeck ’01 steps from the plane, a fleet of snowmobiles and dogsleds waits to escort him and his team of 137 medical personnel to their temporary staging quarters at Kotzebue Middle High School nearby. Maj. (P) Dan O’Brien, MPA-C ’94 arrives a few days later. 

This is not their ordinary medical mission, nor are these alumni accustomed to a frozen environment of this magnitude. Hallenbeck, the detachment’s operations officer and mission officer in charge (OIC), coordinated for 10 months to organize this combined team from the Air and Army National Guards, Marines, Navy, and U.S. Public Health Service to provide medical care for 12 remote indigenous communities located throughout a 36,000-square-mile region of northwest Alaska that is accessible only by plane and snowmobile. Trading April’s springtime in the Granite State for late winter in the Arctic, they are here for two weeks to treat the Last Frontier’s most isolated and vulnerable population. 

“I have never done or seen anything like this,” Hallenbeck says, now back at his Manchester office where he’s nurse manager of Surgical Services at the Department of Veteran Affairs. “Whether it’s the location or the mission … to be able to do a joint mission with all these other services, to be able to go somewhere this challenging, and to execute a mission in this complex nature was new for me.”

Hallenbeck explains that the Alaskan community applied to the Department of Defense’s Innovative Readiness Training Program, which partners military units that seek training opportunities with communities that have needs they are unable to meet on their own. In this repository of applicants, Hallenbeck says he saw potential for his New Hampshire detachment to train in arctic warfare preparedness and provide medical care to this remote Alaskan community that struggled to get doctors, dentists, andveterinarians, beyond what they receive through the Department of Health and Human Service’s Indian Health Service.

This mission was a major physical and logistical challenge on myriad levels, but Hallenbeck’s modesty underscores the value of collaboration and planning. His medical detachment usually doesn’t deploy, he explains, but rather they focus on soldier readiness within New Hampshire to ensure that National Guard personnel are prepared for a mission. Transporting and preparing this team was an accomplishment, but also wrangling seven other disparate military and civilian units together, when they don’t normally collaborate, added a layer of cross-country complexity that Hallenbeck and O’Brien say they don’t often witness. And then, providing medical care in the middle of the Arctic was the cherry on top to create a significant test in deployment capability.

“Captain Hallenbeck was the man that made it happen, and I can’t stress enough how much complexity he had on his plate. This is what the American military does. This is why we’re the elite force in the world, because we focus on complexity, doing that with multiple partners, be they multinational or multiservice, and doing it in any environment,” says O’Brien, deputy state surgeon-clinical with the N.H. National Guard in Concord, who led a care team to three of the 12 remote villages.

“And this exercise just highlights that. We’re in the Arctic Circle. We have Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines, Public Health Service, and we’re working with civilian authorities,” O’Brien says. “On one hand, we’re helping a local community, and on the other we’re training ourselves and multiple units to work together and to do complex things, so, when something goes down, we can react, no matter where it is. This mission just brings that all together in an extremely complex environment.”

And in recognition of these efforts, Hallenbeck was recently named Officer of the Year by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Innovative Readiness Training program.

REMOTE POSSIBILITIES

The 137 personnel consisted of medics, dentists, behavioral health therapists, pharmacists, gastroenterologists, and veterinarians that provided no-cost care for more than 800 patients and 270 animals, all at a market value estimated at more than $750,000. According to O’Brien, they provided 460 dental procedures and 52 colonoscopies, and processed more than 1,400 prescriptions for a community that has the highest prevalence of colon cancer in the nation. Meanwhile, they slept in sleeping bags on cots at a school, then divided into individual teams of providers that dispatched to each community based on its medical demands. They brought only the basic supplies they could carry on their backs, and relied almost exclusively on the limited equipment at health clinics in each village. Because there were no roads with cars, they traveled by snowmobile and dogsled on trails through the snow for up to 40 miles, consistently in temperatures that were below zero.

Hallenbeck adds that partners Alaska National Guard and local villagers were incredibly accommodating, provided daily transport and guidance, and even rerouted their plans from using Black Hawk helicopters or dogsledding over a frozen river to taking a safer inland snowmobile trail if the ice looked unstable or a snow squall was moving through.

O’Brien counters that, as grueling as it sounds, it didn’t feel as cold as it looked, the villagers were welcoming, and the impact they made was worth the effort. They even played a basketball game with the villagers, which lightened the winter mood and gathered communities together.

“We’d wake up and get out of the school before the kids got there, and go over to the clinics, even though we had someone stationed in the clinic at night as well—and we really got our trauma skills put to use there,” O’Brien says. He recalls one nighttime evacuation by snowbulance (a small truck with rubber, tank-like tracks) to meet an emergency flight for a transfer on the runway for a snowmobile crash patient. “So that was pretty intense,” he says. “I think the biggest takeaway from the mission was the amount of care we were able to provide to communities that don’t get to see a dentist or a doctor all that often.”
 

ANSELMIAN BEGINNINGS

Their training over the years was critical for the care they could provide in Alaska, and began as students at Saint Anselm College. Hallenbeck, a biology major, and O’Brien, a natural sciences major, vividly recall their time and their professors on the Hilltop influencing their current career trajectories. They’re seven years apart, so they didn’t meet on campus, but rather met at the Veterans Affairs office where O’Brien worked while recruiting Hallenbeck into his current role.

“The courses I took and the professors I had, it was a challenging, hard curriculum, and it was a difficult workload to balance. But I felt supported. I always had good instructors to lead the way. My desire to push myself and their willingness to foster that, put me on this path,” Hallenbeck says, citing professors Carolyn Weinreb, Jay Pitocchelli, John Feick, and Christopher Lee as strong influences. “On the other side, there’s so much service happening on campus, and I took part in that and continued to build my desire for service. I started in Boy Scouts and youth groups in church, and then continued that service through my time at Saint Anselm, joining the Peace Corps and then the military. It was a great environment to be in to foster both my service side as well as the academic side.”

O’Brien agrees that he learned so much about service at Saint Anselm from the monastic community, professor and pre-med advisor, Barbara Stahl, Ph.D., and student volunteer opportunities like Anselmian B.R.E.A.K. to Appalachia. “I started learning that a more rewarding way to live is by giving and taking care of others.”

Reflecting on that time as eager students and their impact as medical professionals in Alaska fosters a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation in these two talented, hard-working alumni. Both Hallenbeck and O’Brien admit there were moments of struggle and hardship, but it led to moments of success and growth that neither would change, even if the Alaskan trail had been a paved road or the temperatures were above zero degrees.

“As we get closer and closer to being able to fully execute, we are always learning, always training, trying to move the needle forward,” O’Brien says. “As much as it was a real-world mission, we’re always training too, and trying to be better.”