Military

Eielson Air Force Base in Interior Alaska has increased its COVID-19 precautions after Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson’s commander declared a public health emergency on Friday due to a surge in COVID cases.

An updated command directive published Monday limits on-base gatherings and restricts interactions with the off-base community, including forbidding in-person dining and patronizing bars. Takeout is acceptable, with masks.

“The 354^th Fighter Wing Commander has directed a Health-Protection Condition Bravo, due to the increased community COVID-19 transmission rate,” said Col. David Berkland, who heads up Eielson’s main fighter wing.

Air Force Col. Kirsten Aguilar, who commands JBER and its 673rd Air Base Wing, said in statement released Friday that the emergency declaration reflects the “continued reality” of sustained, community transmission of COVID-19.

JBER officials are urging service members to avoid places that don’t require masking and to maintain social distancing and other COVID-19 mitigation measures. According to the statement, if the situation at JBER worsens, commanders will take additional measures to protect military personnel, possibly including restricting their access to off-base establishments.

Commanders at the two Army installations in the Interior have not elevated their health protection condition levels — at least, not yet.

Fort Wainwright spokesperson Eve Baker said post officials will require personnel to continue using the precautions that the post had established months ago.

“We are not increasing the health protection condition at this time, though the garrison leadership is monitoring the situation and may adjust, if necessary,” she said. “We are maintaining the mask requirement for all indoor spaces. And then for outdoor spaces, if you cannot maintain 6 feet of separation, you do have to wear a mask.”

A Fort Greely spokesperson said Monday that post also hasn’t elevating its health protection condition level.

Vaccinations against the virus are required for military members, under an order from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month. But different branches have different deadlines. For the Air Force, the deadline is Nov. 2, and for the Army, it’s Dec. 15.

Julia O’Malley and Casey Grove contributed to this report.

The Coast Guard encountered a flotilla of Chinese warships 46 miles off the Aleutian Islands at the end of August, inside of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, according to a news release Monday evening.

The exclusive economic zone extends off the country’s coastline, including off the coast of Alaska. The U.S. has jurisdiction over natural resources in the waters.

The Coast Guard said the four Chinese warships included a guided missile cruiser, a guided missile destroyer, a general intelligence vessel and an auxiliary vessel.

No interaction occurred between Chinese vessels and American Coast Guard or American fishing vessels, according to the Coast Guard’s release. It said the Chinese vessels have right of passage through the economic exclusion zone and were in full compliance with international maritime law.

Scott McCann, a Coast Guard spokesperson, would not speculate on the reason for the Chinese warships’ visit when asked Tuesday morning. He said it’s been several years since Chinese warships last entered the economic zone off Alaska.

The Coast Guard encountered the vessels with the Bertholf and Kimball legend-Class national security cutters and Healy, a medium icebreaker.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

The U.S. evacuation in Afghanistan that ended Monday got some help over the past few weeks from an Alaska National Guard unit based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

An Alaska Air National Guard spokesperson says the Guard’s 176^th Wing provided two C-17 cargo planes and four aircrews to help U.S. forces evacuate Americans and others from Afghanistan.

The spokesperson says an additional aircrew left J-BER over the weekend.

An Air National Guard news release said the two C-17s are assigned to the Alaska Air National Guard’s 144^th Airlift Squadron that’s also based at JBER. The crews include both Guard members and active-duty military personnel from another JBER based unit, the 517^th Airlift Squadron.

The news release said Alaska-based crews had helped evacuate about 1,700 people from Afghanistan as of Friday morning. And it says a total of about 111,000 have been transported from the region since U.S. and coalition forces began the evacuation.

U.S. officials say Alaska is ideally located to launch or assist in military operations in the Indo-Pacific region, but so far Army and Air Force resources based here are not being used in the U.S. evacuation efforts in Afghanistan.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month said what many other U.S. leaders have stated over the years: that Alaska’s forward location enables U.S. military units based here to respond quickly to events throughout the region adjacent to the Indian and Pacific oceans.

“We are an Indo-Pacific nation. And we are an Arctic nation,” Austin said during a July 24th visit to Eielson Air Force Base. He said the buildup of Alaska-based military assets in recent years has given the Army and Air Force substantial capabilities for both offensive and defensive operations.

“This is where we can project power into both regions,” he said, “and where we must be able to defend ourselves from threats coming from both places.”

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis touched on the same theme during his visit to Eielson in June of 2018.

“It is probably the gateway to the Pacific for us in many, many ways,” he said.

But Alaska-based military assets apparently are not part of U.S. efforts to evacuate remaining American and allied citizens from Afghanistan, along with Afghans and others who’ve helped the U.S. military during its occupation of the country.

The withdrawal of the U.S. military from Afghanistan has been watched closely by veterans of the 20-year war, who’ve expressed a range of emotions and opinions as the Taliban have once again swept into power.

That includes many based or formerly based in Alaska, which is said to have a higher percentage of veterans than any other state.

One is Thor Johnson, who lives in Kodiak. He was in the 6th grade when terrorists attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001. A decade later, he deployed to Afghanistan as an infantryman with the National Guard.

“Politics aside, I knew that we were trying to help people have a better life,” Johnson said. “I guess I thought we were doing the right thing for those people at the beginning.”

Johnson was stationed at Camp Nathan Smith in the Kandahar region, and his job was to protect members of a Provincial Reconstruction Team. Close to the end of his deployment, while providing security to workers visiting a dairy, two men on a motorcycle attacked Johnson’s convoy.

“So, the doors were just about shut and these two gentlemen kind of popped up, and the one with the rifle started shooting at us,” Johnson said. “And the ricochets are going by, the rear gunner reported it, you know, ‘Enemy firing at our rear,’ and he was returning fire.”

Everybody in Johnson’s convoy was OK that day, but he knows people who didn’t make it back. He also badly injured his shoulder later — not in combat — but it still affects him today. And he’s had friends commit suicide while suffering from the lingering trauma of war.

Now what bothers him the most is that he feels like many Afghans didn’t care enough to put up a fight of their own, and the U.S. withdrawal happened so quickly, it handed the country right back to the Taliban.

“For the investment of 20 years to go down the drain in what amounts to less than a week’s worth of fighting is devastating,” Johnson said. “It’s very upsetting. It’s frustrating that a lot of people gave their lives, their youth, to this.”

Air Force pararescue jumper Roger Sparks, an Eagle River resident who deployed to Afghanistan over a dozen times, saw the mission differently.

“I was never going there to improve the lives of the Afghan people, you know, I was going there to pursue people that would do citizens of this country harm,” Sparks said. “I was pursuing people that wanted to project violence upon people of this country. And we just happened to be pursuing them in Afghanistan.”

With the special forces, Sparks saw his share of violence. Men died in his arms. A fellow PJ survived getting shot in the head through the bottom of their helicopter. In an operation called Bulldog Bite, Sparks lowered down from the helicopter under heavy fire and grenade attacks to tend to nine badly wounded men, saving five of them. He was awarded the Silver Star.

Sparks said it’s deeply unfortunate for the Afghan people that the U.S. is now pulling out. But he doesn’t think American soldiers lost their lives for nothing because he says they knew what they were getting into. And for him, violence was the point of being there, not the reconstruction.

“Was this all just a giant rat race? Well yeah, most of it was. But you know, just don’t ever lie to yourself for the reasons that we’re really there,” Sparks said. “We’re coming up on the anniversary of September 11. That’s the reason we’re there. … You know, if you have someone that’s trying to project violence on you, you’re going to absorb that violence unless you project violence upon them. You can’t talk your way out of that. And so I think we were very effective at doing that in Afghanistan.”

Still, it’s complicated and there are no easy answers, Sparks said.

“It’s just, if you’re going to try to solve problems with violence, it gets very esoteric in the fact that you’re just creating more problems, you know,” he said.

Tom Berry, formerly an Army captain stationed at Fort Wainwright, also wasn’t surprised to see the Taliban swoop back into power in Afghanistan. He was deployed there in 2011 about 30 kilometers from where the Taliban started, and he could see that in the rural, agricultural area his unit patrolled, things on the ground had changed very little since the initial U.S. invasion 10 years earlier.

“And you saw the government, while well intentioned in many ways, was not functioning,” Berry said. “So a big reason why I left military service the year after my deployment was, you could just see, or I could see, that I couldn’t possibly lead soldiers into a cycle where every year, a new American unit comes in and declares victory. But victory wasn’t really achieved. And then a new unit comes in and repeats. That already happened about seven times in the village that I was in.”

A lot of the problems with the long U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and now the rapid withdrawal, are the result of American citizens and politicians not caring enough or not paying enough attention, Berry said.

“Like, ‘Oh, we’re here for a year. Someone else will be coming for the next year,’ (the) absence of caring as Americans, caring at the highest level,” he said. “Maybe it’s easier to just prolong this war than to be honest about the fact we have no strategy and people are dying.”

For Berry and many other veterans, it still isn’t over: He’s trying to help his Afghan interpreter, Walid, and his wife and their nine children escape the country.

Walid and his family are in hiding while Berry and his former colleagues in the U.S. try to get them special visas. Even then, Berry said, they’ll have to somehow evade the Taliban and get to the airport.

“I think the way that this is going down is, it shows that if I just care through this final step, no matter what happens, very least, I want to have one more nightmare to deal with coming out of this week,” he said.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the United States military shouldn’t stay in Afghanistan forever, but she called the result of the withdrawal “just devastating.”

As the Taliban takes control again, Murkowski said she’s thinking about the gains lost and the many American soldiers killed in that country over the past two decades.

“Now looking at these things play out on TV, and perhaps questioning why, whether their sacrifice was worth it,” she told reporters on Monday. “This is devastating for us to be in this position.”

Murkowski did not specifically blame President Biden, though she said she was concerned when he announced this spring that troops would be gone by Sept. 11. She expects to eventually see a review of the decision-making timeline and the intelligence reports to identify what went wrong.

“I think the task for us now is to try to get as many out as safely and as quickly as we possibly, possibly can,” she said. “And then I think there’s going to be a lot of review about how we came to be at this place at this moment.”

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan declined an interview request on Monday. He issued a written statement saying Biden “botched” the execution of the withdrawal plan. If the Taliban flag is flying over the U.S. Embassy building in Kabul on Sept. 11, “Joe Biden will be solely responsible for that sickening and dispiriting image,” said Sullivan’s statement.