Military

The Army has released a report on its investigation into a mid-air helicopter crash in a remote mountainous area 60 miles south of Fort Wainwright that killed three soldiers last April.

The report released by the Army Combat Readiness Center is 385 pages long, but much of it, including details about the crash, is heavily redacted. The parts not blacked-out include findings the Army hadn’t previously disclosed, such as: the crash occurred as the two helicopters that collided and a dozen others were flying back to Fort Wainwright after a two-week training exercise.

“All 14 aircraft were AH-64Delta Apache helicopters,” says Jimmie Cummings, a spokesperson for the Alabama-based Combat Readiness Center.

Cummings couldn’t talk Thursday about redactions in the report, but clarified some of the information, like exactly where the crash happened.

“The mishap occurred 60 miles south of Ladd Army Airfield,” he said

That’s about 50 miles south of the Tanana River, near the confluence of the Wood River and Sheep Creek.

The report says the 14 Apaches took off from the Donnelly Training Area south of Fort Greely just after noon April 27th and headed west through the Alaska Range for flight to Nenana. From there, they intended to fly over Fairbanks International Airport en route to Ladd Field on Fort Wainwright.

Mid-air collision in mountain pass

The report says about 48 minutes into the flight, the formation turned right and headed north into a mountain pass. Army officials have said there were no weather advisories or visibility problems in the area.

The report says the two Apaches that crashed were traveling at about 82 mph about 250 feet above ground level. Then, 30 seconds after they executed the turn, the pilot of one of the Apaches slowed down and lost sight of the other, then tried to increase airspeed and hit the main rotor blades of the other aircraft. Both of the helicopters then crashed into the side of a mountain.

A crew member aboard one of the helicopters then transmitted a mayday call. But the report says “there were no mayday calls or radio transmissions” from the other Apache.

The three soldiers who died were assigned to the 1st Attack Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment: 39-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 3 Christopher Eramo, of New York; 28-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kyle McKenna, of Colorado, and 32-year-old Warrant Officer 1 Stewart Wayment, of Utah.

A fourth soldier who hasn’t been identified was injured and hospitalized.

Portions of the report on lessons learned and recommendations based on them were both redacted.

The Army released the report last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by KUAC.

Congress approved an $886 billion defense bill Thursday and sent it to President Biden for his signature. The measure calls for more than $200 million in funding for construction projects at Alaska military installations, and a pay raise for service members.

The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act calls for planning and design work on future construction projects at Alaska military installations that Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office says will provide military personnel serving in Alaska with “state-of-the-art facilities.”

The legislation authorizes funding for military construction projects already under way in the state or about to begin. Murkowski’s office said the biggest of those line items include $107.5 million for extending a runway at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, $34 million for completing a Fort Wainwright housing project, $9.5 million for a new dormitory at Eielson Air Force Base, and $6.1 million for a precision guided-missile complex at JBER.

The NDAA also calls for nearly $30 billion in missile defense funding in fiscal year 2024, including about $11 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, which operates a base at Fort Greely. The funding will enable the agency to complete work needed to field 64 Ground-Based Interceptor missiles, most of which will be at Greely.

A Defense Department document says the agency expects to complete testing of an advanced missile defense radar facility at Clear Space Force Station in the coming year. The document says the Long-Range Discrimination Radar will then be handed over to the Space Force.

The NDAA also includes funding for a 5.2% pay raise for service members and other quality-of-life measures — like improvements to the allowance that helps offset the cost of food and other necessities for military families.

According to Murkowski’s office, the legislation also calls for improving relationships with local Alaska Native and American Indian organizations by appointing tribal liaisons to consult and coordinate with those groups.

A judge in Idaho has dismissed a manslaughter case involving a 19-year-old Alaska woman who was killed in a Humvee crash last year during an ROTC event.

The judge decided that Idaho’s laws didn’t apply in the case, because of a jurisdictional technicality: The crash happened on a military bombing range that isn’t open to the public.

Military investigators did flag a civilian Air Force employee and a major for possible crimes related to the death early on, but the military hasn’t disclosed if they actually faced any charges or disciplinary action.

Eagle River resident Jessica Swan, the mother of slain Air Force ROTC cadet Mackenzie Wilson, called the lack of accountability “unconscionable.”

“Mackenzie was killed and there’s no consequences,” she said Tuesday, after listening to a court hearing to wrap up the case. “Like, how can that be? How can that be legal? Like, how can that be OK? It just doesn’t make sense.”

Wilson was one of 19 college students from around the country in the Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps picked to attend a four-day educational program at Idaho’s Mountain Home Air Force Base in June of 2022. ROTC cadets are civilians preparing to become military officers.

The crash happened on the last day, on a gravel road of the Saylor Creek Bombing Range. Military investigators detailed poor oversight and a series of broken rules leading up to the crash. According to their report, range officials gave the untrained cadets unsupervised access to drive old Humvees, which had been procured as bombing targets and weren’t supposed to be driven.

Idaho authorities charged the driver, another cadet from Minnesota named Cole Harcey, with manslaughter.

For months, Harcey’s lawyer and the county prosecutor argued over how to parse the grammatical structure of a reckless driving statute and case law.

Reckless driving is a prerequisite for the manslaughter charge in this case. The judge ultimately decided it didn’t apply on public land that is not open to the public.

In a court hearing last month, Harcey’s attorney, Aaron Hooper, summed up the crash as “an unfortunate accident.”

Swan, the victim’s mother, disagrees. She went public with her anger and frustration earlier this year, because she wanted accountability, and because she feared her daughter’s death would be explained away as just another tragic accident.

Hooper deflected blame toward the military, citing its investigators’ report.

“The hummers were sent to the range to be targets, basically, to have bombs dropped on them,” he said. “They were not kept up to be driven around. They were not properly maintained. They did not have the right kind of tires. Essentially, they were not regulated in a way that almost all military equipment is. They weren’t, essentially, safe to drive.”

Now, Swan said, it feels like the judge’s decision means other people can get away with killing a civilian on military grounds.

“What’s to stop this from happening again?” she said. “This actually leaves cadets less protected,’cause now there’s legal precedent. So it’s done the complete opposite of what I was hoping, to protect other cadets.”

None of the attorneys involved in the case responded to requests for comment. Air Force officials have not said whether its personnel faced disciplinary action after the accident.

Swan said the prosecutor was in touch with her recently and told her he intends to appeal.

Over 100 kids and their parents waited patiently for Santa and Mrs. Claus in the Tuluksak school gymnasium. The Alaska Army National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk from Bethel had to make two trips to Tuluksak, about 34 miles away. The first trip brought six passengers that included this reporter, representatives from the Salvation Army, and Alaska Guard members. Most importantly, of course, it also carried presents. But Santa was a bit delayed.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Colton Bell is assigned to Golf Company, 2-211th General Support Aviation Battalion. He was the lead helicopter pilot for the mission.  

“We had Santa on the second flight. He was with the medics,” Bell said, referring to staff from the air medical transport company LifeMed.

In the middle of Operation Santa Claus, there was an urgent assistance call from the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.

“We got a rescue mission, patient transport from the village of Napaskiak about in the middle of it. So we took off from Bethel and took two LifeMed medics with us over to Napaskiak to drop them off, and then continue the mission up to Tuluksak. Dropped off those passengers, the second round of presents, and then returned back to Napaskiak. Picked up the patient and the two medics and transported them back to Bethel over to the hospital,” Bell said.

The wind and runway conditions made it too dangerous for LifeMed’s air ambulance to respond to a man from Napaskiak, who had gastrointestinal bleeding. So they called the rescue center for help.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 David Berg was the helicopter’s support pilot. He said, “we as a team, the whole crew here from Bethel. Plus the support team from Anchorage. Air Force and Army really came together to reconfigure the aircraft to include the medics and their equipment.”

Berg also said that it was a seamless transition to go from dropping presents, Santa, Mrs. Claus, and their team of volunteer elves, into a rescue mission. “And then go back and pick up the patient. And it all happened fairly smoothly. We had to shut down a couple times, but it was a smooth afternoon. In my experience, it was definitely a highlight of my career,” said Berg.

“So my role for this was purely to get the passengers loaded for the second leg. So normally when we’re loading and unloading with the rotors turning, we’ll have a backseater on board to make sure everybody gets out. Clear the aircraft safely,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Nicholas Lime, who served as the crew chief for the second leg of the mission.

According to the crew, they didn’t want to shut the Black Hawk down.

“We had a rescue mission, so we didn’t want to shut the aircraft off and have something not start back up. So we landed in Tuluksak and unloaded while we’re running. Make sure when he gets out safely away from the aircraft and then reconfigure the aircraft to put the back row or the stretcher across the back row, instead of presents, and then help the LifeMed people put the passenger in the aircraft,” Lime said.

Lime also said that the conditions in Napaskiak were wet, icy, and windy, not ideal conditions to transport a patient.

“Yeah, everyone’s okay. Nobody, nobody got dropped. Nobody slipped and no one got hurt. So yeah, it was a good mission,” Lime said.

The Alaska Army National Guard aviation facility in Bethel has been active since the Black Hawk’s arrival on Feb. 4.

The rescue center, which organized the medevac, said that the patient was stabilized and transported to Anchorage, where they remained in stable condition as of Thursday.

Then it was back to the mission of holiday spirit. The crew reconfigured the Black Hawk to allow for all 12 passengers, including Mr. and Mrs. Claus, to be picked up from Tuluksak, leaving the presents behind.

Although Santa and Mrs. Claus arrived a little later than scheduled in Tuluksak, the community immediately forgot about the tardiness when the honored guests arrived. And the pictures with Santa and Mrs. Claus, free ice cream, and presents helped.

Becky Queen remembers opening the letter with the foreclosure notice.

“My heart dropped,” she said, “and my hands were shaking.”

Queen lives on a small farm in rural Oklahoma with her husband, Ray, and their two young kids. Ray is a U.S. Army veteran who was wounded in Iraq. Since the 1940s, the federal government has helped veterans like him buy homes through its VA loan program, run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But now the VA has put this family on the brink of losing their house.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” says Ray Queen. “The only thing I did was trust a company that I’m supposed to trust with my mortgage.”

Like millions of other Americans, the Queens took advantage of what’s called a COVID mortgage forbearance, which allowed homeowners to skip mortgage payments. It was set up by Congress after the pandemic hit for people who lost income.

But an NPR investigation has found that thousands of veterans who took a forbearance are now at risk of losing their homes through no fault of their own. And while the VA is working on a way to fix the problem, for many it could be too late.

For the Queens, this all started in September of 2021, when Becky’s mother died of COVID-19. She had to take an extended leave from work and lost her job.

So last year, with their savings dwindling, the couple says they called the company that manages their mortgage, Mr Cooper, and were told they could skip six months of payments. And once they got back on their feet and could start paying again, the couple says they were told, they wouldn’t owe the missed payments in a big lump sum.

“I very specifically asked ‘how does this work?'” says Becky Queen. “They said we’re taking all of your payments, we’re bundling them, and we’re putting them at the end.”

That is, the missed payments would be moved to the back end of their loan term so they could just start making their normal mortgage payment again.

But that’s not how it worked out.

In October 2022, the Department of Veterans Affairs ended the so-called Partial Claim Payment program, or PCP, that enabled homeowners to do that. This happened even though the mortgage industry, housing advocates and veterans groups all warned the VA not to end the program, saying thousands of homeowners needed to catch up on missed payments. Interest rates had risen so much that many couldn’t afford to refinance or get back on track any other way.

Ray Queen says nobody told him about any of this.

“How does that happen?” Queen asked. “This is supposed to be a program that you all have to help people in times of crisis, so you don’t take their house from them.”

The Queens say they tried to come off their forbearance in February of this year and resume paying their mortgage. They were both working again. But they ran into delays with the mortgage company.

Then, in September, the couple says they were told they needed to come up with more than $22,000, which they don’t have, or either sell their house or get foreclosed on.

Their mortgage servicing company, Mr Cooper, said in a statement it “explored every possible avenue to work through a solution for this customer.” But it said the VA needs better loss-mitigation options and referred NPR to a letter from advocates, industry and veteran groups urging the VA to restart the PCP program.

The VA “has really let people down”

“The Department of Veterans Affairs has really let people down,” says Kristi Kelly, a consumer lawyer in Virginia who says she is hearing from a lot of other veterans in the same situation as Ray and Betsy Queen.

“The homeowners entered into COVID forbearances, they were made certain promises, and there were certain representations that were made,” says Kelly. “And the VA essentially pulled the rug out from under everybody.”

For some homeowners, ending the program may not mean foreclosure, but it still means a financial hardship.

“Many of these people have 2 or 3% interest rate loans,” Kelly says. With the PCP program they could keep that interest rate. But now, she says, the only way they’ll be able to save their home is to enter into a loan modification where the interest rate will be around today’s market rate of 7.5%.

“For most people, their payments will increase by $600 or $700 a month, because the VA has decided to end the partial claim program.”

Many homeowners can’t afford such a huge increase in their monthly payment.

According to the data firm ICE Mortgage Technology, 6,000 homeowners with VA loans who had COVID forbearances are currently in the foreclosure process. And 34,000 more are delinquent.

Kelly says most other homeowners in America — people with FHA loans, for instance, or loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — still have ways to avoid foreclosure by moving missed payments to the back of the loan term.

But homeowners with VA loans don’t, because the VA ended that program. So veterans are being treated worse than most other homeowners, Kelly said.

“Service members are in a position where they’re going to lose their home,” she says. “And for most people, that’s everything they work for — and all their wealth is in their homes.”

VA has a plan to help, but it could be too late

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it had no choice but to end the program.

“We had a short-term authority for that specific program during COVID,” says John Bell, executive director of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Loan Guaranty Service. “It wasn’t part of our normal authority.”

Some in the industry think the VA did, in fact, have the authority to extend the program. But either way, it ended it.

Now, though, the VA is taking the situation seriously.

NPR has learned that the VA is working on a new program to replace the old one. It will work in a different way but to similar effect, to save people from foreclosure. Bell says it’s going to take four to five months to get it up and running.

That’s too long for many of those 6,000 VA homeowners already in the foreclosure process. Not to mention the many more who are delinquent.

Already, data shows that more VA homeowners have been heading into foreclosure since the VA ended its PCP program. The same is not true for FHA loans or loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Will the firetruck arrive too late?

With so many homeowners at risk, there’s growing pressure on the VA to stop foreclosing on veterans until it gets its fix up and running.

“There should be a pause on foreclosures,” says Steve Sharpe, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “Veterans should really be able to have an ability to access this program when it comes online because it’s been so long since they’ve had something that will truly work.

Sharpe says the VA could also restart the PCP program that it shut down. “They have the authority to do both,” he says.

Pausing foreclosures sounds like a good idea to veteran Ray Queen in Oklahoma.

“Let us keep paying towards our regular mortgage between now and then,” he says. “Then once the VA has that fixed we can come back and address the situation. That seems like the adult, mature thing to do, not put a family through hell.”

NPR repeated Ray Queen’s plea to John Bell at the VA directly. Bell said the VA is “exploring all options at this point in time.”

“We owe it to our veterans to make sure that we’re giving them every opportunity to be able to stay in the home,” Bell said.

Ray and Becky Queen are hoping the VA does let people keep their homes until the new program can offer them a way to get current on their mortgages. Because if the firetruck shows up after the house has burned down, it’s not going to do much good for the thousands of veterans and service members who need help now.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

A group of explosives experts from Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson traveled to Cold Bay, near the western end of the Alaska Peninsula, on Oct. 30 in response to a local hunter’s report of what appeared to be a large unexploded artillery shell. The ordnance was found in the middle of the federally protected Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, a key habitat for many migratory birds and other wildlife.

U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Tyrone Powell, the explosives ordnance disposal team leader for the mission, confirmed the hunter did find an unexploded military round.

“It’s big artillery,” Powell said. “When we pulled it out of the ground, it weighed probably six or 700 pounds. It took four of us to pull it out.”

The shell was about 12 inches in diameter and four feet long. Powell said that particular type of round was first manufactured in 1943, during WWII but could have been built anytime up to the 1990s.

“What was interesting about the round, it was actually split open, so there was no more explosive on the inside. It had to have been underneath the ground for a pretty long time for that to happen,” Powell said.

Photographs of the munition show that the surrounding area has several large divots in the tundra, which point to former military operations — the U.S. military built a base in the area during the 1940s.

“It looks like it used to be a demolition area for old ordnance,” Powell said. “What we think it was, was one of these old pieces of ordnance … got kicked out of where it was getting blown up. Those sorts of things get buried in the soil, and eventually, they work their way to the surface.”

The military team used explosives to dispose of the munition where it was found — in the middle of the 315,000 acre refuge, which contains one of the world’s largest eelgrass beds.

Noise pollution can have a negative effect on wildlife. But representatives from the refuge said they monitored the birds on nearby lakes before the detonation and that they were still there afterward with little reaction.

Izembek is a crucial habitat for a quarter million migratory birds. That includes the Pacific black brant, a rare type of goose whose entire population stops in the refuge at exactly this time of year during its fall migration.

The refuge said the detonation occurred away from the majority of migrating waterfowl and was not near the eelgrass beds where the brants feed.