LITTLE ROCK — Lt. Col. Richard Tate's voice was distant and delayed as it bounced from a phone aboard the USNS Comfort off the shore of South America to a satellite and back down to a plain black phone in Little Rock, but his excitement came through loud and clear.
"There's a whole other world out here that you don't even know about," Tate said. "It changes you."
Tate, a dentist with the Arkansas Air National Guard's 189th Airlift Wing at Little Rock Air Force Base, is nearing theend of a 120-day tour of duty aboard the Comfort, one of the Navy's two hospital ships.
He and three other airmen with the 189th's Medical Support Squadron and two airmen from Little Rock Air Force Base's 314th Airlift Wing volunteered for a four-month humanitarian mission to take medical care to some of the most remote and poverty-stricken areas of Latin America and the Caribbean.
"It's been an amazing experience," Tate said, using the rapid pace of someone telling a story he can't wait to share. "It's been a little tough on an old man likeme, but it's been an amazing experience. We stay real busy. It's not uncommon to work 12, 14, 16 hours a day. I think when we all took this job we thought it would be easy, but I'll tell you, it's probably the hardest thing we've ever done."
Most of Tate's time is spent off the ship at remote locations where he works on the teeth of people who have never seen a dentist. Dental care is only part of the Comfort's mission. With more than 500 doctors, remote clinics are set up in each country for a few days at a time to address minor health needs. Patients are sometimes flown from these locations onto the ship for major surgery and recovery.
The Comfort is at its last stop, Paramaribo, Suriname. By the time it returns home Oct. 15, the medical staff of the Comfort will have treated more than 90,000 patients in 12 countries and performed more than 1,500 major surgeries. Services provided during the mission include general surgery, eye surgery, medical evaluation, preventative medicine, dental screenings and treatment, eyewear distribution, public health instruction and veterinary services.
Most on board volunteered for the mission.
"It's a training mission for all of us. I'd studied about field equipment but never used it. You can't get training like this anyplace else," Tate said.
But for him it was more than that.
"I think from a personal standpoint, I felt it was time for me to be deployed," he said. "Sometimes you have to pay some dues."
Tate's fellow 189th airmen on the mission are Staff Sgt. Monica Christman of Maumelle, a dental technician; Tech Sgt. Tony Francis of Mabelvale, a medical technician working in casualty receiving on the Comfort; and Tech Sgt. Angela Dohm of Little Rock, a medical technician working in the ship's intensive care unit.
The names of the 314th airmen also on board were not available.
"If you told me when I joined the Air Force that I'd be on a humanitarian mission aboard a Navy ship, I wouldn't believe you," Tate said with a laugh. "That's opportunity right there."
Mixing the military branches is nothing new aboard the 894-foot-long USNS Comfort.
It is operated and navigated by a crew of 68 civilian federal employees who work for the U.S. Navy Military Sealift Command. They are supported by about 260 sailors. The bulk of the Comfort's population is a mix of more than 900 medical personnel from all U.S. military branches and Canada. This mission also includes medical staff from the nongovernment organization Project Hope and medical personnel from the U.S. Public Health Service.
"It takes more than any one single service to get the job done," Navy Surgeon General Vice Adm. Adam M. Robinson Jr. said in a conference call with journalists Thursday. Robinson noted that many military medical missionssuch as the Comfort's have operated with a mixed medical staff for decades.
"That's a perfect example of what we're moving toward, more joint operations like going out with the Navy and doing good work," said Brig. Gen. Riley Porter, Arkansas' assistant adjutant general over the Air National Guard. "I could preach to you about what the Arkansas National Guard is doing. We're guarding the skies, we're on the border, we're fighting forest fires and deploying in the war on terror."
At any given time, for example, more than 7,000 of the nation's airmen are gunners and drivers in Army convoys in Iraq, supplementing ground troops.
"This is the future. You will see more joint operations, and we'll do it without losing our individual cultures and identities," Porter said.
On the rainy day in June when Tate and his fellow airmen boarded the Comfort, they entered a Navy world much different from the C-130 cargo planes they know in the 189th.
"It seems like 100 years ago," Tate said. "When I first hit the ground that first week, I thought, 'I can't do this.' But now I probably feel better than I have in years. This ship is a StairMaster in itself. I lost 20 pounds since then."
The ship is almost threefootball fields long and 10 stories high. Tate shares a small room with three other lieutenant colonels and counts himself lucky. The bunks in his room are stacked two high. Junior officers live in rooms with bunks stacked three high.
It didn't take long for Tate and the others to acclimate, the work pace required it.
Dental crews leave the ship before dawn, boarding helicopters to fly to the day's makeshift clinic. Their dental offices are portable, moved on pallets and unloaded when the doctors arrive.
Generators, portable lights, folding dental chairs all have to be set up as the line of patients grows longer with each minute.
"My first day, our first country was Belize," Tate said. "We loaded up on [helicopters] and flew off the ship and flew for about 45 minutes to a place way up in the middle of the country."
San Pablo school is little more than a cinder-block building. With its rooms cleared of desks, the dental teams set up their field clinics and went to work.
"The first day we set all that stuff up and started seeing patients. The heat was the hardest part, it was 110-115 degrees," he said. "And that's how it's been running ever since. But that was day one, and it was unbelievable. There were a lot of kids. The need was tremendous."
The people just kept coming throughout the day and into the evening until the teams had to head back to ship as night fell.
"The saddest thing we saw, and it was everywhere, is we'd be at the same site for four or five days and the lines would never end," Tate said. "They'd still be there when we left. You can never get it all done."
Now, close to a dozen countries and thousands of patients later, stories like that are common for Tate and the crew of the Comfort.
"We have been in places where people don't know what a toothbrush is," he said.
He's seen and treated ailments that he'd never see at his private practice in Little Rock. He's seen cancer, horrific infections and cracked teeth.
His most memorable day was one in Guatemala.
The 8-year-old boy had waited in line for two days. His mother was sick, home in bed. So he waited in line alone.
Tate and his team were packing up when the boy stepped forward and asked if they could please fix his teeth.
His two front teeth had been broken off, fractured in jagged ugliness.
"We normally do not see children without a parent's consent," Tate said. "But they looked bad. And this little fellow had been standing in line for two days. What 8-year-old do you know who would do that by himself in 110-degree weather?"
It was an easy fix, Tate said. Although the teeth were fractured, the nerves were not exposed.The boy never whimpered, never cried.
"Let me tell you, that kid had the biggest smile when we were done and that was worth the whole thing," he said. "That stays with you. You know ?"
Arkansas, Pages 19, 22 on 10/07/2007