March 28, 2024

Army vet has good memories of time in Alaska

Dale Flander was drafted into the Army in 1968. Unlike most of the draftees of the time, Flander didn’t end up in Vietnam. Instead, he spent nearly all two years of his enlistment in Alaska. Being an outdoorsman, the assignment was right up his alley.

After basic training in Fort Bliss, Texas, Flander was sent directly to Fort Greely, Alaska, at the end of the ALCAN Highway, 150 miles from Fairbanks. There he joined the motor pool, driving a truck for the Northern Warfare Training Center Mess Hall.

“Whenever they needed me, that’s were I went,” Flander said. His jobs were varied. For instance, he often took deceased military personnel to the morgue in Fairbanks.

“I think more about it today than I did back then,” he said. “It was a job and I did it.”

His first body was a professional swimmer who drowned near Ft. Greely. Another time, he had to meet interpreters in Fairbanks for visiting Koreans. Three trips per week to Fairbanks was typical, he said, usually in a straight truck or personnel carrier, but when dignitaries were involved, he drove a sedan.

The base was an important training site for the Army as well, and Flander found himself training “just about everybody.” Members of the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Special Forces, Green Berets, and National Guard units from the lower 48 states would come to Ft. Greely for river training and glacier training. Flander would take the men out to remote areas, or bring them food.

A rule at the training base is no one gets saluted, no matter what their rank.

“One time we had a two-star general in a class, and he got mad because no one was saluting him,” Flander said. The reason was that they could have an entire class of officers, and saluting each and every time would be too time-consuming for everyone on base.

“Another time, I took a guy to the artillery range, and he said, ‘Do you want to listen to a missile?’ We were sitting in the middle of a 10-mile range, and pretty soon you heard a whoosh. The missile had gone over about eight feet above our heads and hit the target five miles away.”

Canadians and Americans often trained together at the base. While the Canadians made about $1,200 per month, the Americans only made about $400 per month.

“Some thought this was unfair, but the Canadians had to pay for their room and board and clothing, while the Americans didn’t.”

One day, Flander said, he got a call from the base commander, saying the chaplain had asked for the safest driver. They told Flander to report to the chaplain. The chaplain needed a bus driver, they said, and Flander said he didn’t have a license to drive a bus.

“You’ll have a license by tonight,” they told him. He said he needed six hours to get a license to drive the bus.

“They said, ‘Dale, you’ve been driving all your life. You don’t need a course.’” So, he ended up driving 24 passengers to the airport in Fairbanks, and he was told he could go with them. They were making a tourist-oriented flight to Arctic Village, a small town of native Alaskans in extreme northeast Alaska.

Another time, Flander recalls flying for four days with the Air Force. They needed volunteers to help with a search and rescue mission. The Air Force had lost a plane, and Flander laid eight hours per day for four straight days on his stomach above a glass window, staring at the landscape below. From about 2,000 feet, they searched for any signs of a downed airplane, wings, oil slicks, etc. Nothing was ever found.

Flander spend two years in the Army, and all of it was spent in Alaska. When it came time to re-enlist, Flander said he would if he could stay right where he was. The Army couldn’t guarantee that.

“All re-enlistees were going to Saigon to clean up bomb damage,” Flander said. “I said I’m not cleaning up someone else’s mess.”

So, a couple of days before Christmas in 1969, he made a surprise appearance at his parents’ house. After the Army, Flander worked at a number of different jobs, including construction, grain elevator work, driving a truck hauling milk, factory work, then attended Marshalltown Community College, and later DMACC, where he got his commercial driver’s license. He drove a truck for CRST and Warner, and is now fully retired.

“I now do a lot of fishing, deer hunting, and last year, I went on my first turkey hunt and got my first turkey,” he said.

Flander lives in Lynnville with his wife Beverly, daughter of the late Gysbert Van Wyk. He’s been married 42 years and has two sons, Kendall of Ewart, and Justin Flander, who’s married to Barb of Searsboro. He also has a grandson, Chris.

John Jennings can be contacted at (641) 792-3121 ext. 425 or via email at jjennings@newtondailynews.com.