Being a wingman means taking care of our own Published Nov. 25, 2009 By Lt. Col. Mike Geer 90th Civil Engineering Squadron commander F.E. WARREN AIR FORCE BASE, Wyo. -- The wingman concept is sometimes difficult to articulate, but in my mind, it means taking care of our own. I recently returned from a deployment as the 387th Air Expeditionary Group commander at Al Mubarak Air Base, Kuwait, which also serves as Kuwait International Airport. One of the lesser-known roles for our unit was to serve as the theater mortuary evacuation point for United States and allied casualties in Iraq and other countries in the region. Short of Presidential support, no mission gets a higher priority. I saw C-17s empty save for one transfer case with an American flag draped across it. A C-17 looks big when empty, but somehow it looks even larger when carrying just that single item. The lengths America will go to in order to return its fallen back home were never short of extraordinary. Our role in the process was something like this: upon notification of a death in theater, usually from combat, but not always; the mortuary team would prepare to receive the body and do their thing. The rest of the base would get a notice when the aircraft was 20 minutes out to get ready for the short ceremony we did for the transfer. A team of six volunteer pall bearers, under the command of an Army NCO, would move the transfer case from the aircraft to the transport truck. An honor guard made up of anyone present on base not actively engaged in mission support would stand in formation between the aircraft and the truck. I saw honor guards as few as four and as many as 50. A Marine gunnery sergeant would command the honor guard. After processing in the mortuary, the transfer case would be moved to an outbound aircraft in the reverse of the earlier process, again with a team of pall bearers and an honor guard. On the way out, a Navy chaplain would preside over the transfer and say a few words about the deceased along with an appropriate reading from a religious text. This is one of the reasons a service member's religion is on his or her dog tags. Of the dozens of transfers I witnessed, a few stand out. First was the doctor killed in Mosul, Iraq on Christmas day. I had been on station less than a month. Thinking about the family for whom Christmas would forever mark the day their dad was killed brought home to me the risks and responsibility every member who raises their right hand assumes when they take the oath. Two more transfers stand out, both for the fact that we knew the deceased. The first was an Army sergeant who had passed through our base only a month earlier escorting one of his comrades who had been killed in Iraq. He spent several days with us at Mubarak waiting for transport back to Iraq, only to return several weeks later in a transfer case. The second was when our executive officer, a young logistics readiness squadron lieutenant, learned her former roommate from the Air Force Academy had been killed in Afghanistan and would be coming through that night. I was always wowed by Chaplain Stuart's ability to track down a few salient facts about the deceased, such as their hometown, family, etc. In the short time available, he made us feel like we were saying farewell to a comrade, not just an aluminum transfer case with a flag attached. Chaplain had that job for seven months, which entailed solely of conducting funerals for people cut down in the prime of life. For that, he's one of my heroes and a perfect example of taking care of our own.