Hero's farewell
Inupiaq guardsman died in vehicle accident at pre-Iraq training
By ALEX deMARBAN
Anchorage Daily News
Published: August 3, 2006
Brown
BARROW -- In a boggy cemetery where crooked crosses poked from the tundra, a crowd of Barrow residents wept this week as grave diggers hand-lowered a roped casket into a hole carved in the frozen earth, burying the first Alaska Native guardsman to die while serving his country during the Iraq war.
Arctic survival instructor Billy Brown, a soldier for almost three decades in the Alaska Army National Guard's northernmost detachment, could have retired from the military nine years ago. Instead, the strapping 54-year-old Inupiaq volunteered to lead his men in Iraq.
He never made it to the desert. Brown, a staff sergeant, died two weeks ago in a vehicle accident in southern Mississippi, where the Alaska unit had gone to train before heading to Iraq.
Brown and three other soldiers were in a Humvee on U.S. Highway 98 traveling between training locations at Camp Shelby when an 18-wheeler slammed into the back of their vehicle and knocked it off the road, killing Brown and Sgt. 1st Class George William Dauma Jr., 37, of Fairbanks.
The Humvee driver, Staff Sgt. William Schultz, 31, of Fairbanks was injured. So was Lt. Pritkal Aujla, 26, a Hawaii resident who recently joined the Alaska Guard to serve in Iraq, Guard officials said.
Both injured men have been released from the hospital and should be training again within 10 days, said Guard spokesman Maj. Mike Haller on Wednesday. The accident is under investigation.
Brown's death shocked Barrow, a whaling village of 4,200 residents perched on the Arctic Ocean's edge. He was one of 600 mostly rural guardsmen recently summoned to duty in the Alaska Guard's largest wartime call-up. The Alaskans are to head to Iraq in early fall.
Here, as in many villages, the call-up's significance is magnified by close family ties and a patriotic legacy of service dating to World War II, when Natives patrolled Alaska's coasts and tundra looking for Japanese warplanes.
Brown, a former Barrow councilman who served in the Guard for 29 years, was a bachelor and father figure for young soldiers and friends in Barrow, family members said.
His flag-draped coffin arrived at the airport Tuesday morning to a hero's welcome.
Relatives and friends, some wearing fur-lined parkas against the early August chill, stood outside a chain-link security fence, saluting and sobbing as police lifted the casket into an ambulance to take it to a ceremony at the elementary school.
More than 700 people crowded onto foldout chairs and wooden bleachers in the school gym, singing hymns and listening to English and Inupiaq eulogies.
About 60 soldiers in crisp military uniforms -- friends, top brass and members of an honor guard -- flew in from Anchorage and Fairbanks on a C-130 that contained several reporters.
During a showing of the body, family members and close friends swarmed by the open casket. They hugged tightly, laying roses and small wooden flags on the body.
"I love you so much!" shouted one woman amid moans, her hand on Brown's chest.
Poster-sized pictures of the soldier in camouflage fatigues, taken just before he flew with the Guard to Camp Shelby, sat on stage amid flowery wreaths.
The straight-backed, lean-jawed soldier in the photographs had the hint of a smile that relatives and friends said never left his face, even after long training hikes atop mountains in the heat of Hawaii.
Brown could have retired from the military after serving 20 years but chose to volunteer every chance he got, including in Germany and Hungary years ago, said Col. Mike Bridges, acting commander of the 207th infantry brigade, which has troops from urban areas and 75 villages in Alaska.
Brown taught young, out-of-state soldiers how to survive the cold at the Fort Greely Missile Defense Site and patrolled the Barrow airport on dark winter days after Sept. 11, 2001, searching for suspicious vehicles, Bridges said.
He helped build up Barrow's detachment from two men a few years ago to more than 11, offering rides to young soldiers, making sure they ate well and stayed off drugs and booze, soldiers said in the halls outside the ceremony.
"He lived for the Barrow unit and the National Guard," said Staff Sgt. Scott Wesierski, who flew with the casket from Mississippi to Alaska.
Brown loved teaching Arctic skills, Wesierski said. For example, he taught soldiers to use snot as Chapstick, smearing their faces to protect them against the cold, Wesierski said.
Brown once led several guardsmen into the 30-below wilderness south of Barrow on a patrol drill that blackened cheeks with frostbite, said Wesierski, a former Marine who moved to Barrow from California five years ago.
Before that trip, Brown warned Wesierski against wearing military-issue bunny boots because they were too hot. Wesierski didn't listen, and two of his sweating toes froze during the drills, turning purple for weeks, Wesierski said.
Following Brown's advice, other soldiers avoided the pain by wearing mukluks -- traditional skin boots -- or manufactured winter boots that were warm but breathable.
During a training exercise three years ago in a hot Louisiana swamp, soldiers marched for 13 hours and waded through brackish water up to their necks.
At the end of the day, everyone was miserable but Brown, said Staff Sgt. Pete Peter, who also accompanied the body from Mississippi. He lit one of his trademark cigars and sat on a bank, beaming and puffing.
Brown loved whaling and shipped boxes of frozen whale blubber when Alaska soldiers trained across the country, Peter said. When soldiers tired, he doled out strips of whale like Power Bars.
Born in Lost River, a former mining community on the Seward Peninsula in Western Alaska, Brown grew up in Barrow with 18 brothers and sisters, some adopted, family said.
Brothers and sisters said he spontaneously spent hundreds of dollars to take them shopping for clothes or food or to buy airline tickets as the extended family spread across Alaska and into Canada.
Frances Leavitt said Brown was a close friend. He raised her children when her husband, Steve, a former guardsman, left Barrow to train. Brown was there when she had her children, she said. He read to them and baby-sat as they grew up.
She and her husband led a procession of more than 100 people that streamed out of the school Tuesday afternoon to follow the soldier-borne casket toward the cemetery for a 21-gun salute.
Brown had asked her to organize his funeral if he died in Iraq, she said. He designated her as the person to receive his military awards, officials said. She wept as they gave her the folded flag from his casket and a shadow box filled with military awards.
Brown's name will live on in Iraq, Wesierski said. A company of about 120 Alaska soldiers, most from Arctic villages, sewed Brown and Dauma's nametags -- cut from their camouflage fatigues -- to the bottom of the company flag.
They'll be with the troops in Iraq, Wesierski said.
War in Iraq reaches Alaska Native community
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
The war in Iraq has reached the Inupiat Eskimo community of Barrow, located on the northern tip of Alaska.
Staff Sgt. Billy Brown was 54. He volunteered to lead his National Guard detachment to Iraq after Alaska Native guardsmen, for the first time since World War II, were called to active duty.
Brown never made it to the battlefield. He was killed in a vehicle accident in southern Mississippi, a death that has shaken the community.
Until now the war was more like a television show,Edward S. Itta, the mayor of the North Slope Borough, told The New York Times. "You don't question the war until it touches you. Only then, when a man like Billy, an important man to us, comes home dead, does the question become clear. We fight. But to what end? What's in it for my grandchildren?
William Brown - More story on William
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