Photo By Airman 1st Class Brittany Kenney | Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency volunteers and local Vietnamese workers pose for a...... read more read more
Subscribe
ELLSWORTH AIR FORCE BASE, S.D. – People join the Air Force for many reasons, from the potential to travel abroad to the educational benefits it affords. For some, the opportunity happens to present itself in a way that can only be described as the right place at the right time, and the story that blossoms from there can be filled with more opportunities than planned.
Maj. Anh Ison, 28th Medical Group pharmacy element chief, was presented her opportunity when she received an email from a local recruiter in college, leading to a flourishing career in the military and allowing her to use key skills outside the country.
Ison was born and raised in Vietnam, then moved to the United States to live with family in Oklahoma when she was 18. While attending college and working in a local pharmacy near Tinker Air Force Base, Ison regularly interacted with Air Force personnel and became more curious about the military. It wasn’t until her second year of pharmacy school when she received an email from a medical officer recruiter that she decided to go for it. The rest, as they say, is history.
“I know for a lot of people it can take years to even find the right recruiter,” said Ison. “I just happened to talk to the right person, and I was able to commission in four months.”
While at her first base, Ison learned from a fellow officer that she could get paid for knowing a second language through the Language Enabled Airman Program (LEAP). This program develops language enabled, cross-cultural service members across the General-Purpose Force with working-level foreign language proficiency. After taking a language test - the first part of a multi-step process - Ison found out she was accepted into LEAP in October 2023.
Fast forward to April of this year when Ison received an email from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) looking for volunteers for a mission in the mountains of Vietnam recovering remains from people who went missing during the Vietnam War. As a LEAP scholar, Ison was able to help the team in more ways than one.
“Everyone was responsible for helping dig on the mountain, but as the linguist of the team, I was responsible for communication between the team leader, the archeologist, and government officials,” said Ison. “Because we were an American team digging on Vietnamese soil, a lot of high-ranking officials in Vietnam were involved as well.”
The nine-week trip started mid-July in Hawaii at the DPAA headquarters with training for all the volunteers, to include a cultural brief, explaining the mission, what it entails, and how to identify bones, along with more hands-on training in mountaineering. After this, the volunteers were flown to Vietnam to begin digging in specific locations.
According to Ison, each day consisted of hiking down a mountain to the site of a previous helicopter crash where the team of 15 people would dig and fill buckets with dirt. Each bucket was passed along a line of 100 local workers that would form down the steep mountainside to a wash station so the dirt could be rinsed to look for potential remains.
Between the long days, strenuous conditions, battles with nature in the form of leeches and near 100% humidity, Ison encountered no shortage of challenges during her non-stop work as a translator.
“There’s a lot that could get lost in translation, and after days on end working in the jungle, tensions could get high,” Ison explained. “Part of my role was to detect these tensions and try to alleviate it throughout translation.”
Despite the struggle, Ison enjoyed being back in Vietnam and getting to be an ambassador for Vietnamese culture, as well as getting the opportunity to work on something that helped give her a different perspective on what it would’ve been like for those involved in the Vietnam War.
“This was a meaningful mission to me,” said Ison. “The work we were doing and the conditions we were working in let me see just how hard it must’ve been for those serving there during the war. I would recommend this experience to any who are presented the chance to go.”
For more information on DPAA and its missions, visit https://www.dpaa.mil/.
| Date Taken: | 10.10.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 10.25.2024 12:57 |
| Story ID: | 482904 |
| Location: | ELLSWORTH AIR FORCE BASE, SOUTH DAKOTA, US |
| Web Views: | 40 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Digging for answers: Ellsworth officer contributes to DPAA efforts, by A1C Brittany Kenney, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
