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The final haul

Photo By Staff Sgt. Christina Russo | Master Sgt. Dale Payne, NCOIC of civil engineering and force support with the...... read more read more

OHIO, UNITED STATES

03.06.2025

The American landscape passes by through the window of Master Sgt. Dale Payne’s semi-truck as he diesels toward Augusta, Maine. He’s hauled similar loads over tens of thousands of miles, but this trip feels a little different. Behind the cab is a 50-foot trailer emblazoned with Department of Defense IRT. It’s full of civil engineering tools and a mobile fitness center.

After a military career spanning two branches of service, wartime deployments, multiple career fields and a reenlistment after a 20-year break-in-service, Payne is making his final haul into retirement this March. He recently concluded his tenure as the NCOIC of civil engineering and force support with the Department of Defense’s Innovative Readiness Program Combined Asset Management Site, a function he helped deliver to Youngstown Air Reserve Station, Ohio, in 2021. He traveled a unique road to get there.

After graduating high school in 1984, Payne joined the U.S. Army as a military policeman, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a World War II veteran who served in the same career field. After serving in Operation Desert Storm, deployments to Honduras, Cuba and Haiti, and a stint stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, Payne decided it was time to separate so that he could take care of his stateside mother who’d recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. Upset that her son hadn’t served long enough to earn a military retirement, she made him promise that he’d reenlist to finish his twenty years. She passed away in 2000.

After separating from the Army, Payne pursued a civilian career in automotive maintenance, eventually becoming a master technician. In 2009, he fought and won his own battle with cancer, causing him to reassess and consider some heavy life lessons.

“Life is very short,” Payne said, “and you can be taken out at any moment. That was one of my defining moments where I said I’ve got to get my life together, I’ve got to complete the promise I made to my mother and finish my career. ”

The deal was sealed during a chance encounter with Master Sgt. Robert Metz, a member of the 910th’s Civil Engineer Squadron, while working on his car. He took advantage of the connection to meet some other unit members and talk with recruiters. Twenty years after separating from the Army, Payne enlisted again, this time in the Air Force Reserve as a staff sergeant with the 910th Logistics Readiness Squadron.

It wasn’t long afterward that Lt. Col. Tina Hannasch, 910th Logistics Readiness Squadron commander at the time, asked Payne if he’d be willing to help relocate the assets of a new mission that was landing at YARS. Youngstown Air Reserve Station had been selected to house the DoD’s IRT Combined Asset Management Site warehouse, which had outgrown its former home at Grissom Air Force Base, Indiana, and Hannasch was tasked with facilitating the transfer.
“I had to assemble the most competent team," said Hannasch. “I had three from Grissom who came with the program and knew the inventory. As far as here, Dale was my absolute first person to ask. He is organized, reliable, trustworthy and can drive and also fix anything. Literally anything.”

Payne worked some logistics and drove truck to help transfer the mammoth assortment of equipment to its new home.

“The inventory was moved and organized between mission seasons and was ready to be packed up and sent for the next season,” said Hannasch. “Dale was instrumental in creating an inventory system to keep track of all of the assets, down to the smallest 10mm sockets. In addition, Dale set up a whole workshop in-container to fix assets coming back from missions in need of repair. In the past those items were simply sent to DRMO and replaced. He has saved the IRT program thousands of dollars. The IRT CAMS is a healthy, well-run, fiscally responsible program thanks in large part to Dale.”

The task exposed Payne to the positive impact the IRT mission was having on peoples’ lives, so he applied for active duty operational support orders to contribute to it full-time.

IRT provides real-world training experiences for military members by using medical or civil engineering equipment to carry out projects that benefit the United States and its people. The medical equipment is often used to provide no-cost medical clinics in under-serviced communities around the country, whereas the civil engineering equipment is utilized for a variety of projects like federal land improvements, veteran housing construction and the cemetery expansion project that Payne delivered on for his final IRT haul.

During his tenure, Payne kept up with the demands of inventorying, maintaining, servicing, packing, delivering and returning IRT assets by locking his focus on the impact of the IRT missions. Some of his highlights were medical missions where he got to meet members of the community and hear their stories and a civil engineering mission that holds a special place in his memory for who it benefited.

“I mostly enjoy going on the missions where we have to take medical equipment out,” Payne said. “I got to meet people of the community, see the impact of what we were doing as the military helping this community. It’d turn around their attitudes toward us. It makes you know what you’re doing is a huge contribution to their life; sometimes it’s a completely life-changing event.”

The capstone of Payne’s experience was delivering for a civil engineering mission to build houses for veterans in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

“The biggest impact was seeing those houses come from concrete slabs on the ground up into a house with somebody living in it and knowing that the Reserve and National Guard military members built those houses for veterans,” Payne said. “It’s one of those heartfelt things that you can’t just walk away from. It sticks with you forever.”

Added to the value of what IRT missions bring to communities around the U.S. and its territories is the training and experience value it brings military members. The medical professionals that have to establish IRT clinics and treat patients may need to do so in the battlefield someday. The civil engineers might have to develop critical infrastructure or erect buildings in combat zones. In both cases, they’ll be better prepared by their participation in IRT missions, providing a high return on the investment.

Payne’s unique skillset, developed over a diverse military and civilian career, allowed him to contribute to the IRT mission in ways that multiply its impact.
Master Sgt. Nick Adams is the NCOIC of medical logistics assigned to the 445th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron at Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, Ohio. He worked with Payne for a stint at the IRT CAMS warehouse.

“Though I’ve known him only since May of last year, I’d say they don’t make them like him anymore,” said Adams. “Master Sgt. Payne has a very particular set of mechanical skills associated with long-haul trucking. He diagnosed an issue as a truck pulled into the parking lot last summer by sound alone. He can fix anything.”

When the program assets arrived at Youngstown Air Reserve Station, they included a couple of unfinished kitchen trailers. The intent behind them was to allow military services teams to provide hot meals to troops involved in IRT missions, but they lacked critical components. Payne, seeing the value they would add by helping take care of his fellow service members in the field, took it upon himself to get them into working order. He ran electrical service, plumbed water service and drainage and calculated and installed generator requirements.

Payne wasn’t asked to take on the project; he volunteered. The task was consistent with the principle that has guided his career, a principle he hopes his fellow IRT members will carry on in his absence.

“Always be faithful, faithful to yourself, to your God, to your fellow troops, faithful to your family,” Payne said. “Be accountable, accountable to your own actions, accountable for what you say and do. Accountable to your leadership, accountable to your supervision who is going to give you a job and know that you can do it. And always be teachable, because nobody knows everything. So don’t ever think that you know all that there is to know about everything because life will let you know that you don’t. So always be teachable.”

As Payne slows his truck to a stop at the IRT site in Augusta, Maine, IRT Airmen begin setting up one of the trailer kitchens. Now fully functional based on the weeks of work Payne contributed to it, within a couple of hours it is set up in the middle of a field dishing out hot meals to U.S. Marines as they take a break from their project.

As he closes this chapter of his military career, and his life, Payne sees the Marines digging into plates of hot food, a clear boost to morale over the standard fare from before he finished the kitchen trailers. He feels a deep sense of gratitude that as his military service traverses its final haul, it’s leaving a lasting impact on his fellow service members, and through the IRT program, his nation.