Senior Airman Brittany Cason

Aviation Survival Technician 2nd Class Omar Alba

When Puerto Rico was pummeled by the 2017 hurricane season, it left the island without power, access to essential supplies or drivable roads.

Coast Guard Aviation Survival Technician 2nd Class Omar Alba, who was stationed at Coast Guard Air Station Borinquen, Puerto Rico, realized he had the equipment to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Alba, who enjoys off-roading when he’s not working, has a modified Jeep that could handle the island’s tree-strewn terrain. He loaded the Jeep up with water, food and supplies and took off across Puerto Rico.

Alba spent about 40 days delivering food, water and medical supplies to churches around the island, cutting through the trees to create a path until the roads were cleared.

“I would literally make a road,” he said. “I was plowing through everything finding these people.”

Alba, now 34, also was among the first rescue swimmers to reach the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

After 12 years in the Coast Guard, Alba says he found a career that is perfect for him.

“Something about the medical world and water brought a lot of happiness to me.”

Read the full story here. 

Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Craig Humes

Navy Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Craig Humes decided to be a combat medic shortly after joining the Navy at age 19.

During his first tour at the Portsmouth, Virginia, Naval Medical Center, Humes began to hear some of his enlisted leaders talk about serving with the Marines on what the corpsmen call the “green side” of their community.

Many corpsmen love serving with the Marines because of how the Corps reveres the sailors charged with patching them up on the battlefield while also caring for their day-to-day health.

“Based on their encouragement, I decided to go to the green side and I’ve never looked back,” he said.

On his own time, the 37-year-old sailor volunteers, building wheelchair ramps for disabled veterans and others who need them. And he is also preparing to start helping foreign-born refugees who have just arrived in the U.S. to get on their feet and live independently.

And even when he retires from the Navy, he’s still got service on his mind.

“When my Navy days are over, I very much want to work for the Veterans Administration and continue to serve, trying to help improve that organization,” he said.

“There is so much potential in that organization for taking care of our veterans that I would love to be a part of that solution in some way, too.”

Read the full story here. 

Sergeant Brooke Sharp

Marine Sgt. Brooke Sharp, a 21-year-old Marine and New Jersey native, deployed with Task Force Southwest, a roughly 300 Marine unit, to one of the most violent provinces in Afghanistan: Helmand Valley.

Her communications job helping to keep the Corps’ networks up and running pushed her to the outer rim of the U.S. security bubble in the region. And her efforts to build command and control outposts that could push data, live video feeds and seamless communications to help track and strike Taliban militants was essential to the success of her unit’s mission to support the Afghan army’s fight.

“We were tracking enemy movement,” she said. “Being able to get the guns off in time to strike a target was important.”

The command and control nodes Sharp helped establish and maintain were also used to help evacuate wounded Afghan troops off the battlefield, which was a major morale booster for Afghan forces.

“Knowing they have an escape if they were going to get hurt is the biggest thing to keep them on the front line,” Sharp said.

Sharp was a vital member of Task Force Southwest. Pushing way beyond her job field, she helped rebuild U.S. outposts that expanded the security bubble around Lashkar Gah and accomplished much of this without ever having gone through predeployment training exercises.

Sharp replaced another sergeant with Task Force Southwest and was not notified she was deploying until the end of March 2017 — Task Force Southwest was wheels up to conduct two weeks of training in Kuwait around April 12, 2017, and touched down in Afghanistan later in April.

“I’ve been looking for that deployment my whole Marine Corps career, so I jumped on it.” 

Read the full story here. 

Sergeant First Class Wolfgang McLachlan

Six years into his career as an airborne infantryman, Sgt. 1st Class Wolfgang McLachlan was faced with a choice: Thanks to a jump injury, he either had to pack it in or start over in a job that wasn’t so hard on his body.

It was a no-brainer, he said. McLachlan, 42, who joined the Army in 2004 to test himself during a time of war, decided to roll the dice and see where he ended up.

The veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan found himself reinvented, as a satellite communication systems operator-maintainer with 1st Space Brigade at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.

There, he made a big impression on his unit, translating his background as a youth counselor into his approach as a noncommissioned officer, volunteering to take care of his soldiers in unconventional ways.

He would have his soldiers over for a monthly potluck, and he stepped up as a command sexual harassment/assault response coordinator and victim advocate. He also answered the hotline for the Kill2 Vet Suicide Prevention program, and volunteered at the Downhome Colorado Homeless Shelter and the National Junior Honor Society.

“It’s an opportunity for people to feel like they belong not just to an organization, but a family,” McLachlan said about spending time with his soldiers. “Some of these folks, it’s the only family they got.”

McLachlan also had two life-or-death situations dropped right into his path last year ― within a week of each other.

In late August, McLachlan happened upon a three-car crash, and one of the vehicles had a severely injured driver with his son sitting in the back. McLachlan grabbed the medic’s bag he always kept in his truck and worked on the driver until paramedics were able to take him away, and he survived.

Five days later, he responded to a car that had driven off the road. His efforts couldn’t save the passenger’s life, but he knew he’d done what he could.

Looking back, he said, he knew he couldn’t have just driven by.

“If not me, who? If not now, when?” he said.

Read the full story here. 

Captain Julian Gluck

Serving in a war can be a time-consuming experience — flying a B-52 Stratofortress bomber in two different combat zones even more so.

But Capt. Julian Gluck didn’t let that stop him from finding service opportunities in a new community.

Over the course of his six years of service, Gluck has given back to the communities in which the Air Force embeds him — be it foreign workers in Qatar, Japanese airmen over the Pacific Ocean, or local high school students outside his home duty station of Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana.

While deployed to Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, to fly combat missions against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well insurgent forces plaguing Afghanistan, Gluck reached out to the foreign workers on and off base. He helped to organize, unpack and distribute undergarments, T-shirts and other items, while traveling around to meet with the foreign workers who would ultimately receive the donations. 

Later in the deployment, Gluck collected and donated 27 large boxes of food, medical supplies and children’s toys to a church in Doha, Qatar.

“We had six months out there, and I was trying to find some volunteer opportunities to do something other than just ‘slaying the mish’ or going off-base to get falafel,” Gluck said.

On a separate deployment to Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, Gluck advised the local Knights of Columbus directors and participated in different events on the island, such as Habitat for Humanity, local animal shelters, and even ocean-side pier cleanup thanks to his scuba dive license.

At home, Gluck volunteered more than 300 hours for five organization across the United States throughout 2017. He also was the Louisiana state young adult director for the Knights of Columbus — the world's largest Catholic fraternal service organization and a Fortune 1000 non-profit.

In his role with the Knights of Columbus, Gluck coordinates about 33,500 individuals across 300 state locations. Combined, they conducted 1.9 million hours of volunteer service and disbursed roughly $3 million in 2017.

On top of that work, Gluck is also the deputy commander for the Barksdale Composite Squadron of the Civil Air Patrol, where he mentors 55 local cadets and senior members.

Read the full story here.