Safety often a matter of common sense

By David W. Kuhns Sr., Northwest Guardian

Today is Fort Lewis Safety Day. While this is an occasion set aside to concentrate on safe practices safety really does need to be central to all we do, 365 days a year.

Looking at the responses we got from members of the community we stopped for Street Talk should make leaders on Fort Lewis feel pretty good. The responses certainly described examples of dangerous events, but I suspect that a few years ago, the unsafe situations described would have been far more personal.

Safety is largely a matter of behaving intelligently and with common sense. Those are two attributes the Army has more of than it did back in the day. The early years of my Army career were dotted with examples of foolish, even idiotic, behavior that could have easily resulted in death.

Back in 1979, I was stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska and a group of Soldiers from my artillery battery spent a week training on a glacier in the Alaska Range. I was one of the NCOs leading the training. As a sort of graduation exercise at the end of the week we conducted a climb of a nearby peak. The route required us to walk several miles up a snow-covered glacier, then through an ice fall and finally scramble up a thousand feet of mixed rock and ice to the summit.

We showed proper caution on the way up. We moved in roped teams, the leaders probing for crevasses all the way. But on the way back in the afternoon we got careless.

The weather was warm, our tracks were obvious in the snow and we didn’t rope up. That is a cardinal sin, for those of you unfamiliar with glacier travel. I was third or fourth in line, walking along as happy as can be, when suddenly there was nothing under my feet and I was falling. I hung up on the snow, my pack caught behind me and my extended arms holding my ice ax in front. My feet were dangling in air, touching nothing. That will definitely get the old adrenaline pumping.

My companions quickly roped up, then one of them carefully slid a rope around me and I was pulled to solid ground. Once I was securely roped up, I slid out on my belly and peered into the hole. There was nothing to be seen but dim blue light fading to black. The term “bottomless” took on real meaning.

A promising Army career could have come to an end right there, and it would have been the result of my own stupidity. I knew better; my companions knew better; but we let our common sense be replaced by complacency.

I witnessed another near-fatal accident a few years later, at Fort Hood, Texas. Fort Hood is an armor post and I saw an innocent driver almost get crushed by a tank because the tank driver wasn’t paying attention.

A small pickup truck was stopped at a red light near a motorpool and an M-60 tank pulled up behind it. When the light turned green, the tank driver gunned the engine and started forward, but he looked away at the same time, distracted by something. What he didn’t see was that the truck’s driver hadn’t seen the light change and was still stopped.

The right track of the M-60 caught the pickup right in the middle of the tailgate. You couldn’t really say the track rode up on the truck bed. It was more like the truck was forced under the track.

The tank’s driver looked up and stopped just as the tread reached the back of the pickup cab. The bed of the truck was crushed as thoroughly as a beer can stomped down on the sidewalk. Another two feet and the driver would have been in the same condition. Me? I was sitting at the light heading the other way through the intersection. I saw the whole thing. I still shake my head when I think about it.

I could go on and on. But I really do think that the extreme examples of unsafe actions became less common over the years.

The Army had always taken safety seriously, but we were working harder at it. That’s why we have events like safety day, now.

It will be really great if today’s Soldiers can go through their careers without any of those head-shaking memories of near misses — or of tragedies when the worst actually happened.