Gabe DeMone doesn't usually dart off to the tropics, but when he does, he wears the Canadian uniform.
DeMone, an army corporal based at CFB Petawawa and UNBC graduate whose mother lives in Prince George, was part of Canada's most recent DART mission. The Disaster Assistance Response Team just completed its one-month mission in the Philippines, aiding in the recovery from Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most violent Pacific storms ever recorded.
DeMone is a military medical technician and was on the ground in the Philippines as fast as the air transport logistics could get him and his colleagues there.
He was deployed to the city of Iloilo, which under normal conditions is a typical urban area not unlike a suburb of Vancouver or Victoria. The DART team was stationed at a basketball/track-and-field facility across the field from a school and across the street from a strip mall containing a pizza joint and a cafe where many of the Canadian military personnel went to eat on their all-too-brief periods of time off.
The region all around the city, however, had been devastated by the storm. The entire region's geography is a series of small mountain peaks and foothills of all sizes. It was a densely forested area, until the storm. DeMone said the lea side of the mountains were still lush, but the sides facing the prevailing winds were smashed from standing trees into twisted woody rubble.
The chaos and damage extended also to homes, commercial buildings, and infrastructure of all kinds.
DART is a military unit that arrives with three primary goals for each disaster area: engineering specialists clear roads, three reverse osmosis units work at purifying thousands of litres of drinking water, and the medical teams look after the soldiers doing the relief work and look after the victims of the disaster. The latter role was DeMone's on his first career DART deployment. The bulk of his duties was helping coordinate the field pharmacy, and sometimes he was out seeing patients.
"During the mission in Haiti [aftermath of the 2005 earthquake] they had a central medical base and the injured would be coming out of the woodwork to that location, but in this case the damage was different. People weren't injured in the same way. We were there really to take up the slack for the normal medical coverage to that region since it was so badly disrupted by the typhoon. We broke up into small mobile teams - a doctor, a nurse, a few med-techs - and we would go out to the small, rural communities that needed the help."
Although it was a location with plenty of modern amenities and working-class or middle-class neighbourhoods, many people there still lived in poverty.
"These people weren't usually affected by the storm, they were affected by the effects, if you understand my meaning. The roads were blocked, the power was out, communication lines were cut off, so even 'normal' medical access was a big challenge and at the best of times these people were hard-pressed to get basic medical needs met," DeMone said. "You could have taken the storm away, still sent us there, and we would have affected positive change. That's just the nature of their healthcare system."
Some controversy arose over the deployment of the DART team. Some non-governmental agencies complained that the expense of sending the military team would have been better spent on the civilian relief groups. DeMone countered that they had skills and equipment no other agencies had, and this mission was a smart deploment of the Canadian military in peace-time conditions.
The DART team has only a handful of full-time members but a huge list of qualified soldiers from across the Canadian Forces who are called to a mission as needed. DeMone now goes back to his regular unit, and perhaps one day into the civilian healthcare ranks, with some valuable experience and lessons for him and the 360 men and women who carried out this effort.
"For the first few weeks there was very little rest to be had," he explained. "We were up by 6 a.m., working by 7 a.m., out in the field by 8 a.m., we routinely attended to a dozen patients or more per hour working through translators, the most we saw in a day was 135 patients, so we were helping a lot of people in very hard conditions."
In the course of the 32 days DART was active in Iloilo, the city gradually got back on its feet. Even the medical conditions changed that the DART teams were encountering, becoming more routine medical needs by the end. It was the kind of gratification DeMone hoped to feel when he first enlisted.
"This is exactly what I wanted to do in the military," he said. "I graduated from UNBC in 2008 with a B.Sc. in biology. I applied to the Canadian Forces about four months later. They told me right away that because I had a degree, I was in line for an officer position but I refused. I knew what I wanted to do. That is what I focused on and that's what I got to do in the Philippines."
He said the Canadian uniform was almost like donning rock star garb in the Iloilo area. "We were celebrities, totally." People would swarm them for photos, and one helicopter mission even snapped a picture of the roof of a house that had "Thank You Canada" etched in the dirt for the airborne personnel to see.
DeMone took notes, as did his colleagues, for when DART deployments happen again. One of the recommendations he has made is for broader training for DART members. In their base units they focus mostly on the defensive, reactive medical scenarios of battle or peacekeeping, but in DART scenarios they are proactively encountering everything from geriatric to pediatric diseases, injuries and conditions.
Medical professions are so-called "purple" professions in the military, meaning those soldiers can apply their skills as much for the air force as they can for the navy or the army. DeMone is now considering his future - everything from pup tents to battleships - or if he wants to explore civilian paramedics opportunities.
