Sky Lakes Medical Center

 

 


    
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mitchellDr. Ben Mitchell was satisfied with his first job as an emergency room physician, working trauma cases at Sky Lakes Medical Center.

 

But then the 36-year-old from Ohio saw — and heard — Kingsley Field’s F-15 fighter jets tearing through the sky. Something about the F-15s spoke to him, he said, and he joined the Air National Guard at Kingsley Field.

 

Last summer, after a little more than one year of service in the national guard, Mitchell volunteered to travel to Afghanistan for a six-week mission with a helicopter air evacuation squadron.  

 

There he flew into combat zones to pick up wounded soldiers and airlift them to the nearest intensive care unit.

 

For his work, the Air National Guard named Mitchell National Flight Physician of the Year, a highly prestigious award selected from more than 450 flight surgeons nationwide. He is also Officer of the Year for the 173rd Fighter Wing at Kingsley Field and Officer of Year for the Oregon Air National Guard.        Mitchell is preparing to return to Afghanistan for a second, longer mission.

 

The Newark, Ohio, native worked his way through medical school at the University of Cincinnati and paid his dues during residency in Toledo.

 

Because he wanted to get away from the flatness of Ohio, he applied at emergency rooms all over the Northwest. He was hired by Sky Lakes Medical Center and moved to the Klamath Falls area in July 2006.

 

To say his career path has taken a dramatic turn in the past four years would be an understatement.  

 

Service

 

Mitchell traces his decision to become active in the Air National Guard to the fascination he had with aviation and aircraft growing up. He considered joining the military during his medical school training and his residency, but never followed through on the idea. He started at Kingsley Field in 2008. “I started with a traditional guardsman’s schedule,” he says. “I served two days a month, two   weeks a year at Kingsley.”

 

But Mitchell wanted more. Last year, he shifted to supplemental status with the Sky Lakes emergency department so he could increase his commitment to the Guard.

 

Mitchell traveled to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., for a condensed two-week officer training program.

 

He then spent six weeks at Flight Doctor School in San Antonio. During this time, he met Anil Menon, another flight doctor. Menon was working with a helicopter air evacuation squadron based in San   Francisco that was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in August 2009. When the squadron shipped out, Mitchell was with them.

 

Helicopter air evacuation squadrons like the one Mitchell worked with in Afghanistan are referred to as “Pedros,” according to Lt. Colonel Martin Balakas, Mitchell’s commanding officer at Kingsley Field. Pedros operate in the most dangerous war zones.

 

“I was stationed in Kabul at the same time as Dr. Mitchell was in Afghanistan, and in talking to American forces and   our NATO partners in every theater, the praise and respect they had for what Pedros do was universal, ” Balakas said. “It takes a special kind of person to get a call, sometimes in the middle of the night, fly out to the most dangerous combat zones and pick up and treat wounded soldiers. Squadrons like Mitchell’s have saved countless lives.”

 

Mitchell split time in his sixweek deployment in Afghanistan between Kandahar, where he treated primarily American forces, and Camp Bastion, occupied primarily by British forces.

 

At first, he was surprised by the ferocity of the fighting taking place.  

 

“When I got here, the fighting was worse than I thought it would be, than I’d heard about back home,” he said. “The first time you fly off the base, you feel like your body armor is the size of a postage stamp.”

 

During Mitchell’s time in Afghanistan, another Pedros helicopter was shot down, though the whole crew survived. Nonetheless, Mitchell became accustomed to practicing medicine in these new settings.

 

“After a while, you settle in and you focus on the job and the patient,” he said. “All the other things get pushed out of your mind.”

 

Printed in the Herald and News, July 10, 2010