Bitter winds were blowing snow sideways across a desolate runway in the tiny, dying community of Red Devil, Alaska, on Feb. 1 when the doctors dropped out of a night sky to save a young man fighting for his life.

This just doesn't happen anywhere else in America.

"It was dark. It was windy. It was really cold," Red Devil resident Ed Lepalla said by telephone Friday, and his neighbor's son, 20-year-old Ryan Morgan was in grave medical danger that night. Morgan had undergone a surgical endoscopy days before and now was in pain and vomiting. Doctors in Bethel, a regional hub 160 miles to the southwest, notified the Alaska Air National Guard that unless someone got Morgan started on an IV he might not make it to morning.

A life-saving service in the far north, the Air Guard took this call -- like dozens of others. At 8:30 p.m., according to Maj. Guy Hayes, the 210th, 211th and 212th Rescue Squadrons launched at the request of the 11th Air Force Rescue Coordination Center based near Anchorage. Though the rescue squadrons have been involved in some high-profile saves of downed pilots, climbers and adventurers over the years, "this was call was more typical of what they do when they aren't busy training their butts off to rescue pilots downed in combat in hostile places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

In Alaska, the only enemy Air Guard has to worry about is the weather.

When it is benign, they usually stay home. The state has plenty of commercial carriers serving rural areas. Under normal conditions, they can pick up the sick and injured in remote villages, even land on glaciers to retrieve climbers struggling after accidents. The Guard only gets called when the weather turns ugly.

Deadly weather

It was crap on Feb. 1. Hayes, in a bit of an understatement, described conditions in a press release as "low cloud cover and unfavorable weather." The reality: a storm was raging across Western Alaska. It would cost one young Alaskan his life. Only hours before National Guard rescuers took off toward Red Devil, 20-year-old Jed Alexie got lost on his way to Toksook Bay, a village just west of Bethel. The friend with whom he had been crossing Nelson Island by snowmachine made it to the village of Toksook Bay, but Alexie did not.

A search was organized in Toksook the following morning. Planes could not fly. Villagers went out on snowmachines. The weather was so bad it drove them back, tough people though they are. Alexie would not be found for a full day. By then, the weather would have killed him. It was the same weather confronting pilots at the controls of an HH-60 Pavehawk helicopter and an HC-130 airplane on the 250-mile flight west from Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, to Red Devil, official population 19 and falling.

"There's probably only about 15 here now," Jim Graham said Friday by phone. "The school closed down." There weren't enough students to support it. Once a mining community, Red Devil has been dying ever since the mercury mine closed for the final time in 1971. There were some sporadic jobs in mine cleanup during the years that followed and a little logging was done in the area, but no sort of economy anyone could count on. Graham was in town from Bethel only to shovel snow off the roofs of a couple properties he owns along the Kuskokwim River. He was afraid they might collapse.

"We've got around 5 feet of snow," he said. "We got a lot of snow."

Much of it was blowing around on the night of Feb. 1. It made life difficult for the Guard. Standard procedure in these sorts of rescue operations is to fly to the site in the Pavehawk, pick up the patient and deliver him or her to the nearest hospital or bring them back to Anchorage. The HC-130 flies top cover for the Helo-1 and packs extra gas to refuel the Pavehawk as necessary.