DAYTON, Ohio — Have you ever wondered what it would be like if an ambulance could fly? For the 445th Air Lift Wing, it’s not a ‘what if’ but a ‘where and when’ as it pertains to transporting our nation’s heroes from hospitals and battlefields around the globe.

I was invited to take a flight with the 445th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron to get a closer look at how Ohio airmen are always preparing for their next mission.

“Within 24 hours I can be ready to go,” said flight medic Madi Potts.

She’s what’s called a traditional Air Force reservist. One day Potts might be in the classroom at her university or working as a nurse. The next day, she could have orders and be in her military uniform working on a C-17 or other type of military transport.

“I just got out of flight medic school for this about two months ago,” she said.

The 445th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron consists of both full-time military members and reservists. Training is the same for everyone.

On the tarmac at Wright Patterson Air Base, a C-17 Globemaster III sits whirling with activity as airmen work with training mannequins — and live actors — labeled with a variety of health conditions lying on transport litters.

While the pilots are busy readying the aircraft to taxi and takeoff; flight nurses and flight medics ensure patients are assessed and loaded. It’s a well-orchestrated process the airmen of the 445th appear to be able to do with their eyes closed.

Master Sergeant Brenna Pogoy, the mission clinical coordinator, is putting the airmen through a variety of scenarios to ensure the unit remains at the top of its game for when it matters.

“This is nothing like a real world but that’s because you’re not having a fire every flight on a real world, you’re not having an emergency landing all the time,” she said.

But the overload of events is to drive the nurses and medics to the brink of their ability, so they learn to dig a little deeper during an emergency.

“When it does happen and when a patient does have an emergency, or the aircraft has an emergency you are ready and there’s muscle memory in that,” Pogoy said.

The Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron’s mission is broad.

This crew could be called to transport service men and women from different military air bases within the U.S. from Walter Reed Hospital to their hometown hospital or military base, for example.

The mission can also take them near the front lines, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, picking up the wounded and transporting them to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany or other military bases for more treatment before returning to the U.S.

“On the C-17 we can max floor load, we can do 12 on the ramp and another 48 on the main floor,” Master Sergeant Marjorie Butcher said.

That’s a total of 60 patients on litters strapped to the floor at one time with a team of two nurses and three medical technicians providing care throughout the duration of the flight. In addition, depending on the severity of injuries full medical teams can set up a hospital-like setting within the transport planes.

“The Air Force trains us well and they trust us to do our job,” Butcher said.

Then there’s the mission Butcher would deem as unregulated. The unplanned scenario was seen around the world in August 2021 as the U.S. evacuated from Kabul, Afghanistan as part of the U.S. withdrawal.

“My first deployment in the military was to Kabul. That was my first flight ever I’d never flown patients or anything,” Butcher said.

She enlisted in 2015 and received her wings to fly with the Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron in April of 2021, just months before the historic images seen around the world as hundreds of thousands of Afghanis flooded the Kabul airstrip trying to get on a C-17 to freedom.

“I was the last AE flight out of Kabul,” Butcher said.

At least one of those C-17s taking part in the evacuation was photographed with a reported 800 men, women, and children.

Colonel Michael Baker, Commander of the 445th Operations Group, told me that members of his unit on one of those flights dealt with a live birth on the flight out of Afghanistan.

Baker said what happened in Afghanistan was part of several debriefs and analyses on how to improve training and mission preparedness.

In all military training, there are checklists. The pilots go through them step by step and operators like flight nurses and medics within the 445th AES go through them. However, training must also prepare airmen for what’s outside those normal checklists.

“We put a lot of emphasis on what are called contingency operations where we really try to flex and push and challenge ourselves and get outside of the letter of our regulations and say where can we flex,” Major Issac Cade said.

Cade is the flight nurse on this flight and the medical crew director.

“We’ll run different scenarios just to see what happens, stress inoculation,” Cade said.

That stress inoculation allows them to run through multiple scenarios that push the limit way beyond the norms in an environment where it’s safe to do it.

“Ultimately the buck stops here,” he said. “If something goes wrong, we answer for it.”

For Cade, this is another day in the life of a reservist.

“I’m a nurse practitioner for Premier Health,” he said. “So tomorrow I will put on my civvies, my work clothes and then go into the office like nothing happened.”

It’s what tens of thousands of traditional reservists do regularly. Living their daily lives, contributing to the community they live in, ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice to answer the call for our country.

If you have a veteran story to tell in your community, email homefront@wcpo.com. You also can join the Homefront Facebook group, follow Craig McKee on Facebook and find more Homefront stories here.

Heading into Week 13 of the 2024 college football season, the Ohio State Buckeyes are ranked No. 2 in the nation. This week, they will face off against the No. 5 ranked Indiana Hoosiers in an absolutely massive game for both teams with College Football Playoff implications.

At this point in time, there are quite a few teams who could be talented enough to win a national championship. As many thought before the season started, Ohio State is one of them.

Ryan Day and the Buckeyes have worked hard to get to this point. It will be interesting to see what they end up doing against Indiana.

Notable college football analyst Paul Finebaum spoke out with a bold take about Ohio State. He thinks that they’re the best team in the nation.

“I think Ohio State’s the best team in the country,” Finebaum said. “It could change, but right now, it hasn’t.”

There are many who believe that the Buckeyes are the best team in the country. The Oregon Ducks are also a team that has received a lot of hype throughout the season.

From a pure roster talent perspective, it’s hard to argue that Ohio State isn’t the most talented team in college football. They have elite talent at every single position.

If everyone plays up to their potential, a national championship should end up happening for the Buckeyes.

However, the team has to take care of business each and every week, but focus on doing it one week at a time. Fans will have a much clearer idea of just how good the Buckeyes are after this week’s game against the Hoosiers.

Hopefully, Ohio State can come out and make a major statement this week. Moving into the Michigan game, the Buckeyes would be brimming with confidence if they dispatch of Indiana. But, the Hoosiers are a good football team and Ohio State will have to bring their best to the field.

All of that being said, the Buckeyes will need to earn the title of best in the nation. Receiving it now is all fun and good, but Ohio State only has one goal. That goal is to be the best team in the nation when every single game in the 2024 season has been played.

How did The Daily break its In Focus story on dining workers? What went wrong during Northwestern football’s loss to Ohio State? The Daily answers these questions and recaps other top stories from the last week.

BAYLEE KRULEWITZ: Compass Group has transferred some Northwestern dining workers accused of harassment and abuse — and the misconduct continues.

NU football lost to Ohio State at Wrigley Field, 31-7.

And Taco Bell’s Evanston location rings once more.

From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Baylee Krulewitz.

EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: And I’m Edward Simon Cruz. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of our top headlines from the past week.

As you just heard, one of our reporters, Baylee Krulewitz, is helping me out today. She interviewed Gameday Editor Jake Epstein for one of our segments. Baylee, welcome to The Weekly.

BAYLEE KRULEWITZ: So glad to be here. 

EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: You’ll hear that segment in a few minutes. But first, we revisit a big story that The Daily broke almost two weeks ago.

Joining me today, we have Cole Reynolds. He’s a senior staffer, but he started working on this story when he was an In Focus editor last academic year. You worked on this pretty big story, our first In Focus of the quarter, with Jerry Wu, who is currently our campus editor, about some things you learned about Compass Group and the way it’s handled complaints against dining workers.

How did the reporting process kind of start, and where did you start going from there once you realized there was a story to tell?

COLE REYNOLDS: Well, I think it really just started by chance. This is sort of how these things sort of happen, I think, is I was getting food in Allison (Dining Hall), when one of our main sources, Ms. Mary — that’s how — all the students know her as Ms. Mary, but Mary Flemming was there with a piece of paper asking students to sign a petition against discrimination. Of course, Compass and dining hall workers are going through contract renegotiations now, and this petition was Ms. Mary’s contribution to that conversation, and I asked, “Well, Ms. Mary, why do you need a petition against discrimination?” And so, she sort of, just there standing in Allison, it just all sort of kept tumbling out, and the result is this sort of In Focus that’s 3,300 words about how, when dining hall employees are faced with allegations of misconduct, sexual harassment, Compass has a tendency to sort of move the employees, just to different dining halls where some of the misconduct continues.

That’s 3,300 words dedicated to that topic, but there were — Ms. Mary had a laundry list of different sort of complaints about how Compass does business, and same with a bunch of other employees, and so there’s 3,300 words about this specific topic, but that first conversation was just sort of — we just heard about a lot of things about the workplace, and this is one of them. And so it — I just sort of sat back and thought about it, and of course you mentioned that I was editing investigations at this point, last quarter or spring quarter with Pavan (Acharya), and I was just thinking and thinking and just, out of curiosity, I wanted to see if other employees had similar things to say.

And I’m off campus now. I fend for myself in the kitchen. I don’t go to the dining hall anymore. But when you’re on campus you’re in the dining hall a couple of times a day. You know the workers, and it’s sort of just an easy setting to just have a quick chat with, and I found myself just asking workers about some of the things that Ms. Mary was saying — not formally, just sort of off the record. And sort of certain themes kept coming and coming up, and, and that’s when I finally sat down with Ms. Mary for a formal interview, and we talked through a lot of these things, and one thing that she stuck up that stuck out was this, her telling a story of a student that had been harassed allegedly by a dining hall employee and telling how that employee was just sort of moved and things like that, and so that story really became the foundation of the In Focus.

I went and talked to the student, talked to friends that were with her during this time and then really sort of fleshed out this narrative of — when you report an employee, whether you’re a dining hall worker or a student — when you report a Compass employee for harassment, a lot of the times they can end up just working elsewhere, and that became sort of the focus of our In Focus piece, even though there was plenty of other issues that could have been discussed just from that first conversation with Ms. Mary.

EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: You worked on this as I previously mentioned with Jerry, so what was it kind of like from a kind of behind-the-scenes end, collaborating on this, divvying up the different parts of the work and reporting that went into putting a piece like this together?

COLE REYNOLDS: Well, we know, we both know that Jerry is one of the most connected men on campus, you know? He knows a lot about what’s going on on this campus, and he sort of came to the same story that I did just unrelated, right? Same sort of situation, talking to dining hall workers, learning about the same thing. And we just figured out that we were reporting and learning some of the same things just by virtue of sitting in the newsroom together.

And that’s sort of when we started talking about, “Okay, let’s maybe compile our research, compile the manpower and really report this thing out together,” and that’s what we did, and we both had our own niches. I sort of took the lead on some of the narrative structures and talking to some of the people impacted by these situations, and Jerry had sources deep into the union and different sort of management positions and Compass and such, and so he really nailed down on the sort of details — the, really, “why” of, “Why is this happening?”

And what we landed on was, it’s this reporting system that’s sort of obscure and vague, that you send off a complaint to Compass and you don’t really know what happens to it, you know? You don’t know what they investigate. You don’t know what’s the result of their investigation. You just might see the person you reported pop up somewhere else, you know.

And so he is the one that sort of was able to dig into that, sort of, “Why is this occurring?” Tackle that question. And I sort of focused on, “Okay, this is happening. What does it look like from just a personal level, from the people that are affected by it?”

In that way, it really did work out. It had sort of a natural synergy to the reporting that I don’t think the story would have, would have looked the same as if it was just one of us reporting it.

EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: Once again, that was Cole Reynolds, one of our senior staffers, talking about an In Focus story he worked on with Campus Editor Jerry Wu about Compass Group and its handling of complaints against some of its dining workers on campus. Cole, thank you very much for your time.

COLE REYNOLDS: Thank you so much for having me, and please give this story a read if you haven’t already. Thanks.

BAYLEE KRULEWITZ: Now moving on to sports, the sadly unranked Wildcats took on the No. 2 Ohio State Buckeyes at Wrigley Field and lost with a final score of 31-7 Buckeyes. This week’s game is on the heels of a bye week after the Nov. 2 overtime win at Purdue. While Saturday marked a disappointing finish in a stadium that was, for some reason, massively overpopulated by Ohio State fans, the Wrigley experience is always a unique one and gives fans a chance to ditch the library and get into the city. Anyway, back to the game.

Right now, I have Gameday Editor Jake Epstein here with me to take us through what happened. Jake?

JAKE EPSTEIN: All right. Well, first off, thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be back on The Weekly after a few weeks where I was not present on this show, but it’s always a pleasure. So, thank you so much, Baylee and to get into the game, you know, awesome venue, Wrigley, unmatched. It’s gonna be great to close out the season in two weeks time there against Illinois. 

But, yeah, the first 18 minutes, Northwestern looked ready for an upset shot. I mean, dominated time of possession, outgained Ohio State 151-to-30 in terms of yardage, got on the board first, courtesy of a Jack Lausch eight-yard rushing score. 

But, from that point, the No. 2 team in the country came alive in Ohio State, and when you wake up a sleeping giant like that, a national championship contender, it’s always gonna be a rude awakening, and it surely was that — 31 unanswered points for the Buckeyes. Will Howard was pretty unfazed back there in the pocket connecting with Emeka Egbuka, Jeremiah Smith, to name a few. They, they, I mean, their receiving core is simply one of the best in the country, and when you have one of your top (defensive backs) in Theran Johnson out of the game somewhat unexpectedly, but he did not participate today, it’s always gonna be a struggle. 

Now, there were signs from some of NU’s DBs, like redshirt freshman corner Josh Fussell and redshirt sophomore corner Braden Turner, and they looked pretty solid at times, but there was, I mean, they showed signs of youth and that’s always gonna happen when you don’t have a real veteran out there at corner. 

But, but I mean, this Northwestern team has two more chances to pick up that vital fifth win for a potential bowl bid on academic progress rate or if they can get two wins out of these last two games that could potentially, that will be enough to get them to a bowl. Now, will this be a high tier bowl like last year’s game in the Las Vegas Bowl? Definitely not. We’ll probably be looking at something along the lines of Detroit, maybe Guaranteed Rate, who knows? But at this point, the goal, as it has been all season, is to make a bowl. 

Will it be, will it happen if I had to say so? Probably not, but it was, today showed that Northwestern is a team that can go into The Big House against Michigan next Saturday and potentially put up a fight. Michigan is not a team that’s gonna out, they’re not gonna drive all over another team. They’re not going to outgain them and not going to blow them out on the, on the scoreboard, but they do have pretty stout defense and so will Jack Lausch be able to pick up the momentum from a pretty good start and a decent finish today’s game? We shall see. 

Then, of course, after Michigan is an Illinois squad that just put a real licking on Michigan State today. So, yeah, this road ahead for Northwestern appears a bit bumpy. It’s gonna be tough to get that bowl eligibility, but, there’s one person I wouldn’t bet against, it’s David Braun, reigning Big Ten Coach of the Year, and hopefully the ’Cats can turn things around these last two weeks. 

BAYLEE KRULEWITZ: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jake. Pleasure as always. 

JAKE EPSTEIN: Of course. Thank you so much. 

BAYLEE KRULEWITZ: Here are the other top headlines from the week:

NU College Republicans painted The Rock red. The Rock read “NUCR 4 Unity” and later “MAGA Unity” in reference to President-elect Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Unidentified students have since painted over the “MAGA” acronym.

The Cook County Circuit Court struck down Evanston’s ranked choice voting referendum.

A therapist from suburban Glenview won a Jeremy Allen White lookalike contest in Chicago.

NU women’s basketball scored its first win of the season, defeating Utah 71-69.

And Taco Bell rings once more with the opening of its new location on Sherman Avenue.

From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Baylee Krulewitz. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Weekly. This episode was reported and produced by me, Edward Simon Cruz, Cole Reynolds and Jake Epstein.

The audio editor of The Daily Northwestern is Edward Simon Cruz. The digital managing editors are Carlotta Angiolillo and Sasha Draeger-Mazer. The editor in chief is Jacob Wendler.

Our theme music is “Night Owl” by Broke for Free, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License and provided by the Free Music Archive.

Make sure to subscribe to The Daily Northwestern’s podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud to hear more episodes like this. Follow us on X and Instagram @thedailynu. We’ll be back next Monday with another episode of The Weekly.

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Related Stories:

— In Focus: Students and staff report some dining workers for harassment. Compass transfers them — and misconduct continues.

— Football: Northwestern’s turnovers decimate early momentum in 31-7 loss to No. 2 Ohio State

— Evanston Taco Bell — minus the cantina — opens with a Baja Blast