Travis teamwork makes presidential visit a success

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Joel Jackson
  • 6th Air Refueling Squadron commander
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  This past week I had the distinct pleasure of being the wing point-of-contact for the arrival and departure of President Bush here at Travis. While it was an honor to help facilitate the president's travel, and it was certainly exciting to see it all happen, the best part of the experience for me was working with the entire Travis Team to get the job done. My time here has taught me that Travis is made up of top performers, and there is no doubt that each squadron on the base is fully capable of doing their specific wartime missions. But it is the unusual events like this, that allow us to work with base agencies in ways we normally do not that bond us together as a one fighting team instead of remaining in our individual stovepipes.

As someone who has not previously been involved with a presidential visit, it was really amazing to see how many base agencies were required to successfully accomplish this brief stop. I received outstanding support from the 60th Medical Group, the 60th Maintenance Operations Squadron, the 60th Security Forces Squadron, the 60th Communications Squadron, the 60th Aerial Port Squadron, the 60th Civil Engineer Squadron, the 60th Logistics Readiness Squadron, the 60th Operations Support Squadron, 60th AMW Public Affairs, 60th AMW Command Post and 60th AMW Protocol. Each of these organizations held one or more vital pieces to the movement of the President and without each other's support, Travis would not have been able to shine in front of the commander in chief.

As I interacted with the White House Advance Team, the White House media representative and the Secret Service, each of them separately told me how helpful everyone on the base had been and how glad they were the president was using Travis. This could not have been any more evident than on the morning before the president's visit when the White House authorized 250 people to go to the flight line and see the president's July 17 evening departure. The security plan had already been set, the flight line arrangements had been made and we had only eight hours to organize a whole new plan including using handheld metal detectors to screen 250 people in a span of only two hours. The Secret Service immediately said that if it were not for the ability of the military to adapt on the go that this change would not have been possible.

Instead of denying base members the privilege of seeing this event, the security forces just changed their plan, the CES arranged for last-minute portable restrooms, the chief's network organized the 250 attendees and the OSS arranged to have 250 people flow thru their Base Operations building. On the day of the event these 250 people were on-time, patient with the screening process and thanks to a lot of work by a lot of separate on-base entities, got to see a tremendous show of helicopters, the president and Air Force One. Thank you Travis for truly being One Team ... One Fight!