Alaska Guard by Lt. James Richardson historical officer - the Alaska ...

Introduction to the retyped ‘Alaska Guard’
Military histories of individuals or units of the active duty side of the United States Army
involve changing faces and moving from post to post. There is much less of those changes in the
National Guard. Individuals in the following pages either spent their whole military career with
the Alaska National Guard or finished their careers here.
Alaska National Guard members frequent places named after Marston, Buckner,
Mandregan and Anderson. Who were they? What did they do? Why the honor? You‘ll find out
here.
Sometime in the spring of 2008, I photocopied CSM Mallie Hall‘s copy of ‗Alaska
Guard‘ written by Lieutenant James R. Richardson of the 134 th Public Information Detachment.
Up to that point, I had little in the way of a written history of the National Guard in Alaska.
It is very apparent that my copy was a copy of a copy many times over, on unbound
8X12 paper.
Despite being unpublished, it is well written and very well endnoted (by numbers), but
not absolutely perfect, as noted by my footnotes (by letters) correcting background information
and a hand written note in a latter page correcting an item about women in the Guard. Footnotes
are also used to update information.
Now and then someone comes by my desk looking for historical information about the
Alaska National Guard and at first had to confess that I had little to offer outside of recent
deployments to KFOR, OIF and OEF.
‗Alaska Guard‘ and C. A. Salisbury‘s book ‗Soldier‘s Of the Mist‘ have filled that
knowledge void. So why not share this with as many people as possible?
The following pages contain Lt. James Richardson‘s words; good, bad or indifferent.
Abbreviations, capital and lower case letters are used when he does. Spelling errors have been
corrected in most cases, but errors in proper nouns are corrected in footnotes. Punctuation,
abbreviations and grammar are unchanged from the original. The errors in the original are
probably due to lack of proofreading or unwillingness to correct simple errors.
Along with the errors, there are also two odd omissions – First is the fact that Marvin
‗Muktuk‘ Marston was among those on Alaska‘s Constitutional Convention, the body that wrote
the state‘s constitution a . No mention is made of that event. Also this account of Alaska National
Guard history was commissioned by Major General William Elmore, the Adjutant General in
place when Lt. Richardson put this together. Elmore was the Adjutant General from August 1964
to January 1967, and was again appointed Adjutant General in 1971 by Governor Bill Egan, but
Richardson makes no note of the second appointment.
Being that the latest information mentioned is from 1972, means the original was
probably written soon thereafter. Thus, the mood, mindset, thoughts and ideas are from that era.
By today‘s standards it is politically incorrect in many places. It neither defends nor excuses
biases. This is an account of what happened: history.
When Richardson was writing the Guard‘s history of the 1960s, he quotes word for word
a letter to the editor and large portions of three articles from the newspapers. To avoid copywrite
infringement, that material is removed from this edition.
The author and date of ‗PART I --- GUARDING ALASKA TODAY’ is unknown.
Richardson‘s paragraphs and chapters are maintained, but not his page numbering
system. Lt. Richardson numbered his pages using the same system as military regulations, i.e.
a Source: Anchorage Museum of History and Art.
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