Anchorage Daily News

UINHAGAK -- It started as soon as Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens stepped off the Blackhawk helicopter that brought him to this village near the Bering Sea, just a speck in an endless flat landscape of sodden tundra and lakes with no names.

Much of the village was at the airstrip in four-wheelers and pickup trucks. "Can I get your picture?" one man asked Stevens. "Hey, are you Ted Stevens?" a woman shouted at a bureaucrat traveling with the senator. "I have to get his picture."

Then came requests for help. "We need a new clinic and more health aides," said Fannie Hernandez, moments after Stevens entered the village clinic.

THE 'GREAT APPROPRIATOR'

Stevens is running what's shaping up to be the toughest re-election race of his life: Those seeking his Senate seat include Anchorage Democratic Mayor Mark Begich. Voters in the coming months will be constantly reminded about the billions of federal dollars the Republican has steered home. He counts money for rural Alaska among his top accomplishments.

The one-day visit to Quinhagak and Bethel on Sunday was classic Stevens. He brings a cabinet official -- in this case Veterans' Affairs Secretary James Peake -- out to some of the nation's most remote spots of human habitation.

Earmarks follow, and presumably some better appreciation from the officials of what it's like in the Bush.

Dan Winkelman, a vice president at the Yukon-Kuskoskwim Health Corporation in Bethel, looked straight at Stevens as he described the need for an electronic billing system and a better rate to reimburse facilities that provide care to veterans.

"We have the VA secretary here and we have our great appropriator here as well," Winkleman said. "That's why we're bringing this up."

Federal money is life's blood for places like the Yukon-Kuskowim Delta. Bethel, the hub for 56 villages in the Delta, has a per-capita income of $20,267, according to the state. Half the jobs are in government. The per-capita income of Quinhagak was listed at just $8,127 in the 2000 census, the most recent information available. Village employment varies seasonally, but most of the people who listed themselves as employed had jobs with some level of government.

People in the Y-K Delta are dreading the arrival of the first fuel barge of the spring, which will bring with it the new price of fuel. There's talk of $8-a-gallon gasoline in the villages.

Thaddeus Tikiun of Quinhagak said even people with decent jobs worry the fuel prices will push them into welfare.

BACK FROM KUWAIT

Tikiun was one of the people Stevens brought the VA secretary to Quinhagak to see. He is a sergeant in the Alaska Army National Guard, one of the group that recently served 15 months in Kuwait, some also doing convoys into Iraq.

The guardsmen came back home in October. There are seven of them in Quinhagak, a village the locals figured at about 700 people. Some, like Tikiun, are still employed by the guard. Others are collecting unemployment but have summer jobs lined up.

Tikiun said it's difficult in the village to take advantage of available veterans' benefits; dental and physical exams often require going to Anchorage, he said.

A Vietnam veteran in Bethel, John Guinn, told Stevens and Peake he was worried about what's going to happen to the village soldiers back from the Middle East.

He said everyone is proud of them now. But what happens in a few years when these men, highly trained in combat, can't find jobs, start drinking and going a little crazy, he asked. There aren't people in tiny villages trained to deal with mental health issues, he said.

"It's going to cause a commotion in their village," Guinn said. "I'm scared."

Stevens said there is good job training available for veterans. "The question is whether they are encouraged by their comrades and by their families to take advantage of their opportunities," Stevens said.

VA secretary Peake suggested some of the concern about post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury has been overblown.

Many of the brain injuries are serious but some of them are akin to what anyone who played football in their youth might have suffered, Peake told Guinn.

Guinn wasn't entirely satisfied with the answers. He said it's a real issue for returning soldiers as well as their families, and he doesn't think job training is enough.

MONEY TO THE DELTA

Stevens also brought Peake to Fairbanks, Anchorage and Eagle River to meet with veterans' groups.

"When the secretary was up before the Senate for confirmation I'd asked him if he'd be interested in a trip to Alaska," Stevens said. "That's sort of threatening in some ways."

But it was the 84-year-old Stevens who got the rock star treatment in Western Alaska, particularly Quinhagak. There was no talk there of the Justice Department investigation or any of the national controversies over his earmarks. People just wanted to shake his hand.

Stevens kept urging the veterans in the village to find out what benefits they're entitled to. He said they're not thinking about them right now but will want to know in the long term.

He and Peake talked about the potential for tele-medicine to cut down on the need for veterans to make trips from the villages into Anchorage and Bethel. A little tele-psychiatry has already started.

Stevens also said he wants the VA to contract with local health providers to let them take care of returning veterans. He spoke of the Yukon-Kuskoskwim Health Corporation as a model that can serve village veterans from a regional hub.

Begich, running against Stevens, has made veterans' issues a part of his campaign, saying he supports letting vets earn educational benefits faster than Stevens does. But the broader issue of Stevens' image as "great appropriator," especially in the Bush, is something that Begich's campaign is going to have to face.

Stevens has started all earmark requests made to him on his Senate Web site. Begich campaign spokesman Matt Browner Hamlin said Begich would go further when he's in the U.S. Senate and post which of the requests he's actually pursuing.

He said Stevens can't "out-Alaskan" Begich, whose father was Alaska's congressman in the early 1970s. And a change in the congressional delegation doesn't mean Alaska won't get federal money, he said.

"Mark Begich, as a member of the Alaska delegation in the U.S. Senate, will fight tooth and nail to make sure that Alaskans have all the appropriations they need," he said.

Find Sean Cockerham online at adn.com/contact/scockerham or call him at 257-4344.

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