JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. - “During the last fiscal year, the Army lost 45 soldiers to motorcycle accidents,” said Ed Cartwright, the 593rd Sustainment Brigade safety officer. “One is too many.”
Cartwright, along with Sgt. Maj. Julio Bensimon, the 593rd Sustainment Brigade support operations sergeant major and brigade motorcycle safety officer, decided to do something about the alarming statistic. They contacted Bruce Thomas, the Washington State Motorcycle Safety Program Manager in Olympia, Wash., and asked him if he would be willing to conduct an instructor course here at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
“I jumped at the chance to run the course,” said Thomas, a retired Coast Guard Warrant Officer. “I love working with the military and I love motorcycles. Typically, anybody involved in teaching motorcycle skills have a passion for it because it sure doesn’t pay that well.”
The course is officially titled the “RiderCoach Preparation Course” and lasts a total of 60 hours, to include classroom training, as well as road training. 17th Fires Brigade blocked off a portion of their motorpool so that the course could have enough room to safely teach the curriculum.
“[The students] are becoming instructors to teach a motorcycle safety foundation basic rider course and the experienced rider course,” Thomas said. “These guys will be able to run this course for folks that have never been on motorcycles before and to take folks that have been on motorcycles and bring them into an experienced class and bring their skill level up.”
“The most dangerous places in our state are in corners, where the majority of fatalities happen, because of a lack of skill. A lot of riders don’t have enough skill to swerve the bike or to stop the bike effectively. This program incorporates how to corner, how to corner better and it teaches the students to stop better each time,” Thomas said. “With these guys, you have soldiers teaching soldiers skills that are actually going to save lives.”
The class was offered to unit motorcycle mentors so that the mentors could then take the skills learned from the course and pass them along to the soldiers in their units.
“When a mentor earns this certification, it gives them added credibility and legitimacy to the unit’s motorcycle mentorship program enabling them to keep their soldiers safe,” Cartwright said.
Soldiers from 1st Special Forces Group, 17th Fires Brigade, 2nd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, 555th Engineer Brigade and 62nd Medical Brigade, sent representatives to take the training.
1st Lt. Patrick Lantagne, an intelligence officer assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 13th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, and a native of Escanaba, Mich., enrolled in the course because he wanted to gain credibility as a motorcycle safety officer.
“Now I can instruct and mentor bikers who are somewhat new to [riding motorcycles] and just getting out learning the basics of riding. We are able to instill in them values and skills they might not learn otherwise. We don’t want them going out and using driving skills that are unsafe and that might lead to them hurting themselves or hurting others,” he said.
Lantagne has been riding motorcycles for 13 years and was still amazed at the amount of knowledge he gained during the course.
“The class has been really eye-opening for me,” he said. “No matter how good of a rider you think you are, you can always improve and you can always learn something that you might not have known before. You get to operate with other experienced motorcyclists and get insight from them and their style of teaching, riding and how they see, evaluate and execute each task in order to be safe out on the road.”
| Date Taken: | 04.02.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 04.02.2012 15:40 |
| Story ID: | 86139 |
| Location: | JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, WA, US |
| Hometown: | ESCANABA, MI, US |
| Web Views: | 132 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Motorcycle mentors add safe riding skills to toolkit, by MSG Daniel Balda, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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