Achterberg’s vision quest pays off

A new medical clinic stands as the result of one of Les Achterberg’s tours of duty.

The sunglasses were perfect for a relaxing day at the beach.

But Leslie Achterberg wasn’t in Florida; he was in Kuwait after being deployed by the Wisconsin Army National Guard a few years ago. The sunglasses were no match for the stinging sand and dust whipping across the Kuwaiti deserts, and the soldiers’ eyes were suffering.

“The Army issued us these wonderful, very expensive Oakley sunglasses that wrap around your eyes,” said Achterberg, a labor foreman for J. H. Findorff & Son Inc., Madison. “But they stand a half-inch off your face at the bottom where they need to be tighter.”

Achterberg found a solution. He had brought a few pairs of safety glasses with him, and he tried them instead of the Oakleys.

Achterberg joins his fiancé, June Morey, and her daughter Sami. Photos courtesy of Leslie Achterberg

“They worked better,” he said. “They keep the dust out a lot better and fit tighter by the cheekbone.”

So he e-mailed colleagues back in Wisconsin and asked if they could send him a box of the glasses. Once the glasses arrived, everyone in the unit thought they were great, he said.

“Brigades found a way to order them online, and, pretty soon, everybody was wearing them,” he said. “A $3 pair of safety glasses beating a $100 pair of Oakley sunglasses.”

That wasn’t the first time Achterberg relied on his civilian duties to help with his Army life.

In 2001, before joining Findorff, he volunteered for a humanitarian mission in Nicaragua.

“Because of what I was doing in my civilian life I thought I could be a big asset,” he said. “I knew there was a real need to go down and do things, a real need to train our troops.”

He spent about 18 weeks in Nicaragua training military engineers from Wisconsin and other states in construction techniques, like pouring concrete with a bucket.

Achterberg (in white hard hat) teaches soldiers how to pour concrete with a crane.

The mission let the Army train troops for work in the Middle East, he said.

“When the Afghan war took off, our National Guard engineers were the first ones to get called up to start rebuilding the country there,” he said. “The mission was real, the training was real, and it was all for a real purpose, too.”

That purpose is what has kept Achterberg in the military for so long. He enlisted as a senior in high school, he said, more than 30 years ago. He has since left the National Guard and is now a major with the Army Reserves.

“I know what I’m doing is protecting you, my family, my relatives and everyone else back here,” he said, “by keeping what happened on 9/11 from coming back here again and again and again.”

- Janine Anderson