| A letter from the Expedition Leader.
This was a very unique expedition and possibly the most elite
group of people to travel to the North Pole. But here's some
other things that happened on this expedition that I'm sure most of
the expedition members were never aware of.
First of all here are some very odd records that have been set
for the Leader, Jeff Dyrek.
1. I was the First Disabled Veteran to ever lead a North
Pole Expedition.
2. I was also the First Expedition Leader that was tricked
into leading an expedition.
3. I was the First Expedition Leader to just send his people
to the pole and not go on this trip himself.
All of this sounds pretty strange. However, the whole
story started with my advertising the expedition on my website.
Somewhere about January of 2005, Curtis called me and said that he
needs help on the expedition. Just like for the 2004
expedition, I told him that I was not feeling well at all and I was
absolutely not able to travel to the North Pole.
Read the
Webmasters Story Here. After talking with Curtis for
a while, he finally said that he couldn't operate the expedition
alone and he really needed help. I finally said that I would
go, but only as a helper and I couldn't actually go to the pole
myself because of my disabilities. He agreed and I accepted to
go only to the city of Longyearbyen. Two days later he bought
my tickets to Longyearbyen and it was set that I was indeed going to
the other side of the world and work on another expedition.
A couple of days later, Curtis called me and said that he was
going on the Peter Island DXpedition to Antarctica and that I would
have to be the leader and do it myself. The DXpedition was an
Amateur Radio Experiment.
Talking about the workload. All of a sudden I had to
take care of all of the lodging, letters preparing everyone for the
expedition, transportation to and from the airport and everything
else. Getting hotel rooms in Longyearbyen is the worst job
that I ever had to do, it was a nightmare. Luckily I
knew everyone in Longyearbyen who had a hotel, a room for rent or
even a cabin. But it was still a terrible job. As with
every expedition, some of the members wanted to have the best hotel
rooms and every time I booked the rooms, these members would call
the hotels themselves and change everything on me.
I ended up making a spreadsheet of all available rooms in the
city and figured out who was going where. I sent regular
updates to Longyearbyen so the hotel managers knew what was going
on. But, some expedition members persisted and still changed
their rooms. Finally I had to call the hotels and tell them to
only take reservations from me, only, and I gave the hotels a list
of everyone on the expedition so that any other attempts for changes
would be blocked.
Curtis did the work of hiring an expert ski guide. The
guide was paid about fifteen thousand dollars for the job and had
all transportation, lodging and meals paid for by Curtis. The
guide kept raising the saying that he needed new skis, boots
and just about everything else. Now, you would think that as
expensive as these trips are, that the tour operator, in this case
Global Expedition Adventures, would be making a lot of money.
But the truth is that with all of the expenses of advertising,
preparing, phone calls, guides, transportation, weather delay
expenses, EXP clothing, equipment storage and others, that the
profit margin is actually very low.
For this expedition, I had to work for three months
continuously, ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, just to
get everything organized. The only money that I handled was to
make deposits for the rooms, some of which had to be sent by wire
and not credit cards. As the time came nearer, the
professional ski guide kept telling Curtis to go through another
polar operator other than the Russians which would save a lot of
money and expand the profit margin for Global Expedition Adventures.
It turned out that after Curtis sent the money to the other
operator, (No names here), they weren't even ready to go. They
didn't even have a helicopter that was ready, no safety systems in
place and that's what happened to the money that suddenly
disappeared, as the expedition members had soon learned. I
have no idea when all of this changing actually happened, but about
two weeks before the expedition was to leave, I was told that the
entire expedition was off and I was to cancel everyone's hotel
rooms. The hotel managers were super mad at me because
everyone, myself and the hotel managers, had done so much work
moving everyone around from room to room, ensuring that the
expedition members would have a single room to stay during their
expedition. Now everything was off and all of this work was
wasted.
A couple of days later, Curtis called me and said that the
expedition was back on, but a number of members did indeed cancel
out altogether. I had real nice forms made out for
everyone showing their rooms, dates and events, but these forms were
now invalid. For the expedition members that totally cancelled
out, I put a big "X" on the form and still carried it with me to
Longyearbyen.
In the next several days, Curtis took all of his money out of
the bank, I believe he sold a couple of houses and really almost had
to bankrupt himself, but he came up with only enough money to get
some of the people to the pole. After counting the money and
figuring how many people he could get to the pole on the new budget,
he decided to pay for the largest number of people which meant that
the people who took the less expensive tours went while the others
were stuck having to pay for the trip again. These people were
the Chinese Skiers.
All of a sudden, I had to get all of the rooms setup again and
the manager at the Radisson Hotel said that after this trip, they
will never work with Global Expedition Adventures again. As
the expedition came closer I was told that some members were indeed
going, but still some were cancelled. There was only a week
left and Curtis stopped communicating with me. I still had the
skydivers checked off, Peter Baker was checked off and I can't
remember who else. I had no choice but to assume that these
members were not even going to show up in Longyearbyen.
About five days before the expedition, I was doing a final
check of my equipment and found out that all of my medicine was
gone. It was because, Blaire, the girl that does my scanning
was taking a couple of pills a day out of my medicine cabinet when I
wasn't watching. I had saved up enough medicine to make it
through the trip and it was a narcotic drug which I had to sign for.
I had to call the police and have her arrested. They
immediately went to her house and found that she had five pills in
her possession. I still pressed charges and she ended spending
a month in jail and a year on probation. However, I needed to
get the police report, take it all the way to Peoria, and get new
medicine from the VA Medical Center.
It was two days before I had to leave. I had made
arrangements with my older brother to take care of my 89 year old
mom while I was gone and he called me, assuring me that he would be
at my mom's house on the day that I was to leave. I thought
that everything was set up and my home obligations were taken care
of.
Now, was the day that I had to drive to Chicago to catch my
flight. Just one hour before I left, my brother called and
said that he had car trouble, but again assured me that he would be
at my mom's house the very next day and that I had nothing to worry
about. I packed all of my gear in my truck and headed out for
Chicago, which is about two hundred and fifty miles away.
So finally I landed in Copenhagen. I hate the way that
the airlines allow only about an hour to catch the next flight to
Oslo because I had to go through customs and to another concourse
that feels like it was about a mile of walking in all. I'm
disabled and when I walk too fast, sit up in a chair for only a few
minutes, have jarring and a number of other things, I end up tearing
the adhesions in my abdomen and it's nothing but bad news.
And, this time I did hurt myself, but not real bad.
Landing in Longyearbyen was a relief. I arrived two days
earlier than anyone else just to get organized and have a day to
relax. Then the expedition members started showing up and I
had to pick everyone up at the airport. I still had the
skydivers and a couple of others crossed off of the list and I still
had no communications with Curtis. I was a lone wolf who had
to do everything on my own with no assistance from anyone from
Global Expedition Adventures.
As the next couple of days moved along, I picked up everyone
that I had listed, but the other tour operators said that I had some
really pissed off customers at the airport. I didn't know how
that was because I did pick up everyone that was on my list. I
realized that the lack of communication with Curtis caused me to
make this error.
But, finally everyone was present and I knew who I had to take
care of. I suddenly found out that the Chinese Ski Team didn't
have any money paid for their trip to the pole. Cao Jun
realized that I had no knowledge of this problem. Well,
I had to do something so I grabbed the very first tour operator that
I knew and set the Chinese Team up with him. This was the
Northwest Passage company from Chicago. I knew that they were
very professional and their guides were some of the best. Cao
Jun had to set up another payment to be transferred to this company,
making the Chinese Ski Team members having to pay twice.
As for the rest of our expedition members, It turned out that
Victor Boyarski wanted the Chinese to go with him and he was super
mad at me and would not even tell me anything on who to contact
about our flight schedule, skydiving or anything. I asked him
time after time and he very politely said that he would get right
back to me and then just walked away, jumped in a car and left.
We still paid Victor over a hundred thousand dollars yet he didn't
want deal with me. (Victor, I'm still mad at you and I think
that you are very, very unprofessional and did not uphold your part
of our contract) Finally, Victor Serov grabbed me and said
here is your flight schedule and here is who you need to talk to, to
get your skydivers to jump over the pole.
I took the skydivers to meet the flight coordinator, Daniel.
At the last minute we found out that there was never any
arrangements to have a jumpmaster for the skydivers. We called
my friend in Moscow and finally with Sergey'a approval, Daniel
allowed the three jumpers to act as their own jumpmaster, since all
of them had more than a thousand jumps already.
I just went three days with only a couple of hours of sleep
and we still needed to get our EXP equipment distributed. I'm
pretty sure how this next problem happened, I distributed all of the
equipment and I remember setting a pair of boots on my paperwork.
Somehow my whole book ended up in Dick Shultz's boot bag. At
the time I didn't know this. I looked everywhere, went back to
the storage and woke up Johan Sletten to open his storage area.
I went through everything, through the hotels, talked to the
managers of the hotels, taxi's and restaurants asking them if they
have seen the book and if they do find it, to contact the
Spitsbergen Guesthouse to let me know. The bus driver and taxi
drivers knew me from years before and when they didn't have anyone
in their vehicles, they picked me up while I was walking on the side
of the road, but didn't charge me for the ride. I'm laughing
right this moment thinking of the super mess everything was.
We finally got everything ready to go and all of the problems
solved. I really appreciate Randy suggesting and everyone else
agreeing to pay my way on the snowmobile trip to the Tempelfjorden
tour. I really wanted to go, but I was already hurting pretty
bad and was heavily medicated plus I was afraid that I would end up
with the internal bleeding problem starting up again. This
would have been really bad.
Click Here to see a 43 second
video on what happens when I have these problems.
After everyone came back from the pole and headed for home, I
did take a trip with Johan Sletten to Barentsburg to see my friends
Andreau and his wife Sovietka who I had met a couple of years
earlier.
Luckily, everything worked out pretty well with the exception
that the Chinese had to pay for everything twice. The last
time that I talked to Curtis, he was still trying to get his money
back from the other North Pole company. I am sending my
apologies to the Chinese because everyone on their team and Richard
Ming just treated me fantastic.
On the way home, I was walking through the Copenhagen Airport
again and I saw a man sitting in a waiting area for his plane.
I stopped and looked right at him and said, "Don't I know you?"
He looked at me like I was some kind of nut. I then said, "Are
you Peter?" He said that he was. I speak kind of loudly
and I said that he was the doctor that operated on me so many times.
Next I said that I'm writing a story, "Why God Sent Me to the North
Pole." A lot of people stood up and gathered around to
hear about this interesting title. I then told Peter that all
of the fifteen or sixteen operations that he did on my stomach were
totally unnecessary. All I needed was the vodka that the
Russians gave me in 2002. I had an infection in my esophagus
that caused the restriction that restricted my ability to eat
properly. He absolutely didn't want to hear this and walked
away. It's interesting that these operations cost me more than
a hundred thousand dollars and all I really needed was to get drunk.
Read 1st Timothy 5:23 to find out why. I then realized that he
didn't want to hear about my problems when I was paying him, so why
would he want to hear about them when I wasn't paying him. His
whole exam lasted fifteen seconds and then I ended up with all of
these operations that have caused me to be totally disabled ever
since the middle 1990's.
When I finally got home, I walked to the door and saw my mom
there. She was really glad to see me. She lost about
twenty pounds and when I asked her how she was, she replied in a
weak squeaky voice, "I'm OK" I asked her where my
brother Jackie was and she said that he never showed up. My
brother Jackie has a million dollars in the bank and he couldn't
even take care of his mom. Please excuse my language, but he's
a prick. The stress of finding my mom in such bad condition
has hurt me very badly and I have never recovered. I have PTSD
from my accident in the U.S. Navy and finding out that my mom was
left alone for all of this time made my stress disorders much worse.
Click Here's an important note about the ski guide hired by Curtis.
As I started meeting people on this expedition, I found out that the
ski guide actually worked for another company all of the time.
It was his persistent effort that convinced Curtis to switch to the
other company.
After this expedition, I was hired to lead both the 2006 and
2007 Expeditions, but it was just impossible. I've been bed
almost continuously since 2005 and really since 2003 with only short
breaks in the pain periods. I can't do anything except
to sit and type on the computer. I'm not able to even work at
my desk because any movement, from side to side, causes the staples
in my stomach to cut the diaphragm, or something, and in just a
minute of working at the desk, I'm bleeding and cannot move for a
month or so. From early December 2007 to Early May 2008, I
have been in bed all of the time and if it wasn't for having to
drive to Peoria to the VA Hospital twice, I would have the same tank
of gas that I bought in early December.
So, Now you know what part of the behind the scenes activities
look like on a North Pole Expedition.
OK, Here's the latest news 12 May
2008
I talked to the IRS about not being
able to file my income tax for the last several years. I have
a letter that they sent to me that says they owe me 256 for 2007,
but now they are going to charge me the full tax, with no personal
deductions, add interest and fines which comes to over ten thousand
dollars. They said that if I don't have everything completed
by June 12th, 2008 that they will take it out of my disability which
will leave me about nine months without pay. Can you believe
that the IRS can be so vicious that they will attach a persons
disability. The doctors took all of my money, I can't work and
this will force me to file bankruptcy, I will have to move out of
the garage, (yes, I live in a garage), and I will have to move into
the wilderness. I will have no address so I will never get any
disability payments again. I take care of my mom who is
now 92 and she will have to move to the nursing home. She will
lose her pets, which are her babies, and lose her house and property
and then just sit in the nursing home (A Jail to Her) until she
dies.
I was reading about Nancy Pelosi,
the Speaker of the House for the United States, and Nancy recently
spent 16,000 of taxpayers money for flowers and then paid a speech
writer 10,000 to write her speech. That's 26,000 of American
Taxpayer money. After a very short look on the web, I found
out that there are over 400,000 Disabled Veterans in the United
States who are homeless. I have a huge handful of brochures
that say, "Join the Army and Be All That You Can Be."
On my other computer monitor, I am
now looking at a Soldier with no leg. Another Soldier with no
face and even another Soldier with no life. Yes, These people
became all they can be, disabled and dead and homeless, yet the U.S.
Government doesn't care about this super embarrassment of 400,000
homeless disabled vets. I have six years in the Navy and six
years working for the Army and I will soon become homeless vet
number 400,001. Yet I cannot sit up to figure out how much
money I made and how many expenses that I have so I can make out my
tax return. The Veterans Administration said that they cannot
help me, I have to hire an accountant to figure out all of this.
I'm sorry! The doctors took my money and left me in an even worse
condition than when I was before seeing them. |
