Hartman, together with oral pathologist Col. Bob Brannon and their wives, was on vacation in Yugoslavia when, on Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide truck bomber exploded his vehicle in the international military compound near the Beirut airport, killing 241 American servicemen. They had stopped at Aviano Air Base, Italy, looking to spend the night before proceeding on. Instead, Hartman recalled, he and Brannon “were immediately kind of put under house arrest and told to get [our] fannies back to Frankfurt” where the bodies were being transported.

Hartman was chairman of the Department of Oral Pathology when, on Dec. 12, 1985, an overloaded charter flight carrying soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division crashed shortly after takeoff at Gander, Newfoundland. Hartman noted that because “almost all the victims were just totally burned,” Morlang’s dental identification software, used to a limited extent on the Jonestown victims, was used “a lot with the Gander incident.”

Though full integration of the military would have to wait until President Harry Truman’s executive order in January 1948, African-American dentists were commissioned into the Dental Service’s ranks as early as World War I. In World War II, 132 African-American dentists were in uniform. Hampton Green, Jr., who entered the Air Force as a dentist in 1954, served 30 years and was one of the first African-American Air Force dentists to rise to the rank of colonel in 1971. In 2014, Maj. Gen. (Dr.) Roosevelt Allen became the first African-American assistant surgeon general for Dental Services.

In 1953, Raya Rachlin became the first woman to be commissioned an Air Force dentist, and would be the service’s only female dentist until well into the 1960s. By the 1980s, about 10 percent of the service’s dentists were women. In 1998, Col. Susan J. Smythe was the first woman appointed to a command dental surgeon position, at Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base (AFB), Colorado. At the start of the 21st century, the number of female Air Force dentists had risen to just under 15 percent.

It’s no surprise that the Air Force Dental Service was tasked to provide “optimum dental care to the space pilots, as well as finding a way to provide emergency dental care during prolonged space flight.” Guidelines for aerospace dentistry were first issued by the Surgeon General’s Office in 1957. When NASA began operations in Houston during the 1960s, dental care for the astronauts was primarily conducted by nearby Ellington AFB, Texas, with additional support from dentists at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas. In 1962, shortly before his historic orbital space flight, dentists at Lackland were called upon to fix a tooth Lt. Col. John Glenn had chipped.

Because the single-man Mercury missions were so short, in-flight dental provisions were unnecessary. Astronauts for the longer two-man Gemini missions were supplied with a toothbrush. With the three-man Apollo program and its goal of landing men on the moon, aerospace dentistry became fully developed. Dental researchers at the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine faced challenges presented by long-term weightless flight in a cramped space that were, in a word, unique. They ranged from basic care such as the brushing and flossing of teeth, to mission-threatening issues such as barodontalgia.

The detergents in regular toothpastes foam excessively in zero gravity conditions. And astronauts had no place to dispose of saliva and dentifrice in the cramped Apollo cabin. To overcome this, Maj. Ira Shannon created “Nasadent,” a foamless ingestible dentifrice.

Researchers created a compact emergency dental kit that contained everything an astronaut needed to provide dental care, from fixing a chipped tooth to performing a simple extraction. Air Force dental officers then taught the astronauts the necessary dental procedures. Though created for the Apollo program, the kits were not included in space missions until Skylab became operational in the early 1970s.

It’s a historical footnote that, thanks to the extensive preventative protocols and care conducted by all the branches of America’s dental military services, the emergency dental kits never had to be used. Unfortunately, Soviet Cosmonauts were not as fortunate. During his Salyut 6 space flight in 1978, Yuri Romanenko experienced an excruciating toothache. But the Soviet space program had made no provisions for in-flight dental care. As a result, during the entire two-week mission, Romanenko was in constant agony.

Over the decades, the Air Force Dental Service has developed one of the finest dental care programs in the world. Its influence and impact extend well beyond the service. Air Force dentists are on the faculties of many American dental schools, often holding chair positions. They have conducted research and written articles that have become classics in the field, and are in leadership positions in many professional organizations. The result is a rich history of contribution to the field of dentistry that continues to this day.

This article first appeared in The Year in Veterans Affairs & Military Medicine 2014-2015 Edition.