23 Aug

We had the memorial service two days ago. It was very well done and a good way to honor the crew of Dry Ice 41. The chapel was packed with a lot of Marines all the way up to the General level. It was a nice way to show us that we are considered one of them. The guys did a really good job with the eulogies – Brian said it was the hardest thing he has ever had to do. The last few days I have found myself thinking about the crew more rather than less. I keep praying that God will give me the strength and wisdom to do everything I can to prevent this from happening to our unit again. We have had a bad run of maintenance problems over the last couple of weeks. In addition to the normal little things we have had problems with major components like rotor heads, aft shafts, engines and transmissions. It seems to be something new every night. It’s been awhile since we have had four aircraft launch without incident. Tonight we had three different problems – we were able to fix two but the third crew had to go to the backup. It makes for long days – I worked until 1AM tonight and I have to go in tomorrow morning to give Brian a day off. He has been working for over three weeks straight. J.R. (one of our instructor pilots) has started to fly with me to get him signed off as a test pilot. He went to the course two years ago but has never done the job at the unit level. It will be nice to have three again but it is going to be awhile before he can be on his own. The higher ups have requested another test pilot from the rear but we will see how that goes.

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