A picture of the crew I flew with on the raid. L-R Fox, Palmer, Martin, Myself, Weber. It was a very good crew that made the mission almost routine. Yes Dave, your flag is on its way (at least as soon as I find a box to ship it in :).

This is Mark - just about the hardest working pilot we have. In his previous life he was an Army Ranger so he has no idea of the concept of time off. The biggest problem we have with him is getting him to stay away from work long enough to reset his duty day so he can fly. He is a lot of fun to be around and he constantly keeps us entertained with stories from his Ranger days.

This is after the main briefing and now it is just the pilots as we go through the whole mission and cover what the individual aircraft are going to do at each stage. L-R Dwayne, Ken, Dimon, Roston, Mark, and Tony's hand.

This was taken during the planning and kneeboard packet preparation for the air assault we did last week. L-R Wayne, Melissa, Roston, Eric, and Dwyane.

28 Oct

I flew my last night mission last night (at least for a month). Most of my flights have been under high illumination conditions (which means close to full moon). I enjoy that more because I get to see the country better and of course it makes flying easier. The downside is other people can see us but the way we are flying on this rotation has eliminated a lot of the ground fire threat. It has also been enjoyable just being up and around at night – the desert under a full moon is beautiful. We did our first raid a couple of nights ago – it’s amazing how many troops we can put on the ground with four Chinooks. Two days later we went back in and picked them up. They even managed to get some of the guys they were looking for (a lot of times they come up empty). The unit we supported was another Army unit that is stationed out here – they said it was nice to get to work with Army again (we speak the same language). There was a lot of planning and work that went into it but it sure was a nice change. All in all I actually had quite a but of variety on nights – in addition to the raid I flew to Al Asad once, Balad twice, and a couple of new areas that none of us had ever been to yet. Today I am trying a different technique for reversing back to days. I have stayed up since my mission last night and I hope to make it through the day and go to bed at a regular time tonight. I have just about run out of things to do and I found watching baseball doesn’t help :).

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22 Oct

Being on nights is everything I had hoped for. First off it is a nice break from maintenance. The nights I’m not flying I’m still there at departure and when they return to coordinate any work that needs to get done but it’s not that constant bombardment we get during the day. Also, nights are a little more laid back, there aren’t as many people there and you get that working late at the office feeling – that you don’t really have to be there but by doing so you show how hard working and dedicated you are :). As a result almost no one works a full 12 hour shift. I also love the fact that I never have to set my alarm. It’s just a trade-off - the longer I sleep the less stuff I can do during the day. Our missions are getting shorter – both day and night. Most of the unit rotations are complete and we won’t start the next cycle until around January. We have also seen a big increase in the number of Ospreys flying around. They replaced the CH-53s which rarely flew around her so I think they are taking some of our missions. Our flights lately have only been about half full. It looks like we may start doing some different types of missions – we have our first one scheduled for tomorrow night so we will see how that goes. On a good note 174 and 169 are back up so we are healthy again. Now it is 168 that is giving us fits but if everything worked then what would I have to do?

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This is me shooting the M240. The guys linked together 300 rounds and let me blast away at some old cars. It is amazingly accurate even out to 800 yards. I found it is a lot easier to shoot from the air - just easier to see the target and you don't get all the hot casings building up around your arms but all in all it was a lot of fun.

This is Kidd with all his radios. It was pretty humorous watching him work when multiple people called him at the same time. He had to keep in touch with range control, the airfield tower, and our guard posts all at the same time.

Ortiz is firing the M240 with Friend feeding the links and Kidd supervising (even in a combat zone the ranges all have to have safety supervisors).

The M16 firers shooting in the prone position.

Friend is watching Ortiz (one of our new gunners) put together a M240 (our new door mounted machine gun that replaced our Vietnam era M60s - the 240s actually fire more than 2 rounds at a time). Ortiz has to get ground qualified before he can go through aerial gunnery.

The guys are unloading all the ammo. The range is on the other side of the post, over by the lake so it took us about 20 minutes to get there. We ended up getting pushed off the range early because a convoy was due to come through. Before each convoy rolls out all the escort vehicles run through the range to test fire their weapons.

Penley(a crew chief), Costello(our resident weapons guy), and Friend(the head instructor for the enlisted crew members) in the back of the HMMWV on the way to the range.

18 Oct

I switched to nights two days ago. It was actually quite easy to reverse out. I was at work at 7AM on Monday, stayed up until midnight then went to Green Bean for coffee, went to bed at 3AM, went to work at 4PM, flew a mission and got back to the room at 4AM. It took me over a week to get comfortable on the day schedule. In theory I like getting up early but in reality I am much more suited to a night routine. My missions the last couple of nights have gone very smooth. I’m certainly a little rusty on goggle flying. Last night I came in too high and fast on two different approaches. Those are the hardest thing to judge at night – speed and distance. Another advantage of flying at night – it’s cooler. Last night was the first night I got back not drenched in sweat. At one point we were up in Al Asad and I had to close my window (it was 68 degrees). Tuesday night our mission took us up to Balad – it was fun to see the place again but I’m glad I’m not stationed there. It was as busy as always and we had two Apaches fly right over the top of us in the traffic pattern. Monday afternoon a group of us went out to the firing range. Most of the group was there to qualify (promotion board or new weapon) but I just wanted to shoot. I shot 90 rounds with my 9MM pistol – it was a lot of fun and first time I have been able to shoot without trying to qualify. It also gave me a lot more confidence in the weapon and my ability to use it.

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The Marine's newest toy - the V22 Osprey. It is a strange looking thing - I hope it works for them because if nothing else it will help us get out us get out of here sooner. I still haven't seen one flying - just taxiing around.

This is the road we landed on to drop off some passengers. It is about as close to the Iraqi population as we ever get. We were a big hit with the kids you can see in the center of the picture. They just stared at us from the moment we landed until we took off.

It is mostly sheet metal damage but it did tear off a major bracket that we have to get from the states. It has really killed our maintenance flow since this aircraft was right in the middle and now we are having to skip other aircraft past it. With only eight it is a delicate balance.

The group assessing 169 - Rich (our safety officer) on the left and the big three in maintenance (not counting the test pilots of course :) Steve, Barry (he runs the maintenance platoon) and Williams (our civilian LAR -coordinates repairs with the engineers among other things).

Christl showing off 169 after it hit the ground a little too hard. Everyone was fine but the impact shoved the strut up into the aircraft and a bolt flew off and hit a blade so that is going to be replaced.

These are all the Marine's bags. It is a full load once all the Marines get on board. You can see why they like to use us - we can move a lot of stuff on every turn.

This is a small town at the base of a dam where I did a few missions. Sections of it look like American suburbs.

Another view of the Euphrates river. The palm groves are interesting to look at but they are always a place we try to avoid - lots of good hiding spots in there.

15 Oct

The time between my entries is getting longer as Wendi likes to point out :). It hasn’t been anything planned – just a combination of laziness and settling into a routine. The days are just flowing together without a whole lot to distinguish them. I start separating them by small things such as today I cleaned my room or today I went to the coffee shop (both of which I actually did today) but that is not all that interesting to write about and even less interesting to read. As far flying goes I have flown a few test flights and some missions since my last entry. The maintenance is moving along but it is going to get ugly pretty soon. 169 is still broke (landing gear) and 174 is not flyable because its anti-missile system is not working. It is something we have been fighting since we got into country and the engineers can’t figure it out. With those two aircraft out and the amount of hours we are flying the other aircraft are getting pushed into phase sooner than we can handle. It is impossible for us to do more than one at a time so they are going to start stacking up. It’s painful to see a train wreck coming and not be able to do anything about it. I had another long mission yesterday (8hrs). It was pretty uneventful except one leg where we landed some VIPs in a small town. The ground guys just closed off a section of the road where we landed. When we came back and picked them up we ended up having to wait on thee ground about 10 minutes. It was interesting seeing something at ground level besides a military base.

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9 Oct

Well I am glad I got that one day off because the next one was long. Our mission was heavy RIP (replacement in place) from Al Asad to one of the FOBs (forward operating base) out west. It’s called a heavy RIP because the Marines have all their bags with them (two duffels and a rucksack each). The aircraft is pretty packed by the time we get everything on. It’s a great mission for us though because we can carry 4 times the people on each lift as compared to the unit we replaced. We took off in marginal weather (dust) and it only got worse when we got to Al Asad. The field went IFR which means only one flight of aircraft can move at a time so it took us forever to pick up our passengers, get fuel, and get out of there. The drop-off point was interesting (on top of a dam) and according to the charts it was only big enough to hold 1 CH-47 so I had to circle while the lead aircraft landed, dropped off troops and bags and loaded outgoing troops and bags. It took so long we had to refuel again when we got back to Al Asad. After our first turn we had already flown for over 4 hours and I knew we weren’t going to make it under our limit (8hrs) with still two more turns to go. On our next turn in we convinced the guys on the ground to let us try and land two at the same time (it’s a little tight but do-able) so we could load and unload together. Between our second and third turns we shut down (not something we like to do because it increases our chances of an aircraft breaking) to unload and load in order to save fuel and flight time. We ended up coming back after sunset and logging 8.3 hours but we moved over 350 people and 60,000lbs of bags with two aircraft. Two days later I did the same mission again and between better weather and knowing how to do it we finished in two less hours. On another note we also managed to bang up another aircraft. It’s a long story but the end result was they landed too hard on the pad out by our parking and drove one of the aft landing gear up into the aircraft. We can fix it here but the parts are going to be had to get. It just so happens to be 169 – the same one I had flown 8.3 hours on the previous day and one of our best aircraft. We are doing great work over here and the higher ups want to love us but we keep doing stupid things (lost weapon, ID cards, secret thumb drives, maps, breaking aircraft) and making it hard on ourselves. We had a meeting with all the PCs (pilot in command) that I hope will get us started in the right direction. By the way we finally finished 170 and I got to fly it on a mission – works great J

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This is Rich our safety officer looking a little tired. It could be because he is having to listen to J.R. :) I think those are my legs on the right of the picture.

J.R. relaxing in the IP (instructor pilots) office.

The guys doing planning for one of the night missions. L-R Dwayne, Ken, Brian, Dennis.

This is Marcus - one of our newest pilots and doing a really good job. I spent a lot of time flying with him at JRTC (in his home town) down in Louisiana because he was the only pilot not up on NVGs so the lucky guy got to do all the test flights with me. He is doing a day rotation now and it has been fun getting to fly with him again.

4 Oct

Today was just what I needed. For the last couple of weeks I have been tired in the morning but after some coffee and getting involved in work I would be fairly alert for the rest of the day but these last couple of days I have been tired all day having a hard time focusing. We pretty much hit a stopping point on 170 yesterday so I decided to take today off. I slept for about 9 hours last night, got up, talked to Wendi, watched some baseball (I taped the first games of the playoffs), and went back to sleep for 3 hours. I managed to sleep through breakfast and lunch but it felt great. This evening I watched more baseball (Cubs lost), some of Planet Earth (a BBC series sent to me by Betsy), went to the coffee shop and read God’s Secretaries (about the writing of the King James Bible) and never though about work much at all (I think I am like Dad in the sense retirement is going to suit me just fine). Tomorrow I am flying on a mission to get away from maintenance for another day. Today is our 3 month mark which means our 1 year starts now – a little depressing so I try not to think about it much. If I was in a Marine unit I would be halfway through my deployment by now. I think the saying “all politics are local” applies to war as well. It would be hard to be against something that gets us out of here even if it may not be what’s best for the country. It comes down to our inherent human selfishness which is why neither communism nor pure democracy will ever work (and on another note it shows how amazing the sacrifice of Jesus was and is). People fought to come on this deployment not as a chance to serve their country (although they might have joined the military for that reason) but because they didn’t want to be left out or let their friends down. If it was my choice we would have been out of Iraq yesterday – another example of why civilian control of the military is a good idea :).

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This is Walls - another Flight engineer. He is one of my favorite guys to fly with but we are going to lose him in a few months. He found out last week that he has been accepted to flight school. I hate to lose him but he is going to make a great pilot.

This is a classic picture of Geda - one of our newest Flight engineers. He was stuck on days for about a month so we got to spend a lot of time together. He is always in a good mood and never fails to put a smile on my face. On the left is CPT Jackson - one of the flight platoon leaders.

This picture was taken during one of our afternoon flight platoon briefings. These are all crewmembers except for the two pilots in the lower right - Justin and Steve (L-R). Right above them is Sena our resident comedian - it is hard to find him without a smile on his face. Right next to him is Barber who owns 170 (the aircraft that is currently giving us fits).

I just liked the colors on this picture. This is aircraft 176 and the engine guys are trying to find out where the oil leak is coming from on the number 2 engine (we ended up having to replace the engine).

The guys get requests to fly flags during a mission then afterwards they take a picture of the crew, add it to a certificate (saying this flag flew over Iraq and describing the mission), then it is mailed back to the states. Then the people back home fly the flag that once flew in Iraq. Most of the time it is for friends, family, VFWs or other military support groups. The aircraft they are in front of is the notorious 081 that we got from Balad (the one that has flown about the same number of mission hours as test flight hours). The other unit nicknamed it the hedge trimmer after they hit a tree with it. It has a cool Homer picture on it but it is still a pain. It belongs to Winsor (the guy lying on the ground) so I can't say anything really bad about it.