2 Nov

Staying up for 36 hours to reverse out worked out about as well as I could expect. My sleep schedule was whacked and I kept waking up at 2 AM for the first couple of mornings. I would be good until about 3 PM at which point my body said enough. I was scheduled to fly my first day back on days but Christl took my flight which was probably a good idea even though I wanted to do the mission. The 31^st was my next mission and that morning it went from beautiful to less than ½ miles visibility as the dust rolled in. It finally cleared up enough for us to fly around 1PM. It was scheduled to be a long mission so we knew we were going to have to drop some legs even before we took off but things got worse when we landed at Al Asad. Our mission was to haul ammo out to a FOB. None of the Marine helicopters can fit 463L pallets (metal Air Force pallets that lock into a roller system we use) so they haul stuff on wooden pallets which are really hard to slide across our floors. Communications got mixed up and the ammo guys were told we didn’t want 463Ls so they showed up with 16 wooden pallets that weighed over 2200lbs apiece ( by the way, I found out 155mm rounds weigh 90lbs apiece). We knew it was going to be ugly when the forklift placed the first pallet on the rollers and the pallet broke in three places. We worked out a better system but by that time we were rapidly running out of daylight. We were only able to load 4 pallets before we had to call it quits if we were going to get anything out to the FOB. As it was we didn’t get back to Al Asad until after sunset, so we had to put goggles on to fly back to TQ. It was a good learning experience but frustrating. I hate being the weal link in the chain and even though we had a lot of factors against us it’s embarrassing not to be able to complete our mission. We are never able to just finish it the next day because they always have something else for us. So the supported unit has to figure out another way to get what they needed or get back in line to request us again. We had a rough night last night and all 4 of the aircraft that flew came back broke but it gave me an interesting day. It was a beautiful morning – clear with a light breeze and 58 degrees! It was such a nice day that I was wishing the test flights would last a little longer – one of those days when there is not much I would rather be doing than flying. It’s not often that I think I am overpaid (at least not over here) but the thought did cross my mind this morning :).

Clear H 90 L 58