This is a little oasis out in the western desert that I think used to be a military base. It always amazes me to see how many resources in this country were focused towards war. As I fly over I can see miles of defensive positions dug into the sand. They are all across the country and pretty much useless without air power. It reminds me a lot of Albania - another country ruled by a paranoid dictator. It's not hard to believe this country has been fighting someone since the early 80's.

You may be sick of the Euphrates river but here is another shot of it winding across the desert.

This was taken yesterday as we were debriefing our mission. It was a good day :)

12 Nov

I have managed to weasel my way onto a couple of missions over the last few days. More guys are starting to give up their flights. It’s a lot more work flying but it sure makes the time go by faster. There are a couple of guys who promise their wives they won’t volunteer for flights – I know Wendi doesn’t like it when I do but she knows how much I enjoy it. My first flight was a pretty typical one out west but the one yesterday was a lot of fun. It was hauling sling loads out of Al Asad. The weather started out marginal but by the time we had landed and organized the loads the dust had blown through and it stayed clear the rest of the day. We ended up moving close to 70,000lbs of cargo both internally and by sling load. We actually hauled more than they expected and did it in less than 5 hours. It’s always a good feeling to be able to work at your full capability and know you are making a difference. The Marine Corp celebrated its birthday on the 10^th by giving everyone two beers. As you can imagine it was very tightly controlled and you had to drink them in the chow hall right after they gave them to you. I don’t even like beer but I decided to take one and it was actually pretty good. The first guys started going on leave over the past week. It’s good to see them go – one more milestone. No one really wanted to leave this early but they had to be spaced out because we can’t have more than a certain percentage gone at any given time. We now fall under the Germany unit out of Balad for administrative things like awards and other paperwork which includes assignments of leave dates. We figured they would take care of their own but they didn’t have to be so blatant about it. They gave our five guys the first five days of December and kept all the Christmas dates for themselves. They could at least pretend to be nice.

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This is on the landing pad on another base. We just finished dropping off sling loads and had landed to unload some mail containers.

During our mission yesterday the loading ramp at Al Asad was packed. There were five civilian planes, a C-130 and a C-17. We had to park out on the taxiway to get our cargo loaded. I couldn't get a good shot that showed the whole scene this one captures the atmosphere.

This is a mosque that sits just outside one of the little bases we land in.

I took this yesterday on our way to Al Asad. That white line was really distinct across the horizon. It took us awhile to realize it was sunlight reflecting off the wave of dust heading our direction.

This is a small lake we fly by on our way out to the bases out west. It always fascinates me - just the contrast between the blue water and the nothing surrounding it.

We are loading 155MM rounds. We learned pretty quick that those wooden pallets are just about worthless with that much weight on them. Each round weighs 90lbs and a pallet of them is over 2300lbs. As soon as they set the pallet on the rollers it collapsed. Now we put them all on metal Air Force pallets but that was a painful learning experience.

7 Nov

I haven’t been doing much of anything except a few maintenance flights the last couple of days. I did the pre-phase test flight on 168 on 1 Nov and started the post-phase flights on 5 Nov. Our maintenance guys are getting really good – our goal is to do a phase in 7 days and these guys are pushing them out in 4-5 days. I was really hoping to get the entire post-phase completed in one flight but one of the engines failed its checks and the autorotation was out of limits. I finished the test flight today and now we are just waiting for the next one. The day missions are starting back up but now that we moved more pilots to days I am only on the schedule about once a week. Some of the other PCs are getting tired of flying so I may be able to take some of their flights. Things have been a little less mundane on the night side. A few days ago we had a big mission to pick up troops after they had completed a raid. Right as the first acft was touching down there was an explosion off the front side that damaged some of the cockpit windows and pushed out all of the side windows. It turns out explosives one of the soldiers was carrying detonated in his backpack. They put all the injured on the acft and flew them to the hospital in Baghdad. The next night we sent parts and maintainers over to fix the damaged acft. Everyone is back now but it shook the crew up pretty good. I really feel for the infantry unit – they are only a few weeks away from going home.

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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 :).

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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).