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.

30 Sep

It’s hard to believe it has been a week since I last wrote. I did have a couple of slow days but the last 4 days I have flown 15 test flights, five of them today since Brian and J.R. are rotating from days to nights and back. Most of the flights have been on 170 coming out of phase. We knew it was going to be tough since we had to change out a blade and reset all the other ones. The last two days we have been trying to find a vibration that is saturating our tracking equipment. It has made the days go by fast – I get up at 6:00, eat and get to work by seven, I eat a bagel and juice for lunch that I get at breakfast, I leave work around 7:30 to make it to dinner before it closes at 8:00. It’s looking better because daylight savings time ended today so now the sun sets at 6:00 which is my quitting time. One thing I don’t like about working like this is that it narrows my focus. I don’t really have any idea what the rest of the unit is doing – it’s like we are in two different worlds. I have always tried to avoid that because you lose empathy for what others are going trough. It has been hard not to lose my patience when the mission guys come up to me at the end of the day (start of theirs) and start describing problems with the aircraft and asking how we are going to fix it (it’s usually the same few people).

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I found another picture of me - Tony took it while I was listening in on the daily flight platoon briefing.

This is what the cockpit looked like. The amazing thing is that they got it all back together and the only thing messed up was a couple of radio connections which we fixed pretty quickly.

This is Delgado working in the avionics closet testing all the wires - quite a mess.

These are a few pictures of 081 (the aircraft with control issues). It was pretty amazing how much stuff they ripped out trying to find and broken or chaffing wires. These are some of the components they took out of the avionics closet.

This is a picture looking towards the Syrian border. They are very a attached to arches as monument architecture over here.

This is Moore and Hull stuffing the Spongebob Squarepants piñata that Read's wife sent for his birthday. It was very entertaining watching him try to hit it while blindfolded.

24 Sep

I have flown test flights every day for the last five days. You would think that only flying four aircraft a night the odds are pretty good that one of these nights they will all come back good. Or at least not require a test flight since most of the maintenance we do doesn’t. After putting over ¼ million dollars worth of parts into 081 it was finally good enough to put back onto a mission. It’s not perfect but it is safe – at least it doesn’t try to fly into the ground on every turn. On its first night out it didn’t even get off the ground before another AFCS (advanced flight control system) part failed (one of the few parts we didn’t replace). I test flew it again today and it is going out for another try tonight. We think it might be scared of the dark. Today I did a test flight and a ground run in the morning then I was able to come back to the room for five hours – four of which I slept. I even made it to the gym this evening. I really need to get back into exercising. Another thing I need to do is make it to church. I have ended up working every Sunday since getting here so I need to figure out a way to rearrange my schedule. They only have one service which is 11:00 – right when test flights are ready.

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I found this very amusing. Tomlinson created this on the barriers right outside our office. You can click on the picture to see a bigger image and read the sign. It actually reminded me more of the rock piles we would see outside the Buddhist temples in Korea.

Rigdon refueling our aircraft after the mission. In the background is our hanger where all the phase work is done. We are working on getting doors put on but who knows when that will happen. We just got lights installed a couple of weeks ago. I must admit we do get much better service for construction projects from the Marines than we ever did from the Army in Balad.

All our cargo is brought out on forklifts like the one you see at the back of the other Chinook. Behind it is one of the big cargo planes that bring supplies in and out of country. Most of them are Russian design and operated by Russians and other Eastern block nationals. This war is certainly fueled by a global economy.

Another view of the Euphrates river winding through the country.

I thought this was a strange sight - there were several houses with these bright green lawns and trees surrounded by desert. They are some of the only green lawns I have seen anywhere in country.

Loading up some Marines at a base out west.