10. Dark as Hell, no Moon...

Written: February 22 - 23, 2003

Saturday, February 22nd
Woke up at 7am and stayed in bed for another hour. At 10am I walked to the PX with Chad and Javier. There wasn’t much to choose from so I went back and left Javier with some money to get some Gator Aid for me.

At noon we had another meeting with the Team (Task Force Gabriel). We talked about the mission packets and information that we both need to have in the packets then looked over the assigned duties and tried to come to a compromise to who would accomplish which tasks when a mission came up.

Flew cross country NVG navigation tonight as the lead aircraft. Had Shawn and CPT Cushwa behind us. We took off around 7pm and it was dark as hell, no moon. We tried to stay between 50 and 100 feet above the ground but it was difficult to see and extremely hard to maintain altitude. There were a few times where both pilots could not see out in front of the aircraft. Fred and I both agreed that we were happy to be flying together because we both have a good amount of experience and our crew mix is strong. We flew towards a burning oil well and it was so bright that we just couldn’t see anything else. The fire on the well was huge. It looked like it was as big as our sleeping tent! We passed the fire and could see a bit better for a while but then it got soupy and we couldn’t see any more. We continued along to our landing zone and landed then took off for Camp Udairi. We landed, shut down and switched out crews with Sam who was flying the same thing next.

Came back from flying and talked with the Apache guys and helped them with the packet for tomorrows training mission. Went to the Gabriel TOC and found that someone created a patch for our new team so we all brainstormed to make it better. We have a good product now it just has to be drawn out so we can take it to Haji to get it sewn.

Heard we are supposed to get desert BDU’s and 2 desert, one-piece flight suits in a few days. I am going to get a desert name tag made for my flight suit and also a desert 12 Aviation Brigade patch. Will take a few days to get it as we have to send the order with a flight crew headed to Doha. No problem, some of the Alpha company pilots go there often.

Went to bed at 1:30am.

Sunday, February 23rd
Woke up at 9 am and found out that Alpha company had 3 aircraft crack windshields last night so they had to borrow the aircraft I was supposed to fly for today’s training. I spent the majority of the day working on the Gabriel TOC: printing maps for tonight’s flight and squaring away miscellaneous items for the team.

The other team flew during the day. This gave a few others the chance to fly the PR mission and see it from the cockpit. This way we have backup pilots who can fly it if need be.

LTC Franks put out that we are no longer allowed to land in the dust because he has no more windshields to replace broken ones if anymore get messed up. That kind of puts a hamper on our training so he said we can land in the desert once per training flight.

Sat in on the de-brief from the day mission then got set to fly tonights mission. Tonight we were going to head out in teams (2 x AH-64’s and 2 x UH-60’s) to practice at night. I ate dinner then headed to the aircraft. Fred was already out there getting started so I joined him, briefed then started up. We began to line up and found that the Apache’s were having some troubles and two of them dropped out of the flight. Then the UH-60 behind us ran into some troubles as well and dropped out leaving us and one AH-64. We decided to continue on. We departed and flew formation off the Apache which proved to be much better than leading a mission into something we can’t even see. There were times when the visibility was great and it looked like a perfect terrain model where there were trees and roads and houses, then there were other times where it looked like someone threw a sheet over the whole thing and we were back to low visibility and relying totally on the Apache so we had some sort of reference. We landed back at Udairi and shut down. We debriefed then went back to the tent to relax. I uploaded some pictures from my camera (video from tonight also) then talked with Fred and CPT Cushwa for a while before heading out to shave (I failed to shave today so it was quite bad).

Sat down to type my journal then off to bed at 1:30am. Tomorrow is supposed to be a “day off.” A day to rest and take a small break from all the hard work and long hours we have been putting in.