21. Pack Your Shit

Written: March 21, 2003

Friday, March 21st
Woke up at 10am. Nice sleep. Still in Kuwait. Hung out listening to the news and didn’t hear much other than the 3rd ID had rolled into Iraq with little to no resistance but the Marines were still working on getting to and taking Bashra.

We saw a few Medevac aircraft landing at the hospital pad but found out that they people they were bringing had heat injuries or broken ankles. No combat injuries.

At 4pm we were told that we would, once again, have to move the PR TOC. This time we had to move across the camp to the 11th Regiments HQ. We were all pretty pissed but packed up and moved to our new area. By 5:30 we were set up again. Fred and I walked back to get dinner. They claimed that this was the last night for hot meals. We had spaghetti and beans. It was ok. We then walked out to the aircraft to preflight and make sure we were ready for any missions. Prior to going out, I got back on the Chat room and found that a CH47 was launching to take a LRS team into An Najaf to check the area. We are supposed to move there within the next day or two.

Fred and I ran up our aircraft with no problems then came back to the TOC to track the CH47s mission. Other than poor communications with them, the mission went well. We then prepared for the move to An Anjaf by printing route cards. Shawn and CPT Cushwa did most of the work on that.

By the way, we have a secure internet connection and through it we monitor a chat room using mIRC software. Through the chat rooms, information is quickly passed about what is going on. It’s a great system when it is up and running but the connection is so slow that it gets frustrating.

We were packing up for the night when, at 11:50pm, we got a message that one of the LRS teams had been compromised by a non-hostile act (perhaps contact with civilians in the area). The process began for what would be our first mission.

I ran back to our sleep tents, a half mile, and told everyone, “Pack your shit bitches, we are rolling out.” I was out of breath from the run but told them to get to the TOC that we had a team to pick up.

We all met at the TOC and received more information on the mission. The mIRC was up and running and the information flow was smooth. Once we had the route we sent crews to the aircraft. We got some help from other crews who weren’t flying and they loaded our GPSs for us while we finished with the last details. There were 6 men out there and we would need to make a fuel stop going in and again coming out. We would use a Fat Cow. Everything was online for the mission to happen.

In the end, we were told that the team would hunker down and await friendly forces link up in about 6 hours. We were also told that we were to be prepared to launch tomorrow night to conduct the mission if needed.

We were all ready to go. We had good information and a great help came from the 101st Air Assault who helped us with weather and intelligence.

We all headed back to the tent and rested for what may come tomorrow.

Can hear lots of jets fling around. Not much else.

Went to bed at 4:30am.