41. A White Puff

Written: May 15 - 22, 2003

Thursday, May 15th
Another hot day but it actually started with a pleasant morning. I woke up to my alarm clock at 0645 (we are now working off of Baghdad Local time) and spent the day assisting with the planning for the mission tonight.

While we planned, Fred returned from Doha after being there for 11 days-he got stuck there when his engines were found to have deteriorated quite a bit due to the massive amounts of sand they ingest.

Company meeting to welcome LT Karkalik and LT Camp, to change CPT Smith to the Executive Officer position and to say goodbye to Javier who is going to B/3-158th.

LRS insertion and extraction tonight. We attended a briefing at 3-158th and CPT Kerr was there. His company will be flying the mission and our team will be backing them up tonight should anything happen. Our team will remain on standby to retrieve the LRS team if anything were to happen to them.

Uneventful mission. Went as planned...quite and no problems.

Friday, May 16th
I think Emily is having a birthday party today but I am not really sure.

Saturday, May 17th
P.R. standby. Spent most of the morning taking wings off 3 aircraft and moving those wings (and tanks) into the hangar.

At noon we took a Platoon picture.

Checked the temperature at 2:30pm. It was 102.2 degrees outside and 98.6 inside the hangar.

Sunday, May 18th
Flew with Dave to Samarah East to do some flight training. He planned a flight to Samarah East which is an airfield 10 miles north of Balad. We flew up their during the day. The airfield is destroyed and hasn’t been touched by Americans. There are huge revetments dug that are filled with ammunition of all sorts. I think we saw some 2,000 pound bombs as well as 500 pounders and other smallers ones. The runways and taxi ways were all destroyed by cratering munitions and most of the hangers had a bomb hole through them. There was an underground fuel tank that was hit and burning as well as at least 3 large airplanes destroyed.

Fred was flying with Phil and I was flying with Dave. We were using the airfield to conduct emergency procedures and other mission tasks. Fred called us over the radio to tell us that he saw a white truck on a nearby hill. I told Fred that Dave and I would fly over there and check it out. As we got closer, Dave said, “Hey guys, keep an eye on that truck and let me know if you see any white puffs of smoke” (signifying a rocket launch). Just as he said that, we all watched in horror as we saw a white puff erupt from the back of the truck. Within a half-second, we all realized that it was a white sheet that they unfurled to signify not to shoot. We all laughed at that point but for a split second we all thought that we were dead. Quite funny actually.

Monday, May 19th – May 22nd
Getting harder and harder to keep the journal going. Either I forget to do it or there just simply isn’t anything that interesting to write about.