51. D Day: 59 Years Later

Written: June 6, 2003

Friday, June 6th

D-Day + 59 years. I graduated from the Instructor Pilot course 1 year ago today.

Woke up at 4:15am and got dressed in the dark. Our crew gathered at the CP and headed out to the aircraft. LT Camp and I went to Flight Operations and put in our flight plan and got updated on intelligence. There were a few attacks over the night in Baghdad and other neighboring areas.

So we didn't have to fly single-ship to Baghdad, we linked up with Tom Foose in A/3-158th to follow them to Baghdad. We departed on time at 6:30am but had to turn around and come back to pick up a few passengers who were late in arriving. The flight was uneventful and as we got close to Baghdad, we broke off from the formation and headed towards the Palace where we would be landing.

We lined the aircraft up with the landing direction and proceeded inbound, slowly, looking for our place to land. We were in the middle of a man made lake/canal system that was a causeway with some beautiful buildings on them. We identified our landing spot; it was next to a large building and already had two aircraft in position. It didn’t look like we would be able to land there but we continued in slowly. To our front was another aircraft. To our left was a huge generator. To our rear was a sink (yes, a sink) on a pedestal. To our right was another building, a palm tree and the water. We landed without incident and shutdown.

We landed and immediately walked across the street, about 30 feet, and into the building next to us. Inside we could see a French style table, marble floors and a gold inlayed mirror. Amazing the stuff that Saddam had compared to what 99% of his people did not have.

We linked up with the pilots and crew chiefs from the 214th. They are out of Germany and are the USAREUR (US Army Europe) Commander’s pilots. They gave us a quick tour of their living area. They lived in a building that was in the middle of the lake and was accessible by a walking bridge. Their building had marble floors, faux French furniture and running water! They had a 10’x20’ kitchen complete with dishes and some fresh food items like garlic. The main room was 20’x20’ and had a 15’ ceiling. It had a chandelier and the same French furniture. We went outside and up onto the roof where they had a marble surface for preparing food along with a sink. From the roof, we had a great view of the palace across the lake as well as all the other support buildings. There were 3 buildings that clearly had bombs dropped through them. The lake looked inviting and the 214th said they fish and swim in the lake. What a stark comparisson to the living conditions we have...and I am sure there is some infantry guy who would look at how we live and would love to live where we do...such is life.

Our mission was to follow this crew on their trip to Kirkuk. They would be flying the CFLCC (Combined Forces Land Component Commander) who is Lieutenant General McKiernan. Once in Kirkuk, we would take on 2 more passengers—the 4th Infantry Division Commander and the 173rd Regimental Combat Team commander.

We took off a little after 8am and headed north. The flight was uneventful but was different because we passed over some beautiful terrain ranging from mountains to lakes to dunes to canyons.

We arrived in Kirkuk, got refueled then picked up the extra passengers and departed on a reconnaissance flight around the area. We flew past some oil refineries and some beautiful rivers flowing out of the mountains.

We flew along a beautiful ridge line that was a few miles behind the city of Kirkuk. The ridge rose up from the desert floor to about 1,000 feet then back down again on each side. We began seeing trench lines and bunkers and realized that we were flying over the Green Line. The Green Line was the front between the Kurds and the Iraqis and until 6 weeks ago was an active battle zone within this country. It was pretty cool to see such a place but it was abandoned now.

We flew back to Balad and shutdown. On the way back I saw a huge flock of birds in front of us and had no choice but to prepare for impact. We hit one and it left a large splatter of blood on the windshield in front of LT Camp.

Once we got home, we shutdown and went inside to debrief. Flew for 4.5 hours. I went back to my tent and found that I had 3 packages on my bed! I opened them and found that one of them was a care package for Dave—from Stef. He enjoyed that and I enjoyed my two other packages.

I talked to Sam about some flying stuff and then hung out in the tent relaxing for a while. Ended up falling asleep for a few hours and woke up at 8pm. I ate some popcorn then we watched, “Blazing Saddles.”

It was extremely cold in the tent.