58. It's All Perspective

Written: Saturday, June 14th, 2003

The temperatures continue to rise: 113 degrees is the normal high right now. It WILL get hotter. Our only solace is the air conditioner that we piped into our sleeping tents. It helps take some of the heat off of the situation and although it is 90 degrees in our tent (during the day) it feels cool…so its all perspective.

Supposed to show to work at 6pm tonight so we can attempt to fly Chris’s mission again. If it doesn’t go tonight, then it may be postponed for a few days until we get the illumination we need.

Woke up at 9am and laid around for most of the day. I washed my clothes – by hand still – and also took a shower!

Before I took a shower, I had SGT Hester shave my head. My hair was getting pretty long so I had him take the clippers to it. Maybe this time I will let it grow and get a tapered cut for going home…if we find out that we are going home in the next few months.

Finished watching, “Patton.” It was a great movie.

V Corps Change of Command occured today. We had General Wallace and we will now have General Sanchez. I don’t know either of these guys from Adam so it doesn’t matter to me, but we all hope that with the change of command, we will finally get some word on when we may leave. There is no word yet. We are still here, making the best of this situation.

Although the weather started off looking bad, it improved for tonights Pilot in Command evaluation for Chris Monteiro. Things went well for him and although there were some things that could have been better, he did a great job and I signed him off as a PIC.

His flight took off from Balad at 8pm – it was still day – then transitioned to night (without goggles). I simulated an emergency where we had to land in an open field. Then continued to Sahra Airfield in Tikrit. As we approached the airfield we could see explosions in the distance. I wasn’t sure that’s what it was until it got darker and we got closer. We could see large explosions near our destination. We talked to the tower and they told us that there was looting and a bunker caught on fire and there were explosions going on all day.

We landed in Sahra and shutdown for 1 hour. We took off after the moon was up and Chris flew a timed route to land in an LZ in our training area which is around Samara Airfield. The flight was uneventful as far as enemy activity goes but we all learned some things which is good.

Came back, debriefed then went to bed around 3am.

Tomorrow we are having a Battalion BBQ! We had to pay $10 for the food which is a bunch of crap, but it will be worth it to have hamburgers, hot dogs, ribs, corn on the cob and chips! I hope it tastes as good as we all anticipate.

As I went to bed, I heard an unfamiliar sound—I heard a loud rumbling getting closer and closer then recognized it as a jet flying low over our runway. There were two total and they were extremely loud - I think they were B1 bombers!