Finally, we get there

corey    Military    

As I remember from my last excursion to this part of the world (last year, about this time) the air is completely filled with dust. Constantly breathing it in and it coats everything that sits still for 5 minutes or more.

As I was walking to chow earlier today, crossing bare dirt, the dust was so thick that it reminded me of a moon landing. Deep footprints. Very much like those pictures.

Our rooms aren’t too bad. We have these miniture mobile homes that have 3 “dorm” rooms in them, each with a single outside door, a window, and an air conditioning unit. Since the rooms are only 15×20, the air conditioner works really well – too well if you let it run too long! I share my room with Ben.

(Ben is the “3 man” on my crew, he drives the jammer. I’m the “2 man” and I do all the prep on the airplane, wiring, final swaying and lockdown – and help the “1 man”, Chris, load the bombs Ben drives up with).

Chow is pretty good here. The Army had everything set before we got here, and since they handle hundreds of more people than we even have, they have a pretty large sized dining hall (two, actually) and serve all kinds of stuff. The chow is cooked and provided by outside contractors (Philipinos?) but the food is from this area, mostly Saudi Arabia. All the Coke cans are in Arabic, as is anything packaged.

Phew, they are painting in this room right now, so I better go before I start dancing and singing or something. More on stuff here later!

IM Blog Notification

corey    Projects    

Can someone try this and let me know if it works or not? If it does, I’ll put a more permanent link somewhere.

Military Efficiency, Part 2

corey    Military    

So, we try again this morning.

Get up bright and early (0530), repack our bags and pack them on a pallet again. We launch our own jets (two late F-16s) who take-off without incident. We grab a bus to our C-17, and hop on. Settle in and after awhile we actually start to taxi. Woohoo! We stop for about 30 minutes at the runway before one of the loadmasters comes on the intercom, “We’re having problems with the #2 engine, we have to go park.” Doh! And so, we taxi back to our spot and weigh anchor. Turns out they are going to need to replace a part in the engine, so it’s stuck here at least until tomorrow night. The flight crew laughingly dons their civilian clothes and flies out the gate at 80mph in their rented car.

Meanwhile, our Captain is trying to get us passage on one of the C-5s sitting on the ramp. There’s one going where we’re going, so we rush to get all our personal stuff off the C-17 and rush back to the terminal. And wait. About an hour later we get the boarding call, so we all hop into the stupid blue school bus (that we all loath, now), and truck it to the C-5. We pull up to the C-5 and await permission to get onboard. 15 minutes goes by. Someone is shaking their head on the ramp. Our driver gets a no-go signal. Doh! Turns out that the time it took them to load two of our pallets (just our personal baggage) has the air crew at 15 minutes over their “crew rest” period, thus they can’t fly. Laughingly, the air crew dons their civilian gear and hits the town.

And so, the morning goes. It’s now 1330 in the afternoon and supposedly we have a new crew for the C-5 (that won’t be over their crew rest period) coming at 1630, with a scheduled departure of 2030. We’ll see.

I’m not holding my breath.

Military Efficiency

corey    Military    

“Hurry up and wait” – the motto of all military forces

0530 – Wake up, shave, get dressed. Pack bags (stuff everything you can, because, somehow, your bag never holds as much as it did the first time you packed), tear down your bed.

0600 – Truck arrives, followed by the bus. Throw bags into the truck, hop on the bus for a round-about ride to our hanger.

0615 – Arrive at the hanger and being to open up the baggage pallets. We sort through the bags to dig up our A-Bags, which contain our helmets and flak vests. Must be wearing our helmets and flak vests when we land, so we all put them on. (They are heavy, so it’s easier to wear them than to try to carry them with our normal baggage). We throw all the bags plus our non-carry-on bags onto the pallets and tie them down to be loaded on the C-17.

0700 – Notice there is no activity at the C-17. At this point there should be crews there, running up the engines. Stop by the terminal, one of the Captains gets out to check on the status. Oh, the crew won’t be out for another hour or so. Must wait in passenger “terminal”.

0930 – Get call to board our C-17. We grab our gear, bags, put on our vests and all pile into a bus that’s barely large enough for all of us, let alone our gear. Truck it to the C-17.

0935 – Oh, they a fueling. It’ll be another hour. Back to the terminal.

1045 – Boarding call again, for our C-17. Once again, pile into the bus, drive to the jet and this time we get to board. Settle into a seat, get our vests and helmets in secure places (who wants to try sleeping in 30lbs of gear that really isn’t designed for comfort?).

1200 – Still on the ground, engines running. The captain of the C-17 comes on the intercom “Sorry for the delay, we’re trying to secure clearance into Iraq ..”. More waiting.

1430 – Still sitting on the ground, captain again comes on the intercom “Ah, um, yah. So, like, we can’t get clearance. Sorry.” (Being a schooled gentleman, of course, the pilot doesn’t actually talk like that).

1445 – Bus arrives to take us back to our hanger. At least we can leave our flak jackets and helmet on the plane.

1450 – Break into the pallets we just loaded earlier this morning. (Our clothes and personal affects are in our baggage!) Everyone grabs their bags and restacks the remaining bags to be ready to go the next morning.

1515 – Arrive back to our barracks. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” our Captain says.

Charge!

corey    Military    

Here I am, trying to write a blog post in Spain. This computer has a 128k connection _and_ is trying to get all the way into the States. Talk about pulling teeth.

Spain is pretty cool, the climate isn’t bad at all – other than the humidity. We drove in to Sevilla the other day, rented a van, and found the city pretty easily. Once we worked through traffic and found a place to park we wondered around a bit. Took a look at the large Cathedral (I forget the name), which is a pretty cool sight. The nice thing about Sevilla is that it’s a pretty old city. It has a lot of character that I see missing in my hometown, Denver. But, I can actually read the signs in Denver!

Even though I don’t know much Spanish, it’s amazing what you re-remember when forced to cope with large amounts of Spanish. It’s like highschool all over again!

We came in (and will go out in) a C-17, one of the Air Forces’ new cargo jets. I got to assist loading it when we got to New Mexico, so I saw how all the loading works with all their cool gadgets. While it took a few hours to load everything (I got to ride the jammer up the loading ramp, that took a few tries!), it was fun to play with this new “toy”. The inside isn’t covered with panels like commercial jets are, so you can see all the cabling and ducts and the wing joints – pretty interesting for the first couple hours. Since we travel in the same jet as our equipment (spare engine, other essential items in case one of our F-16s break down) the seats are lined up along the sides, facing in. Once we were cruising we staked out unclaimed space on the deck and took a nap. Works pretty well, even if the metal floor is cold.

They want to kick me off the computer, so I better go. Tomorrow we leave for Iraq, which is kinda a bummer .. it’s not so bad here! But, at least we’ll get our hazard duty pay and tax free pay for this month.

TTYL :)