Last night I got to fly in a Blackhawk at night back down to Bagram. The trip was justified because I helped LCDR Tillery and CDR Flesvig, with all their bags on the first leg of their long trip home. Secondly, I was encouraged to find and meet the Air Mobility operations team to build report as I lean on them often to coordinate moving reporters around the country. The last reason was that Dave has arrived and is stationed in Bagram for about the length of time that I will be at HQ.
I landed at the base later in the evening, but Dave was able to borrow a car and come get me and bring me to his barracks. He showed me one of his maintenance hangars and a couple of his Apaches – pretty bad ass bird. He told me about some of the missions they run and we commiserated on the arduous travels to get here. He told me about how frustrating it is for him to be the pilot with the most combat time and the most flying hours of anyone in the unit, while being the least experienced on that platform. He deployed almost right away after he finished his qualification training on the Apache.
We got coffee and hung out, we FaceTimed with mom and dad and his Melissa. Mine couldn’t answer the phone because she was on her way to get the kids bunk beds. I stayed in his barracks with him; as a senior WO3, he gets his own hooch, so I slept in the extra rack while he stayed awake and watched movies in order to reset his clock to start flying nights. It was really nice to see him and I hope that sometime in the next nine months that we are here, I will get to again.
The next morning, he helped me navigate a bus that transits the base. We got breakfast, then I bussed back to the other side of the base where the passenger (PAX) terminal is. I found out around midnight that my flight back was scheduled for 7 am. I missed that one because I still needed to meet the air ops folks. Problem was, no one knew where they were. Someone directed me to the right place, but when I got there, I asked someone if they knew what building I should go to and they directed me half a mile down the road. This turned into a wild goose chase, but I met with every air ops people I would ever work with, civilian and mil air, and eventually found the folks I was looking for, one door down from the person I originally asked if I was in the right place. But, I made the contacts I needed and was able to jump on a flight space-available and get back to work in time for a photo shoot with the 4 star general I was scheduled to shoot.
The flight back was interesting; six passengers plus two pilots and two gunners in a Blackhawk. A bus brings us from the terminal out to the flight line, and the six of us dawning kevlar and vests and luggage accompaniments, climb into the chopper. She (do you refer to helicopters as female the way we sailors do for ships?) taxi’s out and begins to take off. She then hovers over the end of the runway for a somewhat alarming length of time. Then we finally get going and the landscape looks so much different than the darkness we flew through the night before. We approach a small mountain and the port side gunner fires a few rounds. Then we circle around the mountain and the starbard gun pops a few off.
We circle the mountain four times while the soldier tries to clear his gun and reset the amo belt. Then I notice we are heading the wrong direction. We land back the Bagram airfield, taxi all the way around the flightline so the gunner can dismount and replace the weapon. When we get back to the mountain he opens up his new toy on some unsuspecting rocks. It was a long flight for sitting in a jump seat with a full protective kit on, but eventually I got back to my base and got to work.