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I just got this from Brad..........
I just returned safely home from a long couple of months in the middle east.
I suppose this deployment went as well as any could. We had no casulties
except for my laptop computer. Poor thing passed on back in early July.
I'm suffering from the worst case of heat rash you've ever seen and several
sand flea bites. Not a comfortable thing at all I assure you. I do believe
that I have reached the point in my life where living in a tent in the
desert is no longer fun. As strange as it is, I used to enjoy it.
Not having access to hotmail out where I was became quite inconvienent. As a result, I'm sending this nonsense that I wrote a few days ago but wasn't able to send until I got back here to South Carolina.
Enjoy....
Here I am again, somewhere between Mosul and Baghdad, Iraq. We are carrying a division of soldiers that are being redeployed to Baghdad. Only being able to carry 146 troops at a time makes that job pretty slow. Stuff is still improving over here but you can't always tell it. I can tell by a rather morbid way. I haven't carried many sets of human remains during this deployment and the wounded numbers seem to be down. If the Iraqi people will ever make more than a half-hearted attempt, they will be able to control their own country. Most of what is dealt with over here is nothing but the equivalent of organized crime. It just so happens that these criminals use car bombs. It's my personal opinion that the Iraqi government
isn't trying too hard I've been over here for a little over 75 days and have about three to go. I won't complain, some of these Soldiers are here for a year at a time. Every time I carry these guys somewhere I'm a little happier my Daddy wouldn't let me join the Marines. I keep flying to places that are nothing but weird sounding names on a map nobody looks at. Most people know roughly where Baghdad is but very few people know the locations of Al Sarrah, Al Taqqadium, Quwarrah, Al Asad, Tikrit, Mosul, Kirkuk and other places like that. They are names you might find in a National Geographic or in a book about the Middle East but for me; they are names in a logbook. Names that for years to come will remind me of this awful pastime we call war. I finished filling up another logbook on the first leg of today's mission. My logbook has all my flying times, destinations, cargo load and dates. In the back pages is a list of all the units I've ever carried in or out of combat. In the margins throughout the book are little notes of when I've been shot at or when things went wrong and scared me. There are also a few pages towards the end that contains the names of all the dead men I've carried. During the course of this deployment, I've passed 4,000hrs in C-17s and 1,000hrs of combat time. I've added a few combat airdrops, a few prisoner missions, a couple of dirt landings and three more humanitarian missions. That was when we carried a bunch of the refugees from Lebanon. My military logbooks, I think I have about six or seven of them filled up so
far, will all end up in my "I love me" box someday. When she's older maybe my daughter will be interested in what her Daddy did in the war.
My civilian logbooks are sitting in the "I love me" box back in South
Carolina. They will be of no use to anybody in the future. Truth be told,
they are of no use to me. They range from a "Big Chief" writing tablet from elementary school, an old spiral notebook from junior high, the backside of several flight plan forms, various sheets of notebook paper and maybe two or three regular logbooks. I took my very first plane ride when I was eleven years old, got my first student license at 16 and my last one late last year. During the last 21 years I've managed to acquire around 3,800 hours of civilian time. I don't know how much of it has been with me at the controls and how much of it has been as a passenger but I've still never managed to actually get a license. Quite honestly I doubt I ever will. A lot of my time was logged when I was wedged into various crop dusters as a kid, quite a bit was in various Cessna's with the guy that flew pipeline patrol back home and much of it was logged in a Piper Super Cub while helping the deputy Sheriff shoot coyotes. At least eight hours were logged in the baggage compartment of a Piper Lance while flying to the Texas Air Races back in the late 80s and about 5 minutes was logged in the wing baggage compartment of a Piper Navajo. Nobody really knew how loud it was in flight but I fit in there so I was the test subject. I can tell you it is loud as well as hot! A couple of nights ago, we were making a landing on a dirt strip in Afghanistan. Between the standard praying, Hail Mary's, bowing to Mecca and the animal sacrifice; I wondered how I had ever gotten my self into this
mess called aviation. About the time I put my Buddha statue back in my
helmet bag, it occurred to me. It's all my Daddy's fault. I remember
watching the movies "Flying Tigers" and "Twelve O'clock High" with him. He
used to build model airplanes for me, my brother and sister. He also showed us how to fill them with gunpowder and fire works. That would come in handy later in life. When I was four years old, Dad took us to the airshow at Reese AFB in Lubbock, Texas. I remember the entire airshow, but three memories really stick out. First, a man named Joe Mabee carried me, Mark and Michelle past the crowd line so that Mamma could take a picture of us in front of his P-40. Second, the crew of the B-25 told my dad that they weren't allowed to fly in the show because "nobody wants to see the old planes, all anyone cares about is the jets." Last but not least, I remember being mad because some drunk staggered into my Mamma and dumped his beer all over her. Of course, years later I would come to discover what a large part alcohol plays in airshows and all was forgiven! I was very fortunate to grow up in a part of Texas that was covered in old airplanes and airshows. I was also extremely lucky to meet a lot of warbird folks that were very nice to me and never treated me like the kid that I was. I'm fortunate that my luck still holds out to this day in that respect. When I was eleven years old my life changed forever. Howard Pardue took me for a ride in his TBM Avenger. As if I wasn't afflicted with the aviation sickness as it was, I certainly contracted it after that!
My personal list of aviation hero's has several dozen names on it, but the
one at the top isn't a pilot, but he could have been. He never worked on
airplanes, but he would have been great at it. That person is my Daddy.
The same person that took me to my first airshow nearly thirty years ago is the one that has always made it possible to live my dream of being involved with warbirds.
There is no way to count the miles he has driven, taking me to airshows and airplane museums over the years. I've lost count of the times he has stood on the ground watching as I went for a ride in somebody else's airplane. Several years ago, I had the chance to take a one-way ride in a B-17. He had no problem driving over 400 miles to get me. In contrast, my second ex-wife got mad because she had to drive 60 miles to pick me up after a one-way Mustang ride. Everybody else said, "But he had to take it. It was a P-51 ride!!" Now, over seven years later, she is still mad! Several months ago, my Daddy stood on the ground at Midland, Texas and watched me help run the engines on the Confederate Air Force B-29. Like so many other times in my life, I looked through the window at him. As he has always done in the past, he was taking pictures for my "I love me" collection. My Mamma is also one of my aviation hero's. The reason is simple. She let my Daddy take me to all the airshows. In the end, she is the one who gave the permission to fly and play with airplanes. I would never have been able to do it if she didn't let me. Although Daddy got me into airplanes, Mamma got me interested in being an airplane mechanic. When I was seven or eight years old, Mamma bought me a book called "How airplanes fly" or something like that. It had all sorts of pictures showing the mechanical aspect of how airplanes operate. I seem to recall being mildly interested in it. Several months later, we were at an airshow somewhere in Texas or New Mexico. One of the things on display was a cut away propeller. The guy standing by it started to explain how the oil pressure in the prop dome along with the counterweights controlled the angle of the blades and such. Mamma studied on it for a minute and finally said,
"So, basically that controls the amount of bite the prop takes out of the
air." The fellow with the prop said "yea, pretty much." As we walked away, Mamma said "I'll bet that is explained in that book you have at the house." That moment, I think, is when the seed of aviation maintenance was sown.
A few days later, after being endowed with all the knowledge you could
possibly acquired from a book called "Why Airplanes Fly", and having a
pretty good understanding about how controllable pitch propellers worked, I carried a ladder into my bedroom. My brother and I proceeded to change the blade angles on our ceiling fan. Now you have to take into account that this was at least twenty-five years ago. At the time, ceiling fans had metal blades and much more powerful motors than they do today. I'm not exactly sure how powerful the motor was, but I do know this. If you tied a piece of parachute cord to your sister's cat's collar and tied the other end to the ceiling fan, the cat would sail around the room fast enough to break his collar and land nearly in the kitchen. One other little bit of cat trivia for you; they have good memories and hold grudges for years! At this point I'd like to point out that I have nothing against cats. In fact I love them. I just can't finish a whole one by myself.
We bent the blades until they were just nearly flat. The ceiling fan would
spin about ten million times a minute and very little air would come off of
it. The fan motor on the other hand made a noise much like a cat tied to a ceiling fan. We bent the blades again, this time they were facing just nearly straight up and down. Now the fan would only spin about five times a minute but we had a virtual tornado in our room. I mean it was blowing dirt out of the carpet and toys from under the bed. This went on for a couple of days. It wasn't real scientific, but it proved that my "Why Airplanes Fly" book and Mamma were right. Different blade angles change the amount of bite out of the air.
I felt like one of the Wright Brothers must have felt after getting their
airplane to fly for the first time. Like a lot of people in the test and
research end of aviation I pushed my luck too far.
One afternoon we had our Hamilton-Standard ceiling fan was running at a very high RPM. The motor was wailing like a banshee and it seemed like paint was being blown off the walls. I had noticed over the last couple of days that the fan seemed to shake a little bit. Usually it was because one blade wasn't bent the same as the others and was easily fixed with a little trial and error. While I was looking up at the fan, disaster struck in the form of structural failure. One of the blades departed the fan, crashed into the wall and fell on my bed. At this point, I got my first lesson in
aerodynamic balance. The now three bladed and horribly unbalanced fan was shaking like a sick dog and the motor was making a noise much that of a possum that has been hit with a lawn mower.
With every revolution the fan shook worse. With every turn, the fan rocked violently side to side and the remaining blades started to slice in the ceiling. Chunks of sheet rock began to fly around the room. I dodged flying pieces of my bedroom ceiling and turned the wall switch off. Just as I did that, the fan tore loose from the mounting brackets. When the sheet rock dust settled, I could see our Hamilton standard fan dangling from wires in the ceiling. I vaguely recall thinking, "I'm in bad trouble."
My career as a would-be mechanic came awful close to ending that day. My two main aviation hero's, Mamma and Daddy, were slightly concerned about the possible destruction of our house in my question for mechanical knowledge. Still, in retrospect, I don't guess they said too much and I don't remember them trying to change my career path. That nearly changed a few months later when my brother and I blew the light fixture off the back porch. When I say "blew the light fixture off the back porch" I mean it landed out on the patio. It started with a airplane magneto that I found somewhere and every other piece of electrical equipment and wire that we could hook together out in the garage. Apparently, our electrical invention wasn't meant to run on household voltage.
Hope to see yall at Reno in a few weeks,
Faithfully submitted,
4Sep06/0333Z
_________________
Don't touch my junk!!
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