In an attempt to connect with my audience, I’ve chosen a sports reference as the title of this post, which I will explain momentarily. Please don’t think that means I’ve started watching football, which is where that particular reference comes from (I think).
It just started getting cold here at night. I figured that meant it was time to update the blog. Well, that and all the people telling me it was time to update the blog. October was a milestone for the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade as we have now been in Afghanistan for more than six months. Halfway home, it’s all downhill from here. Not much has changed since we last spoke, still planning missions, chasing the medevac birds around, and searching for IED emplacers. Though, the monotony is often disrupted by brief moments of excitement. A few war stories for your enjoyment/terror (Sorry about this Mom)…
Several weeks ago I was on 24 hour Med Chase duty at a FOB about 100 miles west of here. We got launched on an urgent call for a Marine who had been wounded in a fire fight. As I’ve mentioned before, the medevac birds are not allowed to carry weapons so they rely on us for Close Air Support when there are no attack platforms in the area, like Apaches, or F/A-18s. As we overflew the LZ at 1,000’, chalk 1 (the lead aircraft) announced they were taking fire, so we moved out of the area briefly until a Cobra helicopter, an AH-1, arrived on station with much bigger weapons than we have. On the final approach into the LZ at about 200’ the med bird came under fire again, but they continued their approach and were able to extract the patient. We got him back to the hospital, and after shutting down, we found four bullet holes in the medevac’s helicopter. Two rounds pierced two of the rotor blades and had produced a slight vibration, but didn’t affect them otherwise. The other two rounds went into the bottom of the helicopter but were unable to pierce the armor that lines the floor of our cabins. Good thing too, because one of the rounds impacted directly beneath the crew chief’s seat. He saved some of the shrapnel he found around the hole, grateful that he wasn’t pulling it out of his butt. Overall, no one was hurt except the Marine, who, despite our medic’s heroic effort, did not survive the gunshot wound.
A few nights ago we got launched on the ARF (Aerial Reaction Force) after a pair of Kiowa’s destroyed a truck full of explosives and insurgents. When something like that happens, our job is to insert a platoon of pathfinders, ground troops trained to do this sort of thing, along with a few FBI guys who can collect evidence from the remains and piece together any intel on the terrorist network. It was the middle of the night and there was absolutely no moon. For the first time in months there were actually clouds in the sky, which meant no illumination from the stars either. Keep in mind, night vision goggles only amplify existing light; they do not illuminate a completely black image. Under those conditions, at 1,000’ above the ground, the desert floor looks like the ocean, barely any detail at all. As we approached the LZ that the Kiowas had selected, the intense light from the burning truck made our NVGs almost unusable. Despite the limitation to our vision and the extremely uneven, rocky, dusty terrain, we got the guys on the ground and moved into a holding pattern as they went to work clearing the area.
While we were orbiting, a convoy of about 20 trucks was moving into the narrow valley where we had inserted the pathfinders. The Kiowas were busy providing cover for the troops on the ground, guiding them in the darkness to areas of interest, so it was left to us to stop the convoy. We flew in low, head on with the lead vehicle, and shined our 400W landing light into his windshield. Outside the wire, we fly with no other visible lights on, so he wouldn’t have seen us approaching until our light lit up his world, and I imagine he thought he was being abducted by aliens. The convoy slowed to a crawl, but they obviously hadn’t gotten the message that we wanted them to stop. We moved into a position about 100 meters in front of the lead vehicle and my crew chief laid several rounds of 7.62mm stop sign on the road in front of him. That did the trick. The convoy stopped completely – for about five minutes. One of the trucks several vehicles from the front either hadn’t seen our show of force, or thought maybe it didn’t apply to him. He began passing one truck after another, and we let him keep moving until he made it to the front. We put a few more rounds onto the road in front of him, and he seemed to figure it out. Not long after that we extracted the pathfinders and returned to base. On the way out we saw that the convoy still hadn’t moved. I wondered when we got back if they were still waiting there for us to reappear from the darkness. Of course I felt bad that we had to involve most likely innocent people with such threatening action, but we had to keep the guys on the ground safe. There’s no way to know what danger they would have faced had we allowed those twenty vehicles, with any number of passengers, to roll up on their position.
I’m not a fan of war. I could do without the violence and it’s sometimes hard to connect the fighting over here with the safety of people at home, though I believe that connection exists. But understand there are very clearly bad people in this country, people taking advantage of every possible opportunity to take lives not only of Americans and coalition forces, but of those who are just trying to live here, their neighbors. Much as Jesus sacrificed himself out of love for the whole world, I work with people everyday who would sacrifice themselves to save just one life. Whether in support of the war or against the war, remember we are fighting people who would sacrifice themselves to destroy just one life.
