Flying in Kuwait

Well, last Saturday I had my first flight in Kuwait. We flew up to the north near the Iraqi border. Pretty much all my flights for now will be training flights until I get my quals. Then I will start to stand the duty and actually be flying Medevac missions. To be honest, there really isn't a whole lot to see up north. There is a huge ditch that runs along the entire length of the Kuwaiti border about 5 km inside Kuwait. Other than that, I saw a whole bunch of sand and rocks. We did some landings into unprepared areas which is actually a lot of fun. At one point, we realized that the unprepared area we were landing in was actually full of trash and kicked up pieces of plywood about the size of small cars when we touched down. One of them even broke our wind screen. Then it got dark so we put on Night Vision Goggles and it got even more boring. Now instead of brown sand, it was green. Yeah!

Last night we flew over Kuwait City. That was pretty cool. We have to be careful not to overfly mosques (sp?) because they tend to get a bit perterbed. That was a lot better than flying north because there was actually something to see. A lot of Kuwaitis put Christmas lights on their houses year round. I'm not talking little strands of light, I mean the entire house covered with white lights (think "National Lampoons' Christmas Vacation") . From the air it was quite a sight. I'll be flying down there again today in the daylight. I'll let you know how that goes in my next update.