Busy Week

It has certainly been a busy week for me. Yesterday I was on the 4th UP alert crew. We flew into Iraq into the morning on a planned trip so that our squadron could observe some sort of excersise that the Brittish were having. That was a pretty exciting flight into a part of Iraq that I had not been to yet. The area wasn't really that different than Kuwait. It was all desert and power lines, but there was point where we passed three oil wells that were billowing black smoke from their sludge burn-offs. There was something really dramatic about having a bunch of black smoke on the horizon and knowing that I was flying through a warzone. Of course I knew that the smoke had nothing to do with any kind of threatening acts but it was almost like flying through some scene in an old war movie. On the way back I actually flew under one of the smoke plumes. Probably about the closest I'll ever get to flying under a bridge.

We got back in the afternoon and were looking forward to a barbecue that the squadron was having. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to go because there were a couple of routine patients that needed to be transported from a camp up north to the hospital down south. So a little more than an hour after we got back we were throwing on the body armor again and heading out to the helicopters. We flew through sunset so part of that flight ended up being on night-vision goggles, which is actually quite a bit more tireing than normal flying for some reason. So I was pretty exhausted after all was said and done last night, but it was a good week. Between Tuesday and Friday I flew:

3 Medevacs including one Point of Injury (where we picked him up out in the desert instead of at another hospital) and two where we had to be off deck within 15 minutes of receiving our initial call.

2 flights into Iraq (one of the medevacs is also included here)

2 training flights

1 maintenance test flight day where we actually flew 3 times but only for a total of 2 hours.

Thankfully today I am off (knock on wood) so I should be able to recuperate a bit.