Well, it's been over a week since my last blog entry. This time, however, I can't take all the discredit for leaving you hanging. Actually, that honor goes to some ship's captain in the Mediterranean who, if the news is accurate, was lazily dragging his anchor along the sea floor when he severed a couple of fiber-optic cables and cut off a huge swath of Southwest Asia from the internet. It's amazing how quickly you begin to miss such things when they're no longer available. The squadron was going nuts. It happened at the worst possible time. The internet went down on January 31. One day before payday. Thankfully, Tricia is back home paying all our bills, but there were guys who are paying their bills online from here that were really in a panic. Thankfully everything has been restored and now you can once again be treated to my rantings. Aren't you lucky?
It was certainly anything but an uneventful week for me. Since my last entry, I flew three medevacs. Two of them were flying wing for the aircraft that carried the patient into iraq. The other was taking a navy corpsman (not one of ours) who somehow got an air embolism while teaching a bunch of Marines how to hook up an IV. I just can't imagine how that could have happened. He was OK and we got him down to the military hospital without incident. Unfortunately, I can't really say the same for the guy we got called for on Saturday night. We were the wing aircraft flying up to a camp just north of the Iraqi border. The other bird picked up the patient and we started the 45 minute, 100-mile-plus trip to pass him over to another set of medevac copters (Army) who would then take him up to a burn specialist near Baghdad. Unfortunately, shortly after takeoff the guy started sucking down oxygen like it was going out of style and the other bird was running out of O2 bottles. We had some in the back of our helicopter, but the idea of landing two very tempting targets in the middle of Iraq at 2300 didn't really appeal to anyone so we pushed the birds to their performance limits to try to cut down the time as much as possible. They ran out of oxygen on short final into the field to make the switch to the Army birds and the man went into cardiac arrest during the transfer. The Army guys took off and we went to get fuel. As we were fueling up, we heard the Army call back to the tower that they were returning. There was nothing more that could be done for the guy. We fly so much and 99.9% of the flights that we do are relatively uneventful. We start to take for granted the idea that we can save everyone. It's a pretty sad moment when you realize that even with the best technology and intentions, sometimes it's out of your hands.
Anyway, on a happier note, I finally took some photos out here that I can post. I know you're a aquiver with anticipation!
Here I am with my beautiful piece of machinery. No. I'm not referening to AW3 Carathers in the background (though he, too is beautiful). I actually don't remember exactly what day this was, but we were getting ready to fly on one of last weeks training hops. Looking in my logbook, it looks like I flew 05 on the 30th.
This is what happens when a sand storm rolls through. The bright spots are where the flash caught the grains of sand in the air. The photo doesn't really do it justice, but visibility was less than 100 meters and the sky was about the same shade of orange as Mars in that old "Total Recall" movie. Thus we decided to go snap some pictures. Obviously, we had our pick of helicopters to pose with since nobody flies when it gets like this.
Last week I also got a package from Tricia and Michenna which was nice. Packages are always fun to get. Michenna drew this beautiful family portrait on her card to me. As far as I can tell, we're all going to church. Tricia is wearing her red shirt and denim skirt. Michenna has on her favorite pretty pink dress, both nicely accessorized with mathching shoes. Apparently I'm wearing my best pair of shorts and a clip-on tie. I also realize that that's a shoe-lace and not a high-heeled shoe I'm wearing. I hope. Anyway, this picture is now hanging on the fridge in my trailer because I thought that it was really cool.
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