Since I found out late I missed the important pre-mission training, about how to properly enter and exit a helicopter, and what to do with it. G-Money wasn’t much help either.
“Just run three paces, and drop to the ground. That way you won’t get chopped up by the blades or something, I don’t know,” she informed me.
“You mean to tell me you’ve spent all morning on this one simple issue? Run three steps and down? Got it. What’s next?” While I muttered the words I also wondered, what exactly had she been doing all day?
“There isn’t anything, hit time tomorrow morning.”
So off I went to prepare. It turned out that the mission was canceled, as all avian creatures and even small insects cannot fly in the lung-clogging dusty conditions which Iraq experiences. Helicopters, a true mimic of those grounded entities, also failed the test of fly status: visibility.
A few days later I woke to clear and crisp skies as I rubbed the sleep off my face. I walked up to the designated formation spot and found G-Money, along with Worthless, out interpreter. Worthless, clad in a floppy camouflage hat which struck the resemblance to some retarded Gillian, nodded hello to me. I glared back in return. Worthless is worth his name.
G-Money said a greeting, and found me some random infantry sergeant who would be allowing me a place in his chalk. “You’ll be on the 2nd bird, 1st flight.”
I thought about this, and wanted to point out that I had no idea what I was doing except those cryptic three steps and drop instructions, but instead I said, “Thanks!”
Sometimes I hate the things that end up worming their way out of my mouth.
Me and 7 other soldiers, along with two leader types jumped into a Black Hawk. We strapped in, closed the doors, and waited. We waited and waited, and then suddenly the helicopter lurched off the ground. We rose in the air and banked around and I could see the rather large city of Mosul. Well, large by Iraqi standards.
Houses and places of worship and roads and bridges were everywhere, when all I could usually see from my concrete fortress was the walls in front of me and the sky above me. It was beautiful, the same sense of awe I get when I sit window seat on a landing aircraft. Structures of all sorts whizzing around, tiny ant like people marching everywhere.
The pilot shouted, “Two minutes!” and everyone echoed, “Two minutes!” I thought, we just took off…I wonder what my purpose will be on this island raid, will there be many things for me to exploit once we get back, computers and whatnot. Will we run into resistance, and what am I going to do once I get off of the helicopter?
“30 seconds!” they all shouted together, and we prepared for landing. I saw water and trees run away under us, always getting closer. We hit the soft grass and sand that we somehow knew was there.
The doors opened, and we ran out. I ran following the soldier in front of me. I figured, in case of doubt, just follow. He hit the ground and so did I; the helicopter took off to go grab more people.
Those of us left on the island rose up, expanded our perimeter, and waited for backup. Lying there, weapon pointed in front of me for security, the only thing I could think about was how out here on this island, away from the city, everything smelled nice. Like flowers. I looked down to see that I was lying in flowers. And I smiled.
2 hours later, after walking from end to end of the island and finding nothing except two stray dogs which avoided us like the plague, we re-boarded the helicopters. I ducked down to sprint under the blades, jumped in and put on my seat belt. Little did I know that a few hours later I would be driving around the city, with a unit aptly named Chaos.
But I never did remember how many steps I took to get there.
1 comment:
super exciting... I still have yet to see the inside of a helicopter T.T
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