Time of Flight: A Gun Pilot's Story

By Spencer Emch

In his debut book, Emch explores the full spectrum of human emotions servicemembers go through when they're put into dangerous situations fraught with chaos and uncertainty."The good, the bad, the hilarious, and the surprising are all included in this war story of human experience and emotion," said Emch, who served in the U.S. Army for 12 years

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tactical 16 Publishing
• Release date: Nov 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088077061

Spencer Emch

BioSpencer grew up with aviation in his blood. His father was a Navy pilot, his mother was a flight attendant before becoming a teacher, and even his little brother, Scott, became an Air Force pilot, a role he is currently still serving in today.After being enlisted for 4 years, including a year-long deployment in Afghanistan, Spencer submitted his packet for the Army Warrant Officer program to become a helicopter pilot. Two years and Honor Graduate of his AH-64D Apache flight school class later, he flew the world's most advanced attack helicopter for the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, in upstate New York.With two years of training under their belts, the 1-10 Attack Reconnaissance Brigade was ready when called upon to serve 9 months in the Middle East. Within a month of being overseas, the plan completely changed, and it wouldn't stop for the rest of the deployment. For Spencer and many of his peers, this would be their first deployment as attack helicopter pilots. None of them were prepared for how groundbreaking it would be for their unit or the aircraft, or how real a threat ISIS posed when helping the Iraqi forces retake Mosul.Upon leaving the Army after 12 years of service, including 2.5 years in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, that deployment and the memories of the people he experienced it with stuck with Spencer, and he decided to write the book "Time of Flight". Initially, he wrote the story as a time-withstanding testament to that experience for future generations of his own family as well as the families of his former colleagues. However, upon completion, he realized the book was also more than that: an interesting look into the behavior of people over varying levels of stress and uncertainty in extraordinary situations across the spectrum of humanity, as well as an inside glimpse into service members' lives while on varying levels of a combat deployment for those back home.Spencer left the Army in 2020 to pursue a career flying for the Airlines, just like his dad did as a 30-year pilot for FedEx after leaving service. Currently, when he's not working on his FAA fixed-wing ratings, he's spending as much time as possible in the lineup on his surfboard or sailing when the waves are flat, searching for hidden stashes of powder on his skis and snowboard when the seasons change, and always playing and recording music in his studio or at a Blues Jam. Spencer encourages anyone with a war story to write it down, as you're the only one who can, and you'll remember more than you think. He hopes to share a cockpit with his little brother one day and prays for those riding in back when it happens.

Book preview

PREFACE

This book is a collection of stories that service members experience while deployed as well as while in garrison to some extent. Their experiences might be significantly different and the situations might be drastically more stressful at times, with the human reactions to each scenario much more intense and crucial in the moment, but all of the root emotions were there, regardless. Every service member’s life experience shaped who they were prior to entering government service. Sure, we were all broken down at basic training and taught what it meant to be part of something bigger than ourselves, but we all made decisions based off of the personal lessons learned from every other experience we had prior to that moment.

Every situation gave birth to a root set of human emotions that may differ between each individual. We learned tons of information. Sometimes, we did the right things. Sometimes, we did not. We just did what we could in the given situation and tried to make the best of it.

I have realized that times have changed and our versions of difficult situations were completely different than those of the generations before us. Technology changed the world in a very short amount of time. Modern war was a much more comfortable environment to live in for those involved, at least for first-world armies. Technology gave this war a strange dichotomy. It was much easier to kill one another, with extreme precision, without much damage to the surrounding civilian world.

But that was not the point of this book. From mild discomfort and annoyance from arbitrarily difficult situations, to getting shot at and killing someone else for the first time: it was all inclusive for me. One fact remains: war changed my perception of the world and views of my own life, the former for the worse while the latter, hopefully, for the better.

INTRODUCTION

In 2016, the 1-10 Attack Reconnaissance Battalion (ARB) was a US Army Aviation Unit consisting of twenty-four AH-64D Longbow Apache Attack Helicopters. Three line companies of about twenty-five pilots and thirty crew chiefs each owned eight of the helicopters, while the rest of the battalion maintained support through flight operations, airframe and mechanical support, weapons maintenance, fuel, equipment supply, and administrative tasks. These were maintenance intensive helicopters. As the most advanced attack helicopters on the planet, they have ensured the support and safety of our ground troops, as well as those of our allies, for decades. As narrated by Patrick Stewart in the movie TED:

Now if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that nothing is more powerful than a young boy's wish…Except an Apache helicopter. An Apache helicopter has machine guns and missiles. It is an unbelievably impressive compliment of weaponry; an absolute death machine.

Pilots tested and enhanced their proficiency in specific areas of flight and engagement techniques, while maintenance and sustainment personnel set the stage for the logistics of sending and receiving supplies required to keep the crews and birds in the air. The desolate and unrelenting environment of the desert itself placed extra stress on the helicopters, crews, and maintenance personnel. New soldiers leaned on those who already had deployment experience, which helped exponentially with work expectations, as well as family life. Some of the biggest points of stress during a deployment stemmed from the families left back at home. This side of it wasn’t something we could train for, unlike the rest of the job at hand.

Operationally, the theater decided everything as far as the train-up went. The non-combat deserts of Kuwait offered different challenges than the war-torn landscapes of Iraq. Both of these theaters of operation were completely different than the extremely diverse terrain of Afghanistan. All locations had different threats, whether they stemmed from the enemy combatants or the environment itself. Each of these Areas of Operation (AOs) had their own Rules of Engagement (ROE) as well. Those were the laws that guided military operations. Senior leadership’s indecision due to fear of prosecution under the ROE could cause a chain reaction that resulted in loss of life, though many times not of the enemy. All these differences between AOs made the planning and training for a deployment crucial to unit readiness.

The thing was, no matter how much we planned, and no matter how much we trained, the common rule of thumb remained: once the mission kicked off, something happened, and the plan went out the window. All we had at that point was our training to try to make the best of that situation. Decades of this practice enabled us to become masters of adaptation, and much of the time, not only did we make the best of it, we shined.

We were not Navy Seals or Army Special Forces Operators with black budgets or anything like that. Even though we supported those types of Special Operations Forces on a regular basis, it was definitely not our day-to-day existence under the Big Army type rules and Chain of Command (CoC). We were just a normal group of everyday Army folks doing everyday Army things, on duty and off, living in the desert, flying and maintaining helicopters, all while trying to make sure the missions we were given met legal mission success criteria.

PART ONE

KUWAIT

CHAPTER 1

THE DESERT

Sand. I fucking hate sand. If there was such a thing as hell for me, as a lifelong surfer, it would be the middle of the Kuwaiti desert with no ocean in sight. Sure, there was a coastline along the Persian Gulf, but we were far from a beach. Surprisingly, the heat when we arrived was not horrible, probably because it was April. But that ugly sand was everywhere. On the ground, in my shoes, on the floor of my room no matter how many times a day I swept, in my hair…it was a constant that I could never get rid of no matter what I did.

Sand would always find its way into my socks and between my toes when I walked to the gym to grab a quick workout. But having an outlet to relieve some frustration was about the only thing that kept me sane in a place like this, sand an all. It slightly eased the prospect of the Groundhog Day experience a deployment entailed. It wasn’t like trying to squeeze in a workout into my busy routine back home; in the desert, I had time. Abundant time. Some of us escaped into a fantasy world of videogames or movies. I preferred to spend long hours in the gym. That was the reason that active people like me got into really good shape on deployments.

At Camp Buehring, Kuwait, the gym was next to the dining facility (DFAC), about a half mile away from my living quarters. Lots of walking in the sand, heat, and humidity was required to get to anything. There was also an area for morale, welfare, and recreation (MWR) stuff, including the Base Exchange (BX), bazaar, restaurants, like Subway and Starbucks, as well as a large stage for USO shows. Everything else was centered around military operations and all the logistics that supported it.

Sleeping quarters were cramped, depending on how many other people were in the room. We had between three and six in each room. The officers had three, the enlisted had six. There were bunkbeds and most people had a set to themselves with one bed to put gear on and the other for sleeping. Most people chose to sleep on the bottom bunk and used their poncho liners to make a curtain. Even with the curtain, we had no choice but to get to know almost every annoying habit of our roommates.

Aviation was a little different from other deployed units because half the company were enlisted helicopter maintainers, or crew chiefs, and the other half were pilots that were either O-Grade officers or warrant officers. The Apache was a very maintenance intensive helicopter. The crew chiefs were busy all day, every day, doing real work, troubleshooting problems, and keeping the birds airborne and mission ready. Pilots, on the other hand, usually had some kind of additional job and tasks to do when not flying. The more seniority we had in the company, the more specialized the job and detailed work.

Most of our battalion was there in Camp Buehring, where this story began. I was in Alpha Company (A Co), or Deathstalkers, named after a scorpion. Charlie Company (C Co), or Blue Max, was also there. Bravo Company (B Co), the Killer Spades, were in the greater Baghdad area of Iraq at Camp Taji, staged and ready, in case ISIS started acting up, but the Iraqi Army had mostly pushed them out of the city. In reality, B Co was a quick reaction force (QRF) there, so they sat around the office on twelve-hour shifts, waiting for a call to spring into action to help friendly troops. Since my Co wasn’t in a war zone, we flew enough to keep current and work on a little bit of training in a desert environment, but the money required for flight time, which went into fuel and maintenance, was understandably allocated to those units flying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Welcome to Kuwait.

CHAIN OF COMMAND EXPECTATIONS

The senior leadership of each location established their overall rules with each subordinate leader aligning their expectations based on that direction. It almost always went from less restrictive to more restrictive. I could see this place being tolerable if it wasn’t for my company commander. He decided that as an Army aviation attack company, in a non-combat environment, we would work six days a week, with three sets of eight-hour shifts, because this was a deployment. We were not in garrison with families to go home to, so we needed to become our own family, living and working together. We even ate meals together. It drove me crazy. The intent was easy to understand since an integrated team could accomplish anything but there was nothing really to accomplish. Most of us needed time for ourselves, especially someone like me.

As a line company, we had roughly forty-five people, split between pilots and maintainers with a company commander (an O-3 or captain [CPT]) and two platoon leaders (O-2s or first lieutenants [1LT]), all three of whom were pilots. The rest of our pilots were warrant officers with various specialties, such as instructor pilots (IP), maintenance test pilots (MTP), safety officers, or mission pilots. The senior pilots had the specialties and were pilots in command (PC), meaning they were in charge of the aircraft when we flew and air mission commanders (AMC), who were in charge of a group or formation of aircraft flying. Junior guys, like me, just tried to fly as much as possible for experience as co-pilot gunners (CPG), also called PIs, for pilots.

We made sure the company ran efficiently, but it was the next organization above the company, our battalion (BN), that managed logistics, supplies, personnel actions, and operations handed down from brigade (BDE), the organization above the BN. When the BN or BDE sections were closed, nothing could be accomplished. They often only functioned five hours a day, five days a week. So the company sat around instead, watching the commander and his lieutenants throw darts at a dartboard, bullshitting about military stuff, and playing stump the chump with helicopter facts, mislabeled as studying.

Studying remained an important part of our profession. We needed to understand not only the helicopter we flew, but also how to employ it effectively in battle. There was a particular way to talk to the ground troops in a firefight from the front seat of Gun 1 (the lead aircraft in our formation), flying tactically, coordinating with other aircraft in the stack (we were assigned specific altitude blocks in conjunction with other airborne assets known as the stack), and the joint tactical air controllers (JTAC). Knowledge of the various weaponry ballistics we used also ensured that we were as accurate as possible when striking a target with minimal collateral damage as was feasible.

I understood the importance of what my company commander tried to accomplish with us in terms of studying and training. With one of our companies already in Iraq, and talk of expansion in that theater, we were staged to go in next. It made perfect sense that we needed to train to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. He simply wanted to make sure we could be effective and that all of us would go home alive.

However, his methods missed the mark. Micromanaging everything and everyone hindered overall effectiveness. He failed to empower his subordinate leaders to take the initiative to realize his command expectations, stunting their confidence in their own leadership abilities, and failed to prepare them for the next higher rank and position.

Arrogant and entitled leaders have almost never performed well or brought everyone home alive. A balance of strength, confidence instead of arrogance, intelligence, and humility was required to be an effective leader in our organization. Knowing how to approach people was also crucial to success. The best example of leadership at a company level I experienced was my first commander in Army Aviation at Fort Drum, CPT Jonathan W. Ryder.

Coming from flight school, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived. When I first met CPT Ryder, he looked tired, but kind. Not a stereo-typical GI Joe image of a man, but drastically more important; one with immediate presence of experience, organization, common sense, and again, kindness. He asked me about myself, if I enjoyed flying, my family, background, and was genuinely interested in getting to know me. He asked what experience I had gained from my life as a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) on the enlisted side of the Army. Personal interests, strengths, and weaknesses were all a part of his getting to know me conversation.

He was relaxed and I could tell he had a pile of work that he’d been chipping away at when I interrupted him. Yet he took the time to talk with me as if we had all the time in the world. Then he told me about himself. His nickname was Cupcake from a previous unit. He probably couldn’t pass a no-notice limits and emergency procedures test, if our IP surprised us with one because he’d been busy with other duties. He also told me he could stand to do a little more physical training (PT).

CPT Ryder then gave me his expectations of me: do everything I could to learn more about our helicopter, learn how to really fly it, beyond what was taught in flight school, help the company in any way possible, be kind to the crew chiefs and make sure they felt appreciated since they kept us flying. Workout when I could and join the company for morning PT whenever I wasn’t flying nights. He wanted me to study battle tactics, ballistics, weaponry, airspace, regulations, and eventually, become a subject matter expert (SME) in those areas. He suggested I volunteer for things I thought I’d be good at and even more so, things that would challenge me. It was simple really: just keep learning about my job and do it. It was all laid out, conversationally, personably, and professionally, and I was welcomed to the Attack community and our little family that was A Co.

That first year was amazing. CPT Ryder was honest and down to earth, and an exemplary leader. He, and our very experienced Executive Officer (XO), 1LT David Gerardo, continuously motivated me to become a better pilot and Warrant Officer. Our platoon leaders, 1LT Dennis Roper and 1LT James Strunck were a few months ahead of me out of flight school and were also really good guys. 1LT Roper dove into learning his job immediately, a little more than 1LT Strunck did. But everyone was working toward the same goal and learning together. I always wondered how CPT Ryder was able to shield us from so much of the nonsense from BN. Somehow, we were tasked with more important operations without taking on many of the bullshit extra duties. I was actually able to get an answer to that question when I flew with him as his CPG during a two-week gunnery right before his Change of Command ceremony. He told me he had learned to become a Yes, but man.

He explained that unlike a Yes, man, someone who always said yes to anything leadership told them to do without pushback, a Yes, but man always said they were willing to do the task, however, if the new tasking was prioritized, it would hinder the ability to complete other tasks already assigned. That forced leadership to weigh their priorities and choose another course of action. CPT Ryder always sought accomplish those things he could do by himself and delegated duties based on people’s strengths instead of arbitrarily assigning them. Our company ran efficiently and he trusted us. I was spoiled from the start.

I didn’t realize how quickly that could change. After CPT Ryder’s Change of Command, 1LT Roper was recognized for his intelligence, efficiency, and potential as a future company commander. So he moved to D Co, which ran the major helicopter maintenance and had five times as many soldiers, thus increased responsibility. We still had 1LT Strunck, who continued his job as a platoon leader. 1LT Gerardo was also promoted and moved to the BN S3 shop to operations planning.

Thus, we had a new commander and we were her first company to command. Our company’s command climate severely changed. We expected some growing pains, but they never dissipated. The same previously happy family, with two officers replaced, were at each other’s throats constantly. All of a sudden, we had numerous additional details handed down from BN that took up all our time. We were constantly counting and recounting inventory. Chief Warrant Officer 2 (CW2) Austin Johnson, a good friend of mine, was our company supply officer. I felt horrible for him because it seemed he was usually at work before anyone else and was always the last to leave. It was rare to see him with flight gear preparing to fly. At the end of that period of command, it was like there was a vendetta against him from the commander, who almost ruined his career with his Officer Evaluation Report (OER). I couldn’t believe how quickly things had spiraled downward.

Under CPT Ryder, I started with a few additional duties, nothing very difficult or time consuming. I worked hard to make sure I met deadlines and completed my duties. After performing well, I received one or two more tasks. I was able to still stay on top of things, without much stress and without having to stay late every night.

With the new commander, as things started falling apart, I noticed that if someone didn’t perform well, that person’s additional task was given to me, or CW2 Corky Sponcey, or CW2 John Mason. We just kept getting other people’s piles of shit and asked to polish them. At one point, I had eight additional duties, besides trying to become the most proficient pilot I could be. Even more frustrating, I watched the people whose additional duties were given to us go home every day between three and four in the afternoon while we stayed until five or six. No thanks were given; it was just expected.

We also had contradicting leadership guidance. Besides our company commander and platoon leaders, we had our warrant officer leadership. Chief Warrant Officer 3 (CW3) Cameron Couturier, known as Cooter, was our Standardization Pilot (SP) which was basically our senior IP and in charge of running the commander’s flight program. He ensured the IPs were doing their jobs correctly, evaluated them, as well as the rest of us, when required. Cooter was a former Army Ranger, a true professional in every sense of the word. He expected us do to our jobs to the best of our abilities, with all additional duties taking second. The more we were SME in everything related to our roles as attack pilots, while successfully supporting the guys under fire on the ground, the better we were in his eyes. This was Cooter’s vision of how to achieve PC.

Our O-grade leadership’s guidance, however, was that we were all attack pilots, so how to stand out was doing well at additional duties. That was their road to PC. It was much easier to align with Cooter’s guidance than our micromanaging commander’s guidance. It was at that time my interest in excelling at additional duties waned and I started leaving earlier to get some extra gym time. The upgrade to PC, after demonstrating substantial effort for over a year, didn’t seem imminent, and I had tired of trying to please both branches of leadership. So, I focused on flying and left the rest behind. As a BN with three companies of pilots, we hadn’t made more than one or two new PCs since I’d arrived and they had close to nine hundred flight hours, whereas I had maybe three hundred.

A year under this leadership also really caused a rift in our company. We weren’t a family anymore. We had fantastic people, but just couldn’t come together because people didn’t want anything to do with work. We hoped our next company commander would be better. He would be the one to take us on a nine-month deployment to Kuwait. We knew he had deployed before as a pilot, been in combat, and we hoped this would make it better. We weren’t that lucky.

It seemed better initially, but other than his style of leadership, much stayed the same. 1LT Strunck moved to BN and we received a new platoon leader, 1LT Jack Manning. An athletic guy, with a good sense of humor, he brought much-needed change to the leadership within our company. Our new commander was more reserved while 1LT Manning brought some boisterous fun. He saw through the bullshit to what clearly needed to be done, which allowed him to set priorities correctly. As time went on, it became clear that his leadership potential at the company platoon leader level was severely limited by our micromanaging company commander. He eventually became as stressed as the rest of us.

Further, our new company commander gradually revealed his arrogance and underlying disdain for warrants. He kept information to himself that directly affected our company, sharing it only with the lieutenants. 1LT Manning thankfully utilized his biggest asset, Cooter, to communicate with the warrants about what was happening at command level. Cooter spoke with us frequently and frankly over the course of our deployment saying, I don’t know how to effectively do my job as your head pilot because that guy (the commander) doesn’t tell me anything. You ask me what’s going on, what we’re doing, what we’re training for, and I know about as much as you. I saw the frustration building daily.

In Kuwait, we were a company working far more than necessary, receiving no information, with everyone at each other’s throats. Wasted time every day eventually led to blow-outs to relieve the pressure. Some people had outlets to relieve the pressure, such as going to the gym or playing video games. At a certain point, I just stopped giving a shit about what other people thought about me, and that made it slightly better. Or so I thought.

CHAPTER 2

LONER

Isolidified my position as an outsider when I decided to stop sitting with everyone else at meals. I was not big on talking about work issues when not at work. So after about a week, I just went to the other side of the DFAC for peace and quiet while I ate. Unfortunately, it set me apart at work as well. No longer was I part of the team because I preferred a few minutes of solitude.

Again, we were not the Rangers or Special Forces. We were in Kuwait, not in combat. We just practiced our skills at flying and getting comfortable with brownout takeoffs and landings in the sand. Those occurred when the rotor wash blows the sand up in the air and visibility dropped to zero. Fortunately for me, I actually had an additional duty I rather enjoyed that gave me other things to do. Prior to deployment, I attended the Aviation Life Support Equipment (ALSE) school. All military pilots flew with flight gear and helmets which allowed us to communicate while flying, function efficiently as pilots, and maintain the ability to survive if we went down in the middle of nowhere or worse, outside the wire in bad guy land.

There was also life support equipment in each helicopter crew station in the form of first aid kits, rafts, floatation vests, etc., depending on the mission profile. That equipment needed to be fitted to new pilots initially and regularly maintained to prevent failure when someone’s life depended on it. Any piece of equipment that had not been inspected according to the proscribed timeline requirements could not be issued to any individual or aircraft.

Thankfully, almost all of our floatation vests we inherited from the previous deployed unit weren’t current on inspection. They hadn’t done much flying over water or practiced landing on the deck of Navy ships in the Persian Gulf like we had planned on doing. It took thirty minutes for each inspection and we had about eighty of them with lapsed inspections. That did not include the life rafts that were also not current. Even more in my favor was the fact that the ALSE shack was about two hundred feet from the company area, far enough away from company drama that it might as well have been a different world. I had my own computer so I could keep email open and could honestly say, I’ll see you guys later; I have work to do. It was heaven.

I also used the solitude to study on my own. Just because I didn’t want to be part of company politics didn’t mean I didn’t want to excel at my job. I still wanted to make PC and knew the requirements needed for it. More importantly, the more knowledge I had of Apache helicopter systems, the faster I could accurately diagnose problems and save my own life in a bad situation. A small system failure could quickly turn into a cascading set of larger failures; I needed to understand that knowledge at muscle memory level. I enjoyed the learning process; I just had a hard time with study groups. That led to my exclusion from most social outings outside of work as well, even in garrison at Fort Drum.

Finally, Cooter approached me one day and asked why I had set myself apart from everyone. I told him about the issues I had studying in a group and that I actually had a lot of ALSE work to do. He understood but said I still needed to be part of the team because perception was everything: I was perceived as not wanting to be part of the team. I mentioned the lack of invites to social gatherings outside of work related activities communicated to me that I wasn’t exactly welcome in the group. Cooter replied, Good point, I never thought of it like that.

Maybe Cooter was just being nice and didn’t have the heart to say, Well, we didn’t invite you because you annoy us and we don’t have much in common. But I think it helped a little bit just having that conversation with him. As our head pilot, he was in a position to say something about it. It got people off my back and it really wasn’t my fellow pilots that I was avoiding; it was the situation with our company leadership, who never even stopped by to see if I was in fact working in the ALSE shack.

CHAPTER 3

OUT THE WINDOW

Initially, we had planned on nine months in Kuwait. We soon got the news that B Co, the Killer Spades, would be heading from the Baghdad area at Camp Taji, up to the International Airport in Erbil, Kyrgyzstan, in Northern Iraq. The purpose was to be in position for the offensive on Qayyarah West Airfield (Q-West) and then, Mosul. Mosul was the last great stronghold for ISIS in Iraq and we were itching to go there to do some real gun pilot work. The Killer Spades would be more like an expeditionary force, without the normal support of a major US occupied airfield. In A Co, we would backfill our sister company’s former location at Camp Taji, providing support for the Baghdad area and farther west. C Co, Blue Max, would be headed to Afghanistan to assist with operations as a supplement to the Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB) in that country. We weren’t planning on moving immediately, though we had heard about the potential for it.

We had only been in Kuwait about three weeks when we got the news that changed everything for our company. We had insight into where we would be going from B Co, since they’d been there for almost a month, and what we would need to take with us. The mission would be one of readiness near Baghdad. We would be sitting as QRF for twenty-four hours a day, in case something occurred that needed the support of our Apaches. We had enough pilots to have two twelve-hour shifts, with a day off, per person, each week. Long hours with a small group of three other people, sitting in a room for twelve hours a day, six days a week, waiting for something to happen. That was fine by us, specifically because there was potential for something to happen. Additionally, we would be providing escort for lift missions around the area as a show of force and deterrent to enemy personnel who might consider Black Hawks and Chinooks easy targets without our presence. The Chinook was the Army’s work horse for hauling cargo and troops around the theater. It could hold roughly thirty soldiers fully loaded with combat gear, and sling load cargo hanging below, such as Humvees, Howitzers, and a number of other things, such as shipping containers. It could also be used for tactical evacuations and Medical Evacuations (MEDEVACs).

The Killer Spades would leave a few people behind at Taji to help us transition and guide us on our new mission. That was nice because it meant we’d have a few extra pilots in the mix, giving us extra time to set up our rooms and get used to the camp. Anytime we moved to a new location, everyone wanted to know what to expect. There was always a mix of solid intel, rumors, and just bogus information. I did find out I was going to be roommates with my buddy, Corky, which was perfect for both of us since we got along well and were already used to each other's personal routines.

As we got closer to our projected move window, things deemed unimportant started dropping off the schedule. Much of our aircraft would remain in Kuwait just as we received them when we first arrived. Someone would backfill us and fall in on the Kuwait mission while taking those helicopters. We would move by bus from Camp Buehring to another airbase, get on a C-17 or C-130, and fly to Camp Taji just outside of Baghdad. Taji had been turned over to the Iraqi Army and we had heard from B Co that a lot of the camp had fallen into disrepair.

There would be an ALSE shop and that would continue to be my job, but without a massive body of water and Navy ships to land on, there would be no ALSE gear inspections waiting for me. So no excuse to spend all my time in the shop and away from the company, sadly. Thus, I tried to get as much done as possible before we left.

Finally, our departure day arrived. Our flight would be just before midnight, and in standard military fashion, we were prepared to leave twelve hours early. Military travel was usually far from efficient and we spent a lot of time hurrying up just to wait. We became masters of being able to sleep, or at least nap, anywhere, anytime, and in almost any position. Nothing passes the time like sleeping, or time-traveling, as some of us called it.

After a while, we boarded the busses that would take us out to the