Me and Erica started the day by attending the daily update briefing. Erica gave the brief today. She had no idea what she was talking about, but most of the time the people briefing don't have any idea either, so nobody noticed a difference.
Our next job was to preflight our helicopter. Erica checked out the engines and confirmed that it was indeed an engine.
Then we sat around enjoying the warm Kandahar sun. We're working with the Medevac today, so we just hang out until we're called.
Then it's time to go. Erica helps program my GPS while I run up.
We meet the Medevac helicopter out on the taxiway. There's a dust storm behind us that's bringing the visibility way down, but Erica's not scared, she knows we need to go save some lives.
So we take off.
Flying past some mountains, we can still see pretty good.
But at our LZ the dust is bad, we can barely see a mile.
I got scared, so Erica takes the controls and sets up for landing.
We wait for the Medevac to pick up the seriously wounded patients. An IED blast hit a convoy and messed up a couple guys legs pretty good.
A couple more guys had minor injuries so we loaded them on our helicopter. We take the guys who can still walk because we're not officially a Medevac helicopter. We don't mark ourselves with the red cross and we don't carry medical personnel, that way we can legally carry guns. We fly with the Medevac to protect them and to pick up guys who can survive a flight without constant medical attention enroute.
We launch again later and the dust has cleared out. Erica sits back on the dashboard again to enjoy the view.
By nightfall Erica had grown tired of flying up front so she took up a position on the guns in the rear as we flew using NVGs.
Last edited by d10; 05-19-2010 at 11:38 AM.