Happy Birthday Dad! Sorry I missed another one. But this one at least I had a good excuse. Susan sent an e-mail saying YOUR e-mail was down, so I'll have to give you a call to see how things are. Hope you had a good day and the girls made you some fun paintings.
We've been here nearly a week, flying since Tuesday, and by now I'm pretty acclimated to both the heat and time change. They say it takes a day for every time zone change you go through. We are seven hours ahead, so that seems about right. Guys are now showing up to fly fairly clear-eyed and focused. Our crews anyway. The guys who have been here a month already seem a bit tired. Hopefully with our arrival and the extra crew we brought along, we'll provide some extra breathing room.
The flying here is fast-paced and non-stop. We provide airlift support for three theaters, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa; if you look on a map you can see we cover a lot of territory. The war may be
using a lot of resources, but they are not over stocked or overstaffed on the tactical airlift side. The idea is to constantly keep the planes flying. The planes sometime have other ideas and our maintenance folks are working incredibly long hours trying to turn airplanes to keep up with the demand.
The biggest demand for our services is moving people and cargo around the country of Iraq. If you've followed the war at all, you know that Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) or buried roadsides bombs, are the biggest cause of casualties in Iraq, and have been for the last 4 or 5
years. When we first came over back in 2003, we were mostly moving soldiers in and out of country as part of a changeover between the Army and Marines, and did it quickly and safely. It finally dawned on someone that we could use that same process to move everyday men and materiel needs, taking convoys off the roads. So that's what we do: move stuff so that our people don't have to drive on the roads. Someone figured out that 40 people equal a bus, and 8 tons equals a truck worth of stuff, and that is how we gauge our success: how many buses and trucks are we taking out of danger. We don't have many planes, but in a given week, we probably remove an entire convoy from the line of fire, plus move Distinguished Visitors around to tour the battlefield and get to all their meetings.
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