The title of this post would be the title of an article if I was interviewed about my deployment. I know I called out the American people yesterday about their whining, but I am about to whine. I'm not whining about missing my family; or about my pay, quality of accomodations and meals. I would like to whine about not getting to do my job as much, and as efficiently, as possible.
A real idiot once said, "you don't go to war with the army you want. You go to war with the army you have." REALLY? When you pick the fight (Iraq)? Okay. Well when you do task the Air Force you have to go to the war you are fighting, you should ask them to come lean, mean and ready to fight.
Am I implying we are not ready, or able, to bring the fight to the enemy? Nope. I'm complaining because of the compliment we came on our deployment with. We have one more crew than we have aircraft. That is so we swap out and we can keep all of our aircraft in the fight. I think that is a beautiful idea because it allows us to not be over tasked and grounded because we exceed the 30/60/90 day maximum number of flying hours. I will bitch about the "duty" crewmembers.
We brought along the equivalent of another entire crew to oversee things like scheduling, tactics, duty crew to load and preflight aircraft for the next days mission. You absolutely need a scheduler to schedule missions and keep an eye on crew rest and how many flying hours we have. You need a tactician to plan missions so that the routing doesn't fly you right over the last f'ing position of the enemy; the tactics officer also handles diplomatic clearances which take up to a month for some countries.
My issue is that these duty individuals are treated like another crew to fly missions. Bullshit!!!! I signed on for a hard crew. I came to fly. These guys signed up to sit in the office. The only justification for flying them is currency requirements. They don't need to fly more than once a month to do that. The crew position I have the most problems with is the loadmaster section followed by flight engineers. Why would I attack the enlisted? I am not attacking the individuals, who happen to be enlisted, I'm attacking the concept.
We have landed after a long mission and our loadmasters are downloading the airplane while the duty loads are in there blabbing their mouths and drinking a latte. Their job is to download that fracking aircraft and seeing the passengers off!!! Our job as duty crew is to make sure that the airplane is loaded and ready to go so the crew flying her can jump in and go asap. All crews could have rotated people in on their off days to answer phones, preflight and load the planes and help with the offloading once someone landed. We don't need additional crewmembers to sit around and complain that they never get any time off. REALLY?? What the F do you have to do when we're in Africa or the middle east for eleven days at a time? We are on hard schedules so you don't even have to be in. We're not in when there is no crew to launch.
The other day we were duty crew and a crew went to Kosovo on an out and back. They actually came back early and didn't let anyone know via the computer we carry on board to stay in touch. They didn't phone back. So, the crew is 30 minutes out and they can't raise anyone the phones. The commander calls people on our crew and tells them to get in there. By the time they show up everything is taken care of and one of the duty loads mouths off and says, "it's about time you guys decided to show up." He got a royal ass reaming from one of the crew who basically told him to have a nice hot cup of shut the F up!!!
We could be lean and mean and take care of ourselves. That's how other deployments have gone. I think that command has gone off it's rocker. The other big issue is the size of our crew.
A Herk flies in combat. Two pilots, a nav, flight engineer (that'd be yours truly), and two loads. Well the powers that be at the numbered Air Force's that dictate our missions wanted four maintainers on our missions and when we go into civilian fields with iffy security they want four Ravens. Ravens are security police specially trained to protect the crew and aircraft at all costs.
So we can't take the six pallets we're built for we can only take five because we have an additional eight people with us. Yesterday morning ATOC came down to load the airplane for that day's mission and got in an arguement with the mission loadmaster. The supervisor informed him that there were six pallets to go and if one was bumped the mission would be scrubbed. I couldn't believe what the loadmaster told him. "Cancel the mission!" REALLY? These are pallets going to the war zone. They are probably much needed given that lots of hazardous material was on them. And this guy is going to say no way?
Did the extra loads we brought fix the situation? Nope. An experienced loadmaster off my crew who was pulling duty load got with the supervisor and said, "wait a minute lets see what we can do." He learned stuff about the Herk that he didn't know and he's been doing it 25 years. In the end he made it work and that involved bumping some of our maintenance people.
Our commander made the final decision and wanted two crew chiefs on the plane to refuel at enroute stops. He took off the engine troop. For the first time in over 150 hours, this particular aircraft broke in Italy for an engine problem. In my opinion it should have been one crew chief and one specialist. For this aircraft an engine troop would have been a good choice as there are four motors on a Herk and all four of this Herks motors have issues!!!!! He wanted to leave the crew chiefs on to refuel. I can do that with one of the loadmasters. I don't need a crewchief to pump gas. It makes my life way easier, but I didn't hit the EASY button when I signed on the dotted line.
On the Africa mission one maintainer brought a huge three foot tall peice of luggage and had to do laundry after eight days. I brought a Kelty backpack and had enough clothes for 13 days and never had to wear anything twice. It was ridiculous traveling to and from base in Djibouti. We had a mountain of luggage and most of it was the maintainers and our Ravens. Pack for war gentlemen. Everyone knows the Air Force is generallly Gucci, but don't show our fellow services it's true. I was so embarrassed because the soldiers running base security probably packed one bag for a six to eight month rotation and the Paris Hilton's on our crew had luggage big enough to house five or six Djiboutians and only had enough clothes for eight days!!!! What a bunch of divas!!!!
The Ravens are diva extraordinaires. They slept every leg, the entire way and ate everything in sight. We had four on board and only two had to spend the night on board one time. At Comores we had a national attempt to get on the aircraft and it was the interpreter with the spec ops guy that stopped him by yelling at him. Then one of the Ravens comes over and guards the door. ARE you SHITTING me? That's why you see us unarmed in the pictures. Our 9's are locked in the gunbox because we have the fire breathing Ravens!!!!! The consensus amongst the crew is we should arm up and leave these boys home. Or at least two of them. But the generals swear by them. Wow!!! If Patton were alive today he'd kick some of these generals in their private areas and call them a bunch of $%^&*#!!!!
Seriously, when you fly in the combat zone everyday, you have body armor, your packin' heat. There is no protection except what you bring. You go down and it's all up to you. It would be the scene from Pearl Harbor where they crashed in China and had to defend themselves. I could see a movie in the future. It would have a scene where a 130 went down and the crew was defending the aircraft and a Raven would climb out of the wreckage looking half asleep with a chocolate brownie from an MRE in his mouth.
I just want to do my job the best that I can and get home safely to my wife. If I'm working more, the time passes more quickly. I know I should just shut up and appreciate what I've got. Who complains about not being beat up and overworked. Those who live to serve. Where are you when I need you Patton?
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