Overseas Again

Here is an aerial shot of Southern Iraq, where I'm currently flying........................suckers, this is Ireland. We stopped there on our way to Kuwait. It was only supposed to be for a few hours, but our plane broke so we were there for two nights. Unfortunately, while the Government of Ireland supports the US in the war in Iraq, the people of Ireland are vehemetly against it, so we were not allowed to go anywhere but the hotel. It is illegal to be in a foreign military uniform in Ireland, and that's all we had, so yet another reason we could not leave the hotel.

Good old Shannon airport. The Shannon area was beautiful, but someone told me Ireland is one of the least affordable European destinations for tourists, so I may never make it back.

This was the hotel we stayed in for two nights. The Clare Inn, with the attached Poacher's Pub established in 1790. This Pub is about as old as the United States. Now I am not a drinking man, but it was really hard for the others to not drink real Irish Guinness. As soon as we left Fort Hood we fell under General Order #1, which includes no drinking alcohol. We had all of our meals here and they were very good. Predictably there were a lot of potato dishes, but that was fine with me.

I did feel bad for the people who were there on vacation. In US Dollars it was about $450 a night as it was also a golf resort. In one fell swoop 200 US soldiers decended upon them crowding the whole place, especially because we couldn't leave the hotel property, and the best internet signal was in the lobby. Most of the people tried to ignore us, but there were a few that got drunk and went off on a soldier about how wrong the war in Iraq was, etc.... There were also a few very nice people, including two young teenage girls who just wanted to get all of our autographs. I gave them my velcro American flag from my uniform as a souvenir.

My hotel room. This place had 4-6 beds per room, as is normal in Europe. I lucked out and only had one roomate, so we weren't that crowded. Again, this room would have been $450 a night for a tourist. It had a very small TV with 10 channels, and small bathroom.

The view from the hotel. This was a small putting green, with the Irish countryside in the background.

This was a castle that you could see from our hotel. It was burning me up that I couldn't go down there and check it out. I seriously debated breaking into one of the hotel's utility closets and throwing on some janitor's cover-alls, just to be able to go check stuff like this out. I made up my mind that if we were going to stay one more day, that is exactly what I was going to do.

On July 16th I arrived in Kuwait. We had to do some training here before we could go into Iraq. This is my Brigade's concrete baricade. These baricades are everywhere on US bases in Kuwait and Iraq. They ensure that no vehicles can approach buildings. It is tradition that each unit paints one. This one is not my Battalion's because we haven't done ours yet, but our Brigade has been here longer and as you can see we are comprised of 11 state's National Guard aviation units. My North Carolina unit is represented on the far right.

This is our shooting range in Kuwait, and some of the many "Scooby-Doo" buses that drive us around. We just showed up, shot some, and then left. All in a morning's work. Kuwait was nice and all, but I was here for 7 months in 2001-2002. Time to go see what Iraq is like.

Finally out of Fort Hood

So I am finally done with Fort Hood, TX and prowling the deserts of Southern Iraq. Since I have been unable to update the blog in a while here is some catch-up info. First off....small pox vaccination is no joke. That sucker hurt and itched for a month and I still have a scar and will probably have it for a long time. Although small pox has been mostly erradicated world wide, it still exists in weaponized form so we soldier types have to get vaccinated against it. This is what it looked like during the second and third week.


The sore was white and nasty, then it turned black, scabbed over, and eventually fell off. I had to keep a band-aid on it at all times because if the puss got onto another part of my body or onto somebody else it could have spread. Nasty!


Well, we finally made it to the Ex-Eval. This was our flight line at Camp Bowie. Although I am in D company, I am assigned to support the maintenance needs of C company as they will be split from the rest of the Batallion in Iraq. I get to be the Officer in Charge of all the D company personnel at that split location.

Here are my maintenance tents set up at the end of the flight line. This whole week it was sunny and HOT! 105ish with Texas humidity. Yuck. Luckily we did not have any of the drama that we had during the Pre Ex-Eval, so I got to fly some missions instead of just doing maintenance stuff the whole time.

These next few pictures are just so you can see what the facilities at Fort Hood were like, and so I can remember looking back. This was our hangar where we worked on the aircraft.

This was the door to the maintenance shop in the hangar. Delta company is known as the Delta Dawgs, so the "Beware of Dog" sign is to warn other companies not to mess with us. It didn't always work, as Army guys love to mess with each other. One day I came to work and the lock to my flight locker was pro-sealed (super sticky stuff we use on the aircraft) to my locker. When I found out it was another Lieutenant messing with me, I plotted my revenge. I changed his rank on the sign to his office, so he thought we were even.....little did he know that I've never been one to get even, I get ahead. He was on nights and I was on days at the time, so one day I changed the clock in his room, his watch and his cell phone ahead 2 hours. He woke up at his usual 5:00pm, but he thought it was 7:00pm. He thought he had missed his ride to the flight line (which leaves at 6:30pm) so he called 3 different people as he was scrambling to get ready trying to arrange a ride. They were all confused at why he was so desperate for a ride so early, and he was confused at their confusion. He finally figured it out, and told me he wouldn't mess with me again. Good thing too, because the next step would have been the kool-aid on the towel prank, and that one is pretty bad.

Here is my office in the back of the shop. Hey, don't judge, I'm busy working, not much time to keep things tidy.

This is me on July 13th, 2009. I am on the bus leaving Fort Hood to go to Gray Army Airfield where I hopped on a Charter flight to Kuwait.

We had to wait a little while to board the plane. This old lady was from some church group. She gave all of us hugs and said she has hugged every soldier who has deployed out of Fort Hood in the last ten years. That is tens of thousands of soldiers.