Christmas 2009....Ho Ho who cares, get back to work!

Explanation: I have been moved to a different FOB and have not had reliable internet, and when I have had internet it is too slow to upload any pictures. I have good internet right now as I am at another FOB for the elections, so I am going to update from Dec-Mar. Thanks for your patience.


Here is my Christmas haul. I got a lot of great stuff from a lot of great people, so I thank you all!!! I loved the book Jane made for me with pictures and well wishes from so many of you. I look at it at least every other day. I also need to give a shout out to Sadie Jensen who sent me a couple bears full of her home made honey from her own bees. You have all been very kind and your country appreciates your support of this soldier.

Here I am with my Santa hat and First Lieutenant rank on it. You can see our office Christmas tree. That is about all the Christmas decorations we were able to fit in our containers and bring to FOB Delta. In the background you can also see the C company chicken. He hangs there with our company motto written on his chest I2WI2, or "It is what it is." It is tradition to squeeze him and listen to his rubber chicken yell before going out on missions. These little things keep us sane in the sandbox.

This is a view of me shooting an approach (pilot talk for landing) into FOB Kalsu on Christmas day. We didn't get Christmas or any other day off, but I guess that's the cost of freedom.

I got out to use the bathroom while we were getting "Hot gas" and took this picture. Hot gas means the blades are still turning and engines are at 100% while we are being refueled. Warm gas means the engines are off, but the APU (auxiliary power unit) is still running, and cold gas means we have shut down completely.

This picture is from our Christmas mission. As you can see there is no snow in Southern Iraq. The temperature was about 65 degrees and it was fairly sunny. Most buildings are just mud brown, but every now and then you see some like this one that are brightly colored. The favorite bright colors tend to be this tangerine orange and lavender. They are nice for us because if we see something we can reference the colorful building to talk the other aircraft onto the target like, "Target is 200 meters due south of the orange building."
So nothing else really happened on Christmas, but New Years was exciting. I was flying a mission on New Year's Eve and had some cool stuff happen. The following is a narrative from my Air Medal citation. It will explain it better than I could. "1LT Miller’s effort saved lives. Despite marginal weather, on the night of 31 December 2009 1LT Miller’s team launched to check out some local areas of interest near FOB Delta due to an elevated threat of New Year’s Eve rocket attacks. While airborne his Area Weapons Team (AWT) was dynamically re-tasked to respond to indirect fire that had been fired on FOB Kalsu, 66 miles away. Despite the marginal weather the AWT redirected toward Kalsu. Three rockets had already hit the FOB and intelligence pointed at several more to come. Upon check-in the AWT was given the Point of Origin coordinates for the rockets, and although it is extremely difficult for aerial platforms to find such small items as rocket rails from altitude the AWT found six rails next to a canal. Incredibly, two of the rails still had rockets on them with timers attached. Working with his wingman, 1LT Miller talked the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit onto the rockets in the dark through the muddy fields. The remaining rockets were disarmed and no further rockets hit FOB Kalsu that night. This is just one example of the difference 1LT Miller’s efforts made while in Iraq."
We were frustrated because we wanted to blow these two rockets up before they launched. We almost had the ground commander talked into letting us shoot them until EOD came over the radio and complained about getting to do their job. We talked them onto the site and they deployed their first robot to disarm the rockets and the robot stopped working. When we heard this over the radio we were excited that we would be able to blow the rockets up (and the stalled EOD robot), but then we heard EOD say, "deploying the second robot." I can't believe they have two! No luck for us, as the second worked properly. So after we watched EOD blow up the rockets we did not have good enough weather to return to base so we had to land at FOB Kalsu and spend the night in a transient tent. We landed at about 2345 (11:45 pm) so we did the ten second countdown to the new year in the housing office with a Pakistani KBR employee who was jamming out to some Pashtun rap music, while picking up linens for our cots. Memorable for sure, but not the ideal New Years.