There are a whole bunch of pictures and stories that I did not have the time to cover during my time in Iraq, so I will add a few here at the end in some last few posts.
Since I have been home the question I have been asked the most is, "What exactly were you guys doing over there?" I have already sort of answered that in a previous post where I spoke about convoy security, patrol overwatch, route/area recons, etc..., but it occurred to me that these words mean little to non-military types, so here is an example. Along the Iraq-Iran border in the South are a series of lakes and marsh land. Due to the difficulty of patrolling this area on the ground, we were tasked to patrol there as much as possible. It is one of the smuggling routes that Iran uses to sneak weapons into Iraq that are later used in rocket attacks, IED attacks (the most deadly IEDs known as EFPs come mostly from Iran), etc...If you look at the top left corner of the above picture you will see a white spot in the reeds. My front seater (Apache pilots fly tandem meaning one in front and one behind each other) saw it as we were flying over this area of the border looking for anything suspicious. You can see how it would be impossible to see from ground level. One of these boats has some US Special Forces types and the other has Iraqi border patrol guys inside. We were guiding them to this "cache" over the radio by literally flying right over them and telling them to turn left here, then turn right there, etc... It was a maze of tributaries we had to lead them through. Besides this cache there was another hidden canoe sized boat nearby that we found. Now a lot of times these turned out to be weapons caches, and the mission became classified, and I would be going to jail right now for telling you all about it, but in this case the white tarp and hidden canoe just concealed illegal fishing equipment such as generators that the illegal fishermen used to shock the water to collect fish. I flew 8 1/2 hours on this mission, and we used a ton of resources just on some illegal fishing equipment, so while we sort of felt dumb, the Iraqi border patrol loved us. Illegal fishing in the area is one of their top priorities, so at least we earned some brownie points.
You can see how lost these guys could get in the marshes without us above telling them exactly which way to go to get in/out.
These are just some cool pictures we took of us shooting flares. Without going into classified detail, Army helicopters have a system that looks for potential SAM (surface to air) launches at us. If it detects what it thinks may be one then it automatically deploys f
lares to distract the missile that is coming our way at several hundred feet per second. Besides this use, we can manually punch them off to designate an area of interest or sometimes if we had been escorting a convoy for a long time and
they were pretty cool over the radio we would give them a little firework show to wish them good luck and increase morale and unit cohesion.
Just throwing this in for fun.
That was cool...thanks for dumbing it down for us. Thanks again for putting your life on the line for our country. You can have anything you want from us....anything. We have no money, but if you ever need surgery one day or have a stats question, you let us know!
ReplyDeleteGlad your family is finally all home together. We need to come see you guys sometime! Tell Jane HI