Wednesday, July 02, 2003 :::
 
I am attempting a long distance blog entry- let's see if it works.

Have been very busy out here flying airevac missions in the theatre- and it's not all Iraq.

Since the 6 june entry, we actually had a day off, and we were sent into town on what they call a "morale trip", which is kind of like regimented time off. This was accomplished by loading up the squadron's toyota hi-ace minivan with my crew, (me, Hunt, & Flarity) and my old crew (Dietrich, spires, and now Savidge), and driving into Downtown Doha for the day. Spires drove, and was adept in the middle-east high-speed roundabout method of vehicle operations. By the end of the day, I was, too.

Most of the day was spent lying outside in the sun at a swimming pool at the hotel Intercontinental, getting hopelessly sunburned. (like we couldn't do that in camp). My crew did eventually venture off to the local mall, leaving the other guys behind at the pool. The mall was huge, and complete with an indoor ice rink, bowling alley, and about 42,000 stores. It was considerably larger than the king of prussia mall, and had lots of nifty persian carpets, designer clothing, gold jewelry, and everything else the well-off Qatari desires. Needless to say, we couldn't afford very much in the place. (I did get some tea for Chy which she doesn't know about yet.) (oops-I guess she does now!)

Regarding Doha (Homer would say it D'oh!-a), it was good to see something other than runways and tents for a few hours.

We managed a coup of sorts, and manned a flight from here to Ramstein on a C-17 from McChord. It was an AE flight, picking up 60-some patients (several critical) in Kuwait, and then on to germany (about eight hours flight time). We did this with a full five person AE crew, plus a three person CCATT team for the critical patients. When we got to Ramstein and transferred our patients, we found out that there were no rooms availiable on base, because of the enhanced operations tempo- therefore we were forced to be lodged off base at a hotel outside of Kaiserslautern. The horror, the horror! Of course, since we were about 12 miles off base, we were authorized a rental car for our crew (the CCATT was on their own) to go back in forth in. We got the very last car availiable, which happened to be a mercedes benz C230 tdi, which was very fast. To make a long story short- the two days we spent in germany waiting for the first flight back to the gulf beat the pants off the "morale trip" to D'oh-a. I was designated driver (I love that), and hit 200 km/h on the autobahn. Paul, the FN we picked up in kuwait, calculated that we hit about .2 mach in the car. (this is the same guy that thought it would be a good idea to open the rear window at that speed- which was the first time I ever had a rapid decompression in a car.) Anyway, that's enough about germany.

We came back on a C-5, and got stuck overnight at Kuwait city waiting for a flight back to al-udeid the next morning. Camp wolf at kuwait has really poor overnight accomodations. It was like being in the army or something!

Over the next two weeks, we continued frequent patient evacuations out of Iraq, and also made it out to Jordan, and to Djibouti on the coast of Africa (you know, right next to Somalia). And that's it for the immediate update- more to follow soon. (let's see how long it takes for Chy to read about the tea!) :)




::: posted by M. at 12:34 PM

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