Live from Afghanistan, it's Saturday night! Or, t_b_f's on the road!

Welcome back 3B . Enjoy your well deserved R & R. The Tide provided you with a nice welcome home present.

 

Glad you are back, man.
For the time being anyway. Enjoy your R&R.
9 of us will be getting together in Houston for this weekend's UH vs. MSU game at Robertson Stadium if you'd like to join us. I've got an extra ticket for you.
State's getting geared for a bowl bid, it looks like.

 

My boys from Shadow Dustoff doing their thing again. This one's about a young medic getting his cherry popped on his second mission -- Specialist "Mo" Williams (His real name is Charles. "MO" is our abbreviation for Medical Officer, and we already have another Specialist Williams, who's a mechanic.).

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/10/army-medevac-crews-in-afghanistan-102410w/?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4cc469f49d947cae%2C0

This reporter, Kelley Kennedy, wrote a series in the Times a few years back about C-1/26 Infantry, the hardest-hit unit in Iraq. I read it. Pretty good read. It's called "They Fought For Each Other."

In other news, I had the craziest mission last night.

Call comes in late last night to someone (I have no clue) on a local cell phone from an Afghan Border Patrol station about 100 kilometers south of the border town Spin Boldak.

No communication with any ground units, whatsoever. They didn't speak English, anyway. No enemy situation available. LZ marked by truck lights. Accidental discharge gunshot wound to the thigh. Bullet still in the leg. Tourniquet applied.

We had to go across the airfield and pick up some quick reactionary force (QRF) infantry dudes and two Apaches, then went down to Spin B and grabbed a sip of gas and an interpreter. Enroute, we got word the patient had been moved, took the new grid and proceeded to the site, when someone told us it was a minefield (which is entirely possible; those fucking things are everywhere. I landed in one right before I came home for R&R; not cool.).

After we sorted out that mess (false alarm), the Apaches reconnoitered the LZ, then we looked at it to determine how dusty it was going to be. Our chase crew had the infantry crunchies on board and inserted them to secure the LZ. With a secure LZ, we went into the heaviest dust I've seen since I arrived (and almost crashed -- another story, all together) and retrieved the patient.

The chase crew retrieved the grunts, and we bugged out. Our average mission is 45 minutes to 1 hour, 15 minutes. This one was 3 hours, 10 minutes. Pretty rough on the old ass cheeks. Our seats aren't really built for comfort.

 

Should we add some Preparation H to the next care package, 3BF?

Come home safe!

 

Can we go back to the part about landing in a minefield??

 

Dude had stepped on a mine and torn his leg up pretty bad. They wanted us to hoist him out (hover above them and lower a medic down to get him on a cable), but we were in a bad part of town, so THAT wasn't going to happen. It would have made us a nice, juicy target for an RPG.

They were next to a nice, cultivated field. I figured there wouldn't be many mines in someone's garden, so we landed.

 

TBF, is this guy in your unit?

Video at the link.

 

He's in my brigade, the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, so there's a chance I've run across him somewhere. But our brigade is spread out across 40 percent of the country. There are probably 3,000 people in the CAB.

In other news, I just returned from a month in infantry land. We were pulling duty at a small FOB just west of Kandahar (city) from which we covered the Zharay and Panjwai districts -- where the brunt of this war has been (and continues to be) fought since the summer.

From that patrol base, we support the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade Combat Team -- a unit that has been getting hit hard since it's arrival in June. Since arriving, they've suffered more than 450 wounded and 53 killed (as of yesterday). The Taliban fighters may be headed to Pakistan for the winter, but these fucking IEDs are still everywhere.

In a month, I evacuated 46 patients -- all Category A, or the most urgent, patients. By far more than any other crew in the company in a 30-day period. Six of them were triple amputees, only one of which lived. Twice we had to completely dismantle the back of the helicopter and use high-pressure water and chemicals to clean it out, as opposed to just rinsing it out like we normally do. If those guys lost that much blood while they were ON the helicopter, I just can't imagine how much they lost before we got there.

Kind-of funny note, I guess. Well, maybe it's not so funny. We had a reporter with us on those missions who requested to end his embed after them. I guess he'd seen enough.

Hell, I have too. I'm ready to come home. February can't come fast enough.

On a somewhat lighter note, I was able to watch Alabama blow a 21-point lead to the Barners and had a decent Thanksgiving meal. No missions that day, too. A nice touch. Maybe all the units took a day off; hopefully they'll do that for Christmas, too.

 

Whenever I read your posts, it makes me feel like a jerk for ever complaining about my workplace. Thanks for all you guys do.

 

Whenever I read your posts, I think about that 24-point lead going **poof**

 

"Well, maybe it's not so funny", as well as your description of how ubiquitous the mines are echoed a story I had the privilege of writing a month ago.

An Air Force nurse advisor from our area who has been mentoring Afghani Air Force people about medical evacuation procedures contacted us about running the road race that we sponsor at a sister site on the Kabul air base. We sent them T-shirts and bib numbers, and almost 50 people, representing six NATO countries and a handful of Afgani natives from their Air Force, ran a comparable race on their base. We published their results as official results of our race.

She gave me a pretty good description of the contrast between the comforts we enjoy and the head-swimming dangers that you guys face as a matter of routine. The runners in Kabul stumbled upon a stretch of their course that was being swept for mines, not 10 feet from where they were running.

She said her initial reaction was to laugh about the absurdity of running a race adjacent to ground that was considered worthy of mine detection. Then, she realized that before she had been stationed in Afghanistan, she probably wouldn't have thought that that scenario was all that funny.