Oldest Company Commander Replaced by Youngest

Today Headquarters Company of the 2-104th Aviation had a change of command ceremony.  1LT Matthew Moyer who will turn 26 on Sunday took command from CPT Paul Ward, age 54.  Ward is moving on to a staff job at higher headquarters.  Like me, Ward has a break in service.  He was a company commander when Moyer was in the 1st grade.

1LT Moyer

CPT Ward

Both men were deployed with 2-104th in Iraq in 2009-10 and were on battalion staff.  Ward was a battle captain in operations.  Moyer was Unit Movement Officer, the officer in charge of moving the battalion to Iraq and back to America.  He organized the movement of almost 50 aircraft and hundreds of containers from Pennsylvania to Fort Sill to Iraq and back to America.

Boys Like Guns

Today I drove to Mifflintown to pick up Emarion for his first visit to our home.  He asked if we could see Army stuff on the way home.

I wrote about some of visit in my other blog, Adoptive Dad.

Of the three boys, Emarion clearly knows the most about weapons.  He has gone hunting, loves fishing and says Cabella's is his favorite store.

He is clearly going to like the family days at Fort Indiantown Gap.  We watched M16 qualification for several minutes.  Emarion liked watching the shooters knock the targets down.  He was fascinated walking through the hangar at FT IG and liked just looking at the trucks and tracks in the motor pools around post.

I could also show him the M60A1 tank in front of the headquarters building and tell him I was a tank commander of one of those 35 years ago.  Since I don't watch football and baseball, it's good that I am in the Army.  Helicopters, camouflaged vehicles and weapons are a great ice breaker with boys.

Sunset Here and There

Today I got a call from one of my riding buddies in NYC.  I got the call at 630pm and said I had to go, I still had ten minutes to ride.  He said "No way, it's dark."  I said "See ya" and rode for 10 minutes.  I could have ridden longer because it was a brilliant full moon low in the eastern sky.  And to be exact, I had nine more minutes to ride than my buddy in NYC, not ten.

I guessed at ten minutes as I left to ride, but I knew it was close.  New York is about 120 miles east of Lancaster PA.  At 40 degrees of latitude, each degree of longitude equals about 60 miles on the ground.  The two degrees of difference translates into four minutes on the clock--15 degrees is 1/24th of the one-rotation-per-day spin of the earth.  So the sun sets in NYC just over eight minutes earlier than in Lancaster. And, of course, the sun rises earlier in NYC.

I know.  What good is knowing that?  Maybe nothing, but when GPS and every other gadget runs out of juice, I can still do some rudimentary time keeping and navigation.

Or just write about weird stuff I know.

My First and LAST Army Ten Miler

The Army Ten Miler was my third long-distance event in the last three weeks: my seven in the last year.  And this event has the distinction of being far and away the worst run.

Let me begin with the schedule.  Race number pick up was at the DC Armory near the capital--nowhere near the event itself.  But it did allow the organizers to fill the armory with more than 100 vendors selling shoes, shorts, shorts and other shit.  I drove to number pick up with my sons.  There was a line out the door because having the number pick up in a government building meant metal detectors.  We got to go in a different entrance with my military ID.  But there were only two lines for those who were not military.

This bottleneck told me what the whole event would be like.

Inside, I got my number and went to another table for the t-shirt.  I paid $10 extra for a long-sleeve t-shirt.  But when I got to the table, with two hours left in registration--no more long sleeve t-shirts.  They had a woman's small which fit Nigel, so he got the race shirt.  I got my other a son an under armour Army shirt in the Expo.

We got up at 0540 in Silver Spring MD at Grandpa's house (he cooked spaghetti for us the night before) and were on the way to the Pentagon by 0600.  The race program said to take the Metro so we parked in Arlington and took the Metro two stops to the Pentagon.  So did thousands of others.  It took 11 minutes to get from the tracks to the exit.  We were against a wall.  Most of the riders did know the Metro and that there were other stairs.  So we all funneled up one inoperative escalator.

No one from the event was at the Pentagon Metro station helping with traffic.  There were HUNDREDS of volunteers along the route with nothing to do.  They would have been helpful in the Metro tunnel.

Or moving people from the Metro stop to the start line.  Everyone who drove or took the Metro had to move through one unmarked gate to get to the start.  No volunteers there either.  No announcers.  But along the route there were official volunteers with very good bull horns encouraging us.  These same bull horns would have been great getting people through the funnel.

In the half dozen other half marathons I have run, by mile five I would be in a group of people running about my speed.  In this event I ran a very steady 10 minute pace for the first five miles then ran about 9:20 pace for the second half.  But for the entire event the crowd around me was changing.  I was passing and being passed by others all the way from start to finish.   And in the last half mile I got passed by young guys who were sprinting for 11,000th place.

They shouldn't have bothered.  From a half-mile to the the finish until the boys and I got in the Metro station, we could hear the finish announcer saying, "Don't walk, keep running after the finish.  Keep moving."  The boys could mimic his pleading/commanding tone very well.  When I got the finish line I couldn't cross the timing line because runners jammed up and stopped.  It was about 20 seconds from the time I was in the crowd till I actually crossed the line.

The finishing chute was no wider than the one at the Hamptons Half Marathon which had about a tenth of the runners.   Fifty feet passe the finish I climbed over the spectator fence and went to Nigel and Jacari.  We first tried to walk back to the finish but the mess was getting worse, so we left.

Again, this event is 25 years old.  They knew the number of runners.  Why all these bottlenecks?

The entry fees totaled about $150,000.  The organizers should take some of that money and make a road trip to Philadelphia to see how they can run these events with either side of 20,000 runners and no bottlenecks at all.

Army Weekend without Drill!

My sons are going to have yet another weekend of long car rides, early wake up and greasy food.  This Sunday I am running the Army Ten Miler.  The race is in Washington DC for most of its distance, but it begins and ends near the Pentagon.  Start time is 0800, so we wil be waking at 0600 to get to the start through a very big crowd.

We will leave after lunch tomorrow and drive to DC for packet pickup.  We have free accommodations with Grandpa in Silver Spring MD.  So hamburgers for dinner tomorrow and for lunch Sunday!!!

I will start with Wave 2 of three waves.  It looks like I will be running with 25,000 of my closest friends.

Should be fun!!

Benefits of National Guard Service

This morning I was making hotel reservations for New York and Philadelphia and thinking about how many things are cheaper, easier or more fun because I am a Guardsman.  

• If you book with Holiday Inn (same with other hotels I assume), they offer a Government Rate.  I have a military ID and that's all they require to give you a better rate and a free breakfast.  Part of the Government rate is breakfast.  
• When I travel to NYC, Washington and Boston on Amtrak, I get a 10% discount with my ID.
• If I fly in uniform I don't get a different price, but I do get WAY better treatment in the security line.
• Two days ago we met Emarion who may be our next son if all goes well.  He is 12 and shy and somewhat nervous about meeting what may be his new family.  I could take out pictures of helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers and talk about flying in the former and firing the latter. Not surprisingly, this ends up being a great ice breaker with a 12-year-old boy.
• When my daughter organized a day at Richmond International Speedway as part of her internship with the local VA Hospital, she could give me an unused ticket because I am a veteran with a combat tour in Iraq.
• And it's fun to occasionally overhear one of my kids saying, My Dad is in the Army."

Great Book by Brit Chinook Pilot

I wrote a review for Books and Culture of Sweating the Metal by Alex Duncan, Chinook Pilot in Afghanistan:

NEIL GUSSMAN

Sweating the Metal

Happy 50th Anniversary to the Chinook helicopter.

Happy 50th Anniversary to the Chinook helicopter! This month, the huge, twin-rotor aircraft capable of carrying 40 soldiers and tons of cargo marks 50 years of service in the US military and in the air forces of more than two dozen other nations.

In 2011, the Chinook was in the news around the world. On May 2, the Chinook helicopter on the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden extracted the Navy Seal team as well as the crew of the ill-fated Blackhawk that crashed on landing at the Bin Laden compound. Bin Laden's body left Pakistan on the Chinook. The Chinook's size made it possible to complete the mission when the primary Blackhawk was down.

In August, that same colossal size (a full 99 feet from the front of the forward rotor to the back of the aft rotor) made a Chinook a big enough target that a single Taliban gunner with a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) could bring the copter down. More than 30 Navy SEALs, Afghan commandos, and crewmembers were onboard for a night mission. All were killed.

But neither of these incidents is typical of the tough-under-fire utility of this hulking helicopter. For a rousing description of flying a Chinook in combat, look no further than Sweating the Metal by Chinook pilot Alex Duncan. Written at a breathless pace, the book shifts easily from technical descriptions of aircraft and procedures to clipped dialogue and action-packed combat narrative.

Although Duncan never goes three pages without using the f-word, he does spare his audience transcription of the speech of British soldiers. Both when I served in Germany in the 1970s and in Iraq in 2009, I trained with British troops. Their ability to cram properly pronounced foul language into every sentence surprised even the most foul-mouthed American soldiers.

A British sergeant leading an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) briefing in Iraq pronounced the "ing" clearly when using the f-word as a verbal adjective for each of the 30 IEDs he showed us. Duncan uses the f-word five times in one three-line paragraph to convey the alarm of one of his crewmembers who landed under fire in the wrong place, but for the most part he limits himself to a few per page. When I try to describe life in the army, particularly the 77-man tent I lived in for three weeks in Kuwait, I find it is a tricky balance to convey the profane speech without coming near transcription. Duncan does a good f-ing job.

Another balance Duncan tries to strike on every page describing combat is the use of acronyms. Soldiers in general and aircrew in particular have an opaque language of acronyms that is real speech to them. I currently serve in a Combat Aviation Brigade, and I find pilot jargon beyond incomprehensible when they speak to each other. Readers who have never flown in a military aircraft will be turning repeatedly to the seven-page glossary at the end of the book. Since some of Duncan's jargon is peculiar to the RAF, I found myself looking up LCJ (Load Carrying Jacket), CAS (Chief of Air Staff or Close Air Support depending on context), and a few others.

Duncan writes in the first person. So, when he is angry the reader can feel the warm temperature of the page. In Chapter 14 (of 40), he talks about waiting for a seat on a flight home. This is one of the chapters with high f-word density, including spelling out the acronym REMF. I will leave it to the reader to look on page 105 or Google it. The chapter is about the hassles of combat soldiers when they are marooned on a large base with non-combat soldiers.

The dispute dates back at least as far as the era of King David, who is recorded in Scripture as commanding that those who guard the baggage get a share of the spoils along with the frontline troops. Duncan clearly would cut the REMFs out of the distribution of any benefits. Yet he makes clear in this chapter that the soldiers he disparages live through daily mortar and rocket attacks, eat dust, and regularly deal with the contempt of people like him.

Many of the missions Duncan flies are what the US Army would call MEDEVAC. The Brits have their own acronyms. Several chapters describe rescuing wounded soldiers under direct fire. I read one of these chapters to my 12-year-old sons. They were caught up in the excitement, but it was a lot of work for me translating those acronyms into something the boys could understand, not to mention bowdlerizing the text and substituting exclamations.

When Duncan mentioned weapons, the boys' questions led me into a ten-minute digression on the M60 machine gun mounted on the Chinook's tail ramp and the miniguns mounted in the doors. They were so excited with what tracers are and how they look when they arc to the ground that we barely got back to the story. They especially liked the British nickname for the 3000-round-per-minute miniguns: Crowd Pleasers, the Brits call them. The next night we went back to Tom Sawyer.

Duncan is very good at technical explanations. Little by little, the reader learns technical details of the controls and instruments of the Chinook helicopter. Page 135, for example, features an excellent description of Night Vision Goggles (always called NVGs by the crews). We also learn chapter-by-chapter about life at home in Britain as well as on the big base at Kandahar and on the forward bases. One cumulative effect of Duncan's descriptions was to make me jealous of British deployment. Tours for US soldiers are one year long. British flight crews spend two months in country. Ground troops, six months.

In the course of the story, the reader gets a sense of how pervasive American popular culture is in the life of British soldiers—and really for all English-speaking soldiers. He says "Let's get out of Dodge" over the intercom, knowing the crew will understand his intent. Same with "Captain Obvious" and many other references to American movies, American songs, and so on, no doubt including some that I am too old to recognize.

And speaking of popular culture, Duncan mentions the DVDs that are everyone's favorite at their base on Camp Bastion: The HBO Series Band of Brothers. Soldiers can be as cynical about war films as doctors are about hospital dramas, but I have never heard a bad word about Band of Brothers. The men I served with in Iraq and Duncan's mates all at some level want to follow Major Dick Winters from Normandy to Berchtesgaden in World War II.

While these descriptions gave me a real feeling for Duncan's life, they helped to make the book too long. The climactic scene when Duncan's Chinook is hit by an RPG begins almost 220 pages into this 300-page book. If the book were shorter by a third, tightened by a ruthless editor, it would be even better.

That said, I would happily recommend Sweating the Metal to anyone who wants to get a good sense of the war in Afghanistan and what it's like to fly the biggest helicopter in the Army inventory.

Neil Gussman is communications manager at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. He blogs atarmynow.blogspot.com.