The
Willy Nilly Story
"I Will Never Leave A Fallen Comrade" Those of you in the Army know this
as one of our "Warrior Ethos" A very Important one my buddies and I thought. Well just before we deployed to Iraq we had a
brief with the Air Force about search and rescue procedures should one of our aircrews go down.
During the brief one of our pilots asked the instructor. "If we are in the area when the call goes
out for a downed crew. Could we go pick them up or would we be stepping on your toes by doing that? Well the instructor started
to say by all means if you can... And that was when our Batallion Commander stood up and said. "I'll answer this. You
will follow orders you will not fly willy nilly around the country."
Well needless to say we were speechless the instructor was astounded. This man was a veteran
P.J. who made a carreer out of saving people's lives and he had just witnessed this woman ordering us
not to help. Well "Willy Nilly" became the big joke around the unit, because we all knew if we can help a fellow soldier,
aviator or not we were going to do it. When we got to Kuwait we all had tan nametags made for our flightsuits. I had the one
made in the picture at the top and said I will too fly willy nilly around the country! it remained on the back of
my helmet throughout the deployment. The nametag was a big hit and I became known as Sgt. Willy Nilly. The really great part
of this story is that I got to be a part of the first "WillyNilly" mission when we got to help out two soldiers from
the 2-7th Infantry who were injured by a vehicle born Improvised Explosive Device(IED) at a check point in Tikrit. We heard
them calling for a Medevac but the Medevac bird was 25 minutes out. We were two minutes away so we dropped off our passengers
at the Forward Operating Base(FOB) in Tikrit and went back to get them. We were stoked, after months of shuttling people
around the country were were actually going to directly help someone.
Willy Nilly is a story that needs to be told. It is the story of a Commander
who was eventually relieved of her Command. That is not the entire story though, the real story is that of a California
National Guard unit who started out as the bastard stepchildren of the State and who went on to show everyone just
what they were made of. A group of soldiers who had come to do a job and although their hands were often tied by
a Commander who ultimately would be found unfit, they would exceed everyones expectations and return home to their loved
ones with their heads high.
