By Roger Yap

9/11/2005

I wish I could say that it seems like it was just yesterday when I sent that message about getting my orders to go to Iraq, but for me it really feels like a lifetime ago. This September 11^{th will make it exactly one year from when my unit was activated and fortunately we only have a few more months to go! I really haven’t been counting down the days, but I have to admit that as this tour starts to come to a close I get more and more excited about the thought of coming home.}

This past month has really been a blur for me (and for a lot of others) and the best thing to compare it to would be the movie "Groundhog Day!" where the events of every day were almost exactly alike except for a few small variations. Almost every night for the past month I’ve been flying through the dark Iraqi sky at with night vision goggles (NVG’s). For one thing, everything is green when you look through the NVG’s. It takes some getting used to at first, but after a while it’s just like watching a green colored TV screen. The NVG’s pick up the ambient light. It’s cool to see almost every shooting star in the sky (and every tracer round or explosion in the area). The meteor shower that passed over about a month ago was really an amazing sight to see through the goggles! The night missions run anywhere from four to six hours, but the Army safety or flight manuals say that the workload of flying one hour under goggles is equal to about two hours of flying during the day. That’s 12 hours of work in 6 hours! Flipping the wrong switch, turning the wrong dial, or missing a warning or caution light could put you in a little more serious trouble at night than during the day. So, there’s a lot more scanning, checking, and cross checking of the flight instruments, gauges switches, doohickeys and thingamabobs to make sure everything in the helicopter is in working order. It even includes the crew chiefs making sure that the pilots are awake up front! (Just kidding, of course!) After these missions, the crews are usually mentally exhausted and we have just enough energy to post-flight the aircraft, eat whatever leftover chow there is, finish up any additional duties, then hit the shower and jump into bed to get enough sleep to start the next night all over again. I’m supposed to get one day off a week, but every once and a while I end up getting volunteered to fly because of an extra mission or something else that comes up. As much as it might sound like a complaint, I really have no room to complain because it happens to everyone and we always get a make-up off day as soon as we can. Also, as one of my fellow pilots once said, "There’s someone out there who’d kill to do what we do so quit whining!"

We’ve really earned our flight pay and hazardous duty pay out here, and I’ve seen and done things that I would’ve never imagined I’d be doing. It really has been a great experience. We’ve flown all over Northeastern Iraq and to places like Mosul, Kirkuk, Baghdad, and the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison. I’ve flown over the Tigris River, miles and miles of desert, camel herds, ancient ruins, spectacular palaces and I’ve flown into one awesome sandstorm. One of our pilots even believes he flew over a Centaur and another one swears that he saw a scarecrow waving back at him! I’ve transported a variety of cargo like hundreds of pounds of dog food for K-9’s, billions of dollars in cash and gold, historic artifacts, high ranking military officers, and top government officials. We’ve even had a few celebrities on board like actor Dean Cain from the "Superman" and "Ripley’s Believe it or Not" TV shows, a few rock bands, country singer Toby Keith, and even singer/ actress Jessica Simpson. We’ve conducted several air assault missions where we’ve flown into high threat areas and inserted U.S. regular and Special Forces troops as well as Iraqi soldiers to get the bad guys.

I’ve flown a casualty evacuation mission and transported personnel wounded by a roadside bomb and we’ve flown one too many "Hero Missions" which are special missions that transport the remains of our fallen soldiers from the outlying bases to the main airbase where they can be flown home to rest in peace. Of all the missions that we’ve flown, the "Hero Missions" are probably the most sobering ones because we know that we have on board the remains of one of our own who had paid the ultimate price. No one back home gets to sees that stuff up close and personal like we do and if anything it’s just a quick blurb in the newspaper or on the news. It’s a very sobering moment to watch the casket carried onto the aircraft and see the soldiers render their salute. On the other side of that, I have to say that the best part of flying over Iraq is seeing the villagers come out of their homes to give us a friendly wave and watching the little Iraqi children do the "Soccer Ball Dance" in hopes that we’d drop a soccer ball or a "candy bomb" down to them. Seeing the little ones jumping and waving like maniacs as we fly by is really a great site to see.

Overall, and speaking only for myself, it really has been a good experience here and I’m glad that I’ve been able to do my duty for my country when it called. But, of course my heart and soul were always back home with my family and there was no place that I would have rather been than with them. Now, getting back to my family is the one thing I really am excited about and looking forward to experiencing.

On the ground the soldiers of my unit have been through sandstorms, 130 degree temperatures, power outages, and occasional rocket and mortar attacks. In the air we’ve dodged birds (well, almost all of them), bullets, RPG’s (rocket propelled grenades), RTBK’s (rocks thrown by kids), other aircraft, and even a few houses according to one of our pilots. So far, through all of that, God has kept us safe. We’ve got just a few more months left and as our tour comes to a close, I ask you to say a quick prayer for me and my fellow soldiers to keep us safe until we return home to our friends and families. Thank you for all the support, mail, email, care packages, peanut butter goodies and prayers you all have sent me. I can’t wait to see you all when I get back!