It was January 6, 2005, and Bravo Company was deploying from Kuwait to our new base in Iraq. The mood was professionally tense but we all knew our jobs and we were beginning the serious business of a Blackhawk unit going to war. The first part of our first leg in to Iraq was fairly uneventful. I was flying with CW2 Rolando Carpio and all seemed to being going well until we had a stabilator failure. Not a big problem, all that was necessary was to manually program the stabilator according to our airspeed. We were all flying tactically in keeping with the intelligence briefings and our tactical training. One of the hazards we had been briefed on was the chance of a bird strike while flying the profile we were flying. Sure enough, just south of Al Kut, our fuel stop, Rolando and I hit a fairly large bird just below the windscreen in the nose area. It was impossible to tell how much damage we had sustained and it was not feasible to land in "indian country" and find out the extent of the damage. We just had to continue on hoping that the damage was not significant.

Just before landing at Al Kut one of the other aircraft in our flight of eight had a problem and had to land 10 miles short of the airport, in "indian country". The tension increased dramatically as we all wondered what had gone wrong. Fortunately, no one was injured and no damage was sustained but we were all very low on fuel and had to get to the airport as soon as possible.

At Al Kut during our refueling we had a chance to stop and reflect, it had been a very interesting morning, first combat flight, a bird strike, our mechanical malfunction, low fuel warning lights, and the precautionary landing in "indian country" by the other aircraft.

After take off from Al Kut began our final leg to our new base at Tikrit Iraq. Once again we were flying along minding our own damned business when one of our engines suddenly tried to go full power. The malfunction required the pilot not flying to retard the power lever of the malfunctioning engine and then to adjust it manually, not a critical failure. I was flying and I told Rolando to retard the over speeding engine which he began to do. However, during the process, Rolando turned up the volume on the navigation radio so that it was blasting in his ears, effectively making him deaf. From then on whenever he would talk on the intercom he would yell at me almost at the top of his lungs. He could not figure out what was wrong with the radio or intercom and began trying to transmit to other aircraft as well talk on the intercom, all yelling into the microphone. After about three transmissions of Roland yelling at me, I finally asked him in my cool and calm instructor pilot voice, "Rolando, why are you yelling at me"?

With all that had happened up to that point, Rolando had had enough, his expression went absolutely blank and it was priceless. The look was a combination of frustration, fear, confusion, dear in the headlights, and……… mommy! Shortly thereafter he figured out what was wrong and stopped yelling at me. For the rest of the flight even though we were in a combat zone, manually controlling the stabilator and one engine we could not stop laughing about the time when I had to ask "Rolando why are you yelling at me"?