I freaking love helicopters.

I just do.  What the hell is not to love?  Hopping in one and then cruising around, checking shit out.  The Blackhawk is just fun to ride.  I do miss the Hueys.  The most fun jump I ever had was out of a huey.   Freaking egg beater, sure at any second the engine was going to freeze up and dump you a couple of thousand feet to the ground.  Good times.  The color schemes on the MFO helicopters in not exactly  standard for the army.  However, since orange helicopters are de rigor for the Coast Guard, I did not really think anything about it.  We have a comedy team pass through and one of the guys started busting on the choppers.

“You take one of the most bad-ass, intimidating choppers in the world, and then paint it up in clown colors!  What the fuck is up with that?  I get in a Blackhawk, I want to hear ‘ride of the Valkyries’,  not fucking merry-go-round music.  Kept expecting 25 people to jump out of the damn thing.”

Oh, yeah, one more thing.  The comedians were not very good, but the name act was pretty good.  The guy that made the helicopter jokes had something about him though…  Everybody kept looking at him, looking at each other, listening to him, looking to each other.  About the time people stopped responding to him, he said “you guys are going nuts, right?  ‘Where the fuck do we know him from?  How about this?  ‘I’m loading, cover me!’”  The place went batshit.  The guy does voices for most of the more popular first person shooter games.  He started calling out a bunch of lines from games I don’t know, but the crowd loved it.  Whatever those popular first person shooter games are that all the college kids play, I met a voice actor for most of them.  He was not that funny in person.

This blog started out to be just about my trip to the island, but I ended up taking a bunch of pictures and decided that this blog is now about whatever the hell I want to ramble on about in order to explain all the pictures I feel like posting here.

By the way, this is Cat.  Don’t think he has another name, but he’s not going to pay any attention to you even if you did decide to talk to him, so why would he need a name.  Cat introduced himself to me the first day I got here by wandering into my room as I was moving in and announcing that this was his building, and I better watch my ass if I expected him to allow me to live in it.  That was the last word he had to say to me.  He does random room invasions on a few people in my building, but stays away from my end of the building mostly.  Rumor has it if you accidentally lock him in your room, he will shit on your pillow.  This little bastard has a serious attitude on him.  Cats have been worshiped as avatars of the gods for centuries here, and it has inflated their already vast sense of importance.

While we are meeting the neighbors...

These are our neighbors.  See how nice the place is? 











This is us.  Not so much, right?  They are not real fond of us.  We are lowering their property values with the tornado magnets, the firing range, and constant chance of terrorists cutting through their backyard to set up mortars.  You have to see their point, right?

Anyway, I went out to an observation point we have out on an island at the entry point of the Gulf of Aquabah.  This is quite a large island at the mouth of where the Red Sea cuts up between the Sahara and Saudi Arabia. The only way to safely get out to the OP is by air.  The island has been mined by both Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia since there have been land mines.  The beaches are the most heavily mined in the world.  Good times.  Everything has to be flown in.  A bunch of the kids were griping about what a shit hole the place was, but I just did not see that.  I saw some pretty cool engineering.  First off, any of these kids that have deployed before are used to the big FOBs that are in Afghanistan or Iraq.  What they forget is that these things were built by contractors using all new and modern equipment.  The contractors got to charge more for every bell, button, or whistle, so they heaped the shiney on.  This site was built in the late 70s, with the technology of the day, stuck up on the side of a wind blasted hill, no heavy equipment to level the place, all work done with hand tools.  It’s pretty fucking impressive.  Not to mention it was built for less money than the Boy Scouts spend on a summer camp out post.  The MFO has no budget.  They don’t get funding from the US, or the United Nations.  They get donations from people interested in peace in the middle east.  Seriously.  That’s how we pay for shit.  The next time you are at a restaurant check out and see one of those donation boxes to help world peace, give generously, were almost out of toner.

Love the cool-ass 70's technology

Anyway, here are a couple of cool photos I took while out on the island.  See that boat?  I asked the guy at the outpost about that boat, what the hell is there for him to be doing out here.  He said that the guy was probably diving.  If they heard any explosions, or the boat was there in another day or two, they would figure the guy came up on the beach to cook out, and call the Egyptian navy to come find the body and tow the boat away.  I don’t think the guy was kidding with me



Let’s see…  This is just a cool picture.  I have no problem imagining a camel caravan traveling through here with a load of Asian spices. 

There are a bunch of dudes that come out here and spend a long time watching shit.  They get bored pretty easily.  The cardinal rule of military discipline is that if you let a Soldier get bored, he is going to entertain himself.  That never ends well.  From time immemorial, the solution to this is make-work.  Keep a Joe busy, you keep him out of trouble.  Rocks get painted, whether they need it or not, sandbags get filled, whether you need sandbags or not, and some pretty cool desert art happens.  Here is an example of said desert art.

This took more than a couple of hours to do...

You can't really get an idea of scale here, but the "R" as about 20 feel tall.

What else have we got here?  Here is my shack as viewed from the air, about a hundred feet above the Gulf of Aquabah...

Here is the island as seen from my back proch, Cat's primary lair.  It's pretty hazy.  Usually you can see it better, but I'm too lazy to go re-shoot it.

Last, but not least, I loved the sling load operations.  Everything has to be flown into the island, and then the empties have to be flown out. The first picture is the chopper bringing in 4 5o gallon water bladders.  The chopper drops them on the water pad, then guys jump up and monkey wrestle the bladders around and attach hoses to them and drain the water down into their storage tank, where it gets pumped up to where it needs to go.  Other sling loads bring in diesel, food, etc…  The guys on the ground have to police up all the containers, and load them back into a sling for the chopper to take away.

This was a pretty cool little adventure, and I had a good time.  I am going to try to get out to some of the other remote sites, but unfortunately, I won't be able to fly.  I think that I would happily deploy to a remote location to watch a slug not crawl across a fixed distance, if only I could ride a chopper to get there.  I think in my next life, I am going to be a door gunner.  Choppers and machine guns.  Life would be good.