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Tales from the sandbox: Heartfelt thanks from a ground-pounder; you operate one hell of a taxi service

Baghdad, Iraq — April 12, 2006

I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten onto a military helicopter somewhere in this country over the past three years and sat there, strapped in with my four-point harness belt, watching the crew and wondering who these men and women are.

They wear these giant helmets, sometimes with full face coverage, and you rarely get a glimpse of a name tag before the bird touches down and you scurry away with all your stuff.

It’s an impossibly loud environment and does not lend itself to chatting with the crew. In fact, unless you’re lucky enough to be handed a headset — if there’s an extra one available — you make the trip in a roar muffled by earplugs, shouting at full volume into the crew chief’s ear if the need to communicate arises.

I have mostly flown on Black Hawk helicopters, which seat 11 passengers. But on this trip I’ve hitched rides on the CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopter which seats more than 30 people. I can only imagine how much patience the aviators must have to deal with passengers with varying degrees of flight experience, or journalists (gulp) who always have too much stuff with them.

I saw a woman on a Chinook a couple of weeks ago who was wearing gold-toned, high-heeled sandals and she must have been carrying four or five tote bags and shopping bags instead of one consolidated back pack. Maybe I’m too quick to pass judgment on her choice of luggage or attire, but it just didn’t seem practical to me. She almost fell off the back ramp as she disembarked, but I have to give her a break on that one because I’ve almost wiped out the same way while wearing my practical, rugged boots.

The crews live in a world, literally, above the fray and it can be pleasant at times.

I did get a chance to ask one of them, Sgt. Jeffrey Madden, 22, of Mansfield, Mass., what it was like to stand during flight on the platform in the back of a Chinook, a wide-mouth opening with nothing between you and the earth except a nylon tether that lets you walk only to the edge.

“It’s real nice. You’re just relaxed back there. There’s nothing to worry about,” he told me.

And I believed him. I had seen a couple of Chinook flight engineers like him sitting out there during a flight with their legs dangling off the edge. Another one I saw leaned against the airframe, one ankle crossed over the other as if he were waiting for a bus.

And the Chinook flights are at night, so it’s cooler and completely dark inside the aircraft, except for ambient light that creeps in from the cities below or from a full moon, when it’s out.

“All I see is green,” Madden told me, “because I’ve got the [night vision goggles] on. I’m looking for other aircraft and the occasional tracer round, which have greatly diminished.”

He politely declined to discuss whether he’d had any annoying passengers but he did acknowledge that it’s hard to communicate with them at times because it’s so loud. Instead, he used a white board and erasable marker to announce the stops.

On what would be my last helicopter ride before finishing this Iraq assignment, I made a point of talking to a crew chief and gunner. This only happened because we actually had a lay-over so they could eat dinner.

They were from Charlie Company, 4th Battalion, 101st Aviation, 101st Airborne Division. They made a joke about being a taxi service, which made me feel guilty, but I’d heard the joke before. Hell of a taxi service, I thought.

When I asked the crew chief, Spc. Michael Hull, 25, of Indianapolis, what he liked best about his job, his response was immediate … his company’s participation in Operation Swarmer, a huge air-assault mission that took place in March.

“We felt like we were doing our part. It was a privilege to be part of a great mission,” Hull told me sincerely. He’s on his second tour in Iraq. The last time he saw a lot of action in Mosul, not all of it good either.

It’s been a calmer deployment this time around.

“I enjoy carrying people around. I get to meet a lot of people of different nationalities or people from my hometown,” he said.

His door gunner, Pfc. Nick Moreno, 25, of Corpus Christi, Texas, is on his first deployment to Iraq and he was pretty pumped about Operation Swarmer, too.

“It was a privilege to take people who are ground pounders on a flight and actually have them do a combat mission,” he said.

Well, from this ground pounder to those men and women up there in the sky I send a giant thank you for always getting us where we’re going, even if I don’t know who you are. I recognize and appreciate the responsibility you have for yourselves, your aircraft and all the souls on board.