CH-46 Night Flight

near Ramadi, Iraq

50 miles west of Baghdad

October 29, 2005

with Marine Air

This time of year it gets cold waiting on the landing strip for your flight to the next place in Iraq. You wait hours for the bird to come in.  In this part of the world you are in the hands of Marine Air.  There are a few army helicopters flying - the ubiquitous Blackhawks - but mostly it�s CH-46 Sea Knights.  These are huge beasts with twin rotors, which come swooping in with a tremendous blast of air, filling the night with the beat of their rotor blades.

Soon enough two do swoop down.  There are a handful of people pile off and we pile on to take their places.  It�s a rush in the darkness but the cabin lights are on and so you throw your bags on he floor and yourself on a bench and pretty soon the lights go out and the plane (helicopters are planes in this part of the world) lurches and pulls itself off the ground and drags itself into the air, reaching higher and higher into the nighttime sky.

These helicopters are not invulnerable,  This same week insurgents down another Marine helicopter, a two-seat gunship operating at midday, not one of these cargo buffaloes flying at night.  Blackhawks and Apache gunships have been lost.  It ought to give us al line dup in the back on the bench seats pause for thought, but it doesn�t.   Now you look out the portholes and see the ground floating by.    

What you really think about are all those guys on the ground fighting it out with the insurgents.  There is a continuous line of lights following the Euphrates which we are loosely following for a flight path to the next stop, Al Taqqadum, 15 miles away.  This is heavy insurgent country.  You wonder about the guys on patrol out there, driving down streets where they know insurgents will have left improvised explosive devices waiting for them.  You know there will be firefights tonight.  It looks awfully dark down there.

Up here the aircraft wiggles sideways, as the counter-rotation forces of its two opposite-turning rotors tug at the long hull in momentary discordance.  The it does it again, and again.  The CH-46 sort of crawls through the air like a dog worming toward its master, begging for a treat.   But it's warm up here, and the cold of the tarmac is a memory.  The darkness beckons out the half -open rear clamshell door, inky blackness out there.  But it's warm in here.  No shooting either.   No you don't worry about being shot down. You're just thankfully, shamefully, glad you're not down there with those brave, long-suffering guys in the humvees, Bradleys and tanks, getting shot at for real.