Helicopter rides should be fun and make life easier
PT VII
We got our helicopter ride later that day. We didn’t buckle into our seats and the crew chief never checked us. We got up in the air and the pilot started flying doors open, nap of the earth. Anyone that’s done this knows that if you’ve buckled up, it’s a wild ride, very much like a roller coaster. But if you haven’t buckled in and you’re sitting next to the open door, it’s down right terrifying. We sat with our rucks on our laps and our arms and legs grapevined in order to keep from Church and myself from falling out. Sometimes soldiers do stupid things from ignorance and a lack of foresight. This was one of those times.
We were told that the pilots would make a series of false drops in an effort to keep the enemy from knowing exactly where they dropped us off. They told us they’d drop us off within a km of our site. They told us not to get off the aircraft until the crew chief gave us the signal. The same crew chief that didn’t check that we’d buckled in. Well, he gave us the signal on the wrong landing zone and we got off the helicopter. Our usual procedure was to throw the rucks off the aircraft, jump out and lie down behind the nearest ruck. After the aircraft took off, we grab the nearest ruck and move off to the trees. Well, I landed behind P-Ro’s ruck and he was behind mine. He gave the signal to move out and I grabbed the ruck and took off running. When we got to the trees, I found Church and Frydaddy but we couldn’t find P-Ro. We looked back out on the landing zone and he was still out there, trying to pull my ruck along the ground. I ran out and picked it up and ran off again. My ruck was so heavy, he couldn’t get up with it on.
We knew that the exercise was only going to be five more days and we didn’t want to have to move again in order to get a resupply. So, we decided to pack for five days instead of our normal three. That meant each person has to carry a little more food, a little more water, and the team needs more batteries. Well, I was the battery man for this exercise, so my ruck gained the most weight.
When we all were together, we checked the GPS and the map and figured out that we were in the wrong spot. We would have to move more than four km to get to our site. P-Ro also decided that we’d check an alternate site on the way. It was a place our LT (LT Dan) wanted us to go, but there was already another unit there and we’d had enough of sharing real estate with bigger units (targets).
We walked for a while and got to the alternate hill. We left Church and Frydaddy in a secluded spot with P-Ro’s ruck. During a leaders recon, the team leader takes one other person and scouts out a good location in the area. The other soldier takes their ruck in case a site is found. That soldier stays behind while the team leader goes back and collects up his ruck and the rest of the team. We walked around for an hour and decided the hill wasn’t for us. The security of the occupying unit was weak and we didn’t want to be stuck with them, so we left. This really pissed me off, since I knew going in we weren’t going to stay there. P-Ro claimed he owed it to LT Dan to at least give it a chance. I told him, he owed it to the team to get us to our site so we could do our job and not waste time making LT Dan happy (LT Dan wasn’t happy because we didn’t pick his site).
We finally moved out to our site. We found a great spot on some high ground that had a very small natural depression already covered with a fallen tree. We widened the hole out a little, stretched a couple of hammocks out over the bare spots in the concealment (hammocks work well because the can be laid flat, secured at both ends, and leaves, branches and other stuff can be put on top to camouflage something), and set up operations.