“You’re Leaving At 1400″
Well, we needed a little coordination for some future ops involving submarines. Since I’m the future ops officer and the submarine officer, I encountered a harried LT who dropped by my stateroom right after the air guys put their travel plan together. I had to scramble to pack up and get the right information before hopping on the SH-60B.
The helo flight was professional. During the prebrief we talked about a previous exercise where they got “shot down”. They didn’t know that it was the fault of the guys choosing the wrong tool for the job–and they felt good about the exoneration. I didn’t get a chance to openly enjoy the flight, though–along for the ride was a chief who was going on leave and a NATO officer, but also a young woman who was going on emergency leave for something very sad, and a senior chief who got on the helo with what looked like the weight of the world on his shoulders, a man who either had no sleep for a long time, or was incapable of crying his eyes out the way he might have felt like doing.
After a harried interlude explaining to my wife exactly where the helo pad was on land, she picked me up and off we went to the new “home”. (Funny, I picked my old boss up at least twice a week for a flight from that same helo pad, and she never knew where it was. No wonder that was a lonely job.)
My better half had to pack up and move out while I was at sea, and had to find a place that she could stay with two cats for a month. Well, for what we were paying for a nice two story house in a nice neighborhood, we now live in a single hotel room with an oven, a Jim Thompson novel updated for the times. It’s thirty feet from the major highway, and not a tree is in sight. Ah, well, it’s the best we can do for now.
In the laundry, cleaning up two weeks of stinky, I met a dried-up fella who was coming back to this town from Hatteras. He lost his house in the hurricane, and won’t be able to rebuild. I also encountered lots of workers–seems that this is a good cheap place to stay when people build houses or ships or Wal-Marts, despite the exorbitant price.
2 Responses to ““You’re Leaving At 1400″”
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September 28th, 2004 at 10:01 am
Is it hard for a helicopter to get people from a submarine?
September 28th, 2004 at 8:47 pm
I was leaving from a small aircraft carrier, so the biggest challenge was not walking through the paint the guys were putting on the walls on the way to Flight Deck Triage.
Subs and ships without helo pads have a hard time transferring things and people via helo. Static, relative motion, gravity, wind, and so forth make for a very exciting evolution where the risk of getting smacked into the sail is real and painful.