Flying over Iraq

During interviews for Anaconda Times stories, I often ask my subjects what memory of Iraq will stand out most in their minds when their deployments are over. Sometimes I ponder that question for myself. My head has been so filled with new images, ranging from the smiling, camera-obsessed Iraqi soldiers at Al Kisik, to the orange glow of enemy tracer rounds on a roadside south of Baghdad, that it’s hard to sort them.

Even so, few things have been emblazoned in my neurons as vividly as the bird’s eye glimpses of Iraq I have gotten while flying between Coalition bases to provide coverage to far-flung units.

My first intra-Iraq flight was from Balad, my “home base” located about 25 miles northeast of Baghdad, to Q-west, which was about 170 miles north. I flew in plane called a sherpa, which could hold no more than ten or fifteen passengers. The sherpa leveled off almost as soon as it lifted off the runway, flying no higher than 200 feet, low enough to scatter sheep from the noise of the engines. I’m sure that is going to warm up the local shepherds to the occupation.

Much of that flight afforded a view of a brown, flat, sparsely vegetated terrain that would have seemed in place in northern Nevada. For a while, I considered what if I really was in Nevada, where the war was being simulated in a massive government conspiracy. (I never did see any casinos or whorehouses to verify my theory.)

About half way in to the hour long flight, we were flying over a body of water—either a lake or an extremely wide area in the Tigris River that took us several minutes to cross. At one point I saw an Iraqi kid standing up in a canoe waving to us from the middle of the lake.

A day or two later, I was initiated to another means of flight. Sgt. Ryan Poland and Sgt. Engels Tejeda, two fellow public affairs soldiers at the 207th MPAD, were doing a story on a Black Hawk helicopter unit that required a few minutes of aerial video footage. The crew of one helicopter was more than happy to take us along. Once we got we needed, they proceeded to demonstrate the maneuvering capabilities of the Black Hawk aircraft in a way that regulations tend to frown on.

Black Hawk helicopters quickly became my favorite mode of transportation, even when I wasn’t joy riding. Give me the deep, throbbing hum of the propellers. Give me low flights with the side doors open. You just can’t beat that with the ear-insulting shrieks and confinement of other aircraft.

I took my favorite Black Hawk flight early last September. I was working on a personality feature about a flight medic and decided to tag alone for a routine patient pick-up in Baghdad to get some photos. Approaching Baghdad by Black Hawk is a lot like standing on the edge of the ocean, only it is a man-made ocean of blockish, brown buildings peppered with mosque domes. There was one enormous dome in the middle of the city that was so large that I wasn’t sure if it was a man made object or a mountain. I later found out that in the Bradt Iraq Travel Guide that it was an uncompleted mosque, the largest in the world. It had been started by Saddam in the 1990s to help create the image of himself as a religious leader.

Since I arrived in Iraq in August, I have gone on more flights than I can count. Sometimes I see lush terrain, other times barren desert. Sometimes I see kids playing soccer in dirt fields, other times I see farmers trying to pump water from the Tigris River to irrigate their crops. Either way, it’s an adventurous feeling.