5 years on; swearing; Buddha

In spite of my best intentions for being in bed at this hour, here I am. But this will be short.

So I guess today is five years in Iraq for the U.S....wish I had something deep to say but I don't. I was in Kuwait for the third anniversary. I hope I'm not here for the sixth thru ninth.

Being deployed is not helping my resolution to swear less. I'm stressed out, which is the biggest cause, but there is also the factor of being away from home and in a strange place with a bunch of other people in that same boat; everyone seems to swear a lot. (It reminds me of a camping trip.) I remember when we went home off my first rote, we had to remind each other to use "non-deployment voice." (A bunch of us accidentally swore in front of children the first few days.)

[edit 20 mar 08: I forgot to mention there was a pretty long controlled detonation as i wrote this.]

I rode a C-17 on a leg of my trip into here. There is a little rivalry between the C-130 and C-17 communities. The C-17 is the newest airlifter, so it tends to get a lot of praise from the top brass,
and there is also the fact that the C-17 was designed to do some of the same things the C-130 was (assault landings). Depending on who you ask, though (me for example), C-130 crews are more experienced at this mission and thus more reliable. It is also an objective fact that we cause less damage to the runways we land on. In spite of this, the C-17 still gets way more publicity, quite unfairly sometimes. For example, on my first rote, a C-17 crew got DFCs for flying into a field that C-130s fly into on a weekly basis, and all we would get was one counter towards an air medal (that is, you need to do 19 more combat missions to get a medal ranked (much) lower than the DFC.)

A lot of the C-17s were built in the late nineties or early oughts, so you tend to think of them as new planes. But when I went up on the flight deck of the C-17 I rode, I noticed the paint on the throttle handles was worn clean and the metal underneath was shiny (a common feature of Herc throttles as well), and it reminded me that the C-17s have been hard at work as well. Their TDY rate has been higher than the Hercs in many of the last several years (approaching 270 days a year), and they too have their moments of eclipse in the press: Lebanon in '06, they were instrumental in pulling out the bulk of the Americans there.