Canook Chinook

Suspended over Afghanland on six fragile rotor blades, I thought the rotors seems miscoordinated, then felt a new shimmy, and noticed hydraulic fluid flowing through the padded ceiling at the back of the aircraft, despoiling the uniformed men and material who were crammed into the cramped cabin beneath.

Remember the training, I thought to myself. It was brief, as the bird was damned loud. Besides, the flight crew would take care of any bad guys (there was nothing an unarmed civilian could do anyway, besides spew curses). “Keep your feet flat on the floor in front of you,” they said, “and not bent under the seat. In case we come in for a hard landing, you don’t want to break your legs.”


On paper, it all sounds easy enough – get off a plane in Kandahar, get inundated with information by stakeholders who need additional facilities, develop a comprehensive solution, and write a big report. This has been our experience on past missions, so how hard could it possibly be?

Where do I start?

Probably shortly after the moment we touched down, when we discovered that our ride was no where to be found and we ended up billeted in the RSOI tent. From that point, it’s been continuous to some degree up to and including this morning.

You see, our work here will plan facilities for not only the Kandahar Air Field, but also for five of what are called Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs. These FOBs are scattered across Afghanland. You can reach them by ground transportation, but they say it’s better to fly, mostly because it’s safer to fly and, in theory at least, it takes less time. Maybe hypothesis is a better term, as I’m not sure if the “Faster Transportation through Air Travel Theory” has ever been proven.

Setting foot on these other bases is on the important side of our mission here. With boots on the ground, we can discover much more about any site than we can in a briefing, or in someone else’s report on a place. To our detriment, we have had neither briefing or report on these FOBs, so the *only* way we were going to collect data was to go there and collect it ourselves. If we were successful, we would learn site and base specific information such as the placement and capacity of local utilities, the amount of stuff that has to be moved or demolished to use the site, and how our proposed usage coexists with the neighbors.

We’d take some pictures, of course, to show to the folks at KAF and slap into the report. [Reports love pictures. In fact, I’m pretty sure we can boost our grade from a B+ to an A- just by inserting a few good pictures. Then, after we load the charts and graphs,… Extra Credit, Baby!]

So, armed with an Electrical and a Wet Civil, I waited patiently outside of the hooch in the early morning light for our ride to the Whiskey Ramp, where we’d find our helicopter. Our Colonel did the driving, and only had to turn around twice, exuding confidence in his passengers. Our Captain, who arranged for this flight and would be joining us, only had the slightest clue as to where we were headed. There was plenty of exuding by the time we got dropped of at the wrong tent. It’s a good thing I insisted that we leave early.

What we thought was the “correct” tent, was actually another wrong tent and, after spending a half hour or so doing nothing, we boarded a Coaster Bus and headed to Whiskey Ramp, me wondering the entire time where we might have actually been all the while we thought we were at Whiskey Ramp. Likely at some other named alphabetical location, like Charlie or Foxtrot, or Has the Captain a Clue? I mean, he coordinated this bird ride. Shouldn’t he know where we’re supposed to be?

The bus soon dropped us off at another ramp, where there were a half dozen Chinooks and a few hundred PAX (as we passengers are called) standing by. There we stood, and stood, all the time the day heating up. All the time wearing our Kevlar hats and ballistic vests, waiting for our orders to gear up and load the helo. Finally, this order came, and we trooped single file onto the expeditionary level apron and up the ramp, past the machine gun, and into the back of our transport. There, we sat along the fuselage, shoulder to shoulder, perhaps forty of us, with our gear piled up to eye level on the floor between the two rows.

Spirits were high as we began the taxi. We were already late in our scheduled departure and still needed to make two somewhat hot stops on our way to our destination. Once my team got there, we’d have about two hours to kick rocks and root around before we had to be checked in for the return flight. There was plenty of air rushing through the cabin between the open gunnery doors to the front and the back door, which remained open during the taxi. We smiled and took a few pictures.

You could hear the motor and rotors whine as they picked up speed and started to lift us up above the airfield. Then the attitude change, then the shimmy, then the fluids, and we dropped about a meter back onto the tarmac with our broken helicopter, limping down the apron to a slow stop. Thus endeth the mission.

We could have taken the spare Chinook, but felt that, due to all of the delays on the departure side, we’d have no time to actually leave the helipad at our destination. We’d collect no data, so why bother? We bummed a ride back to camp from a couple Canadians, then headed to the Dutch Café for lunch and some work.

Tomorrow, we’ll try again.