Lawman

1,1,1,1, .... ###### Ive been in Kandahar for to damn long.

You shape and mentor, you have influence commensurate with your position if your an instructor, but outside of a place like Ft Rucker where CW4s are flight commanders and immediate raters of the IP Cadre in their flight, you dont command. A PC officer may run the maintenance plan for the Battalion, but he doesnt own any of the maintenance soldiers that work under him, the Delta Company and Line Company commanders do. Fact is as a Warrant you can and should work all the way up at the Brigade level (CW5s) but you will never be a rater. You will have voice and dependent on your command climate a very powerful one, but you will never put pen to paper to express someones ability or flaws and why they should or should not continue in Army Aviation.

Army Warrant is possible. Worked with a couple Warrants who were commission guys first either in Aviation or in another Branch/Service that converted to come over. Its a pay cut and you dont "Command" but at the same time you can spend the life of your career in an active Line Unit and never leave the cockpit for stupid shit like staff tours or trips to far away places with UAVs.

I heard a Female C-12 call out something in conversation out in RC South the other day that had me and my crewmember dying. "Roger... understand you have a hot load for me?"

One of our guys has managed to get the phrase "Roger, Im coming inside you" on at least 2 gun tapes of engagements.

More to the point... If you cant fall to the ground only to be rolled up by a bunch of cavemen wearing man dresses who will gladly beat you, rape you, put you in front of a flag tied and bound, and then cut your ######ing head off for anyone to see on youtube including your family, you dont get an Air Medal.

I think you missed my point. Any helicopter can casevac just like any ground vehicle, but it may be much more detrimental to the casualty. I can throw a guy on the EFAB and D ring him on, but I can treat him. I can't apply pressure to wounds or try to keep him flat on a hard board so he doesn't aggravate injury. And neither can another couple yahoos in a 60 with no medic that was "near" our RT. That's something we try to drive home when we talk about spur rides in the Apache, I there is a 60 close and your trying to take out a critical casualty you may kill him trying to save him.

Casevac does not equal medevac. And I've personally been in a position where we pl'd near the Georgia/Alabama border and the Lakota could only take one of us. The others sat for an hour and a half till a Huey showed up and took us out of there with the plane guard to watch the bird we'd just parked in a field.

Didnt help that right as the decisions on the "best way" to do things we suddenly got ourselves involved in a whole metric ###### ton of War time Ops.

Your sources are wrong. Return to target is a perfectly acceptable maneuver. You can brief up go 60 +- pitch and 120 in roll, if your briefed for it. It's just not something you should be doing at 9000 MSL where the aircraft is power limited and the rate decent can't be rapidly arrested. You can do that maneuver for days Near sea level even with a heavily loaded bird. The crew ######ed up got lucky they didn't kill anybody including themselves and for nothing more than someone trying to show off for YouTube. That's pretty much been the topic of conversation at more than a few company and battalion meetings in my unit.

Spend the majority of your time at around 2500 AGL and you'd understand the sentiment. ###### drones.

I thought that was all asians....

If you go back to about the 1999-2002 Time frame you'll hear pretty much the exact same statement about the Super Hornet from the F-14 mafia. Guess who turned out to be wrong as hell in that argument.

"Not only did Pepsi quench my thirst! Im also able to walk again!".

At least these guys were smart enough to cover their faces. And I found the one of the guy strapped to the "Rocket" funny as shit.

Ill call it stooping to their level when we drag combatants that surrendered out into the open, behead them... burn their bodies... drag them through a ######ing street... and then hang them from the walls of a FOB. Nothing the media does that sells papers over here cant be used by the Taliban as a recruiting tool. We live in the age of digital editing and the internet. Mearly throwing captions into a video of us doing a perfectly legal strike on a bunch of combatants with a little holy mumbling to Allah song going on is a recruiting tool. These people make videos of them blowing up a minor IED... waiting for medics and additional personel to come on scene to pull their burning buddies out of the wreckage and then set off another IED. These ######ers mutilate, rape, torture, and desicate the bodies of not only ours but of civilians on the battlefield meanwhile they drag piles of bodies together sans weapons and claim war crimes and illegal air strikes. The War will end and history will remember whatever the ###### it wants dependent on which country your in. Lets kill bad guys (ie anybody that points a ######ing weapon at anyone wearing an ISAF patch) and stop worrying about anything beyond that.

Like ThreeHoler said, call the company that issued the loan (USAA, Sallie Mae, etc) and inform them you want your interest rate fixed as part of the servicemans civil relief act. After that they will likely either give you a number or an address for you to send your information to. Typically they want some kind of official letter head type document but just about anything with a date on it will work. I used my original appointment orders since they had the whole commitment to 20XX on it. That should fix your loans to a 6% interest rate maximum and they cant be arbitrarily increased. Also contact your credit card company, car loan, etc, it works for anything you had when you joined the military.

See thats a problem we experience too. Any time a mission comes up we find ourselves adding 3-4 approach plates to the kneeboard packet because somehow people feel they need to be there. Even though you have your volume 3 with the same plates on it in your pubs bag, or at least your supposed too. I think thats more a cultural problem in the powerpoint military of if something isnt X number of pages it must not be complete. Quantity over content.

Urban Meyer was actively campaigning for his team to leapfrog Michigan. And remember until last year the Big 10 didnt have two divisions so there was no championship game. When Michigan stopped their season Florida still had the SEC championship to play while ranked #4 and USC was ranked #2 (and lost to UCLA). The final BCS poll passed Florida over Michigan to take the No. 2 spot while Michigan remained unchanged at No. 3, with .0101 points separating the two teams. This small difference was a result of the human polls (the Coaches Poll and Harris Interactive Poll) ranking Florida above Michigan while the computer polls had the two teams tied for second. That pretty much set a precedent that if you lost your division championship you should be locked out of the National Championship. But the two teams going on to lose shows any team can lose on any game day, and Oklahoma State has far more cause for playing in the National Championship than Alabama, but there is too much blind SEC love a la "We are the greatest at football ever" (so long as you ignore Vandy, Kentucky, Mississippi state, Ol'Miss, and Tennessee) that the people this contest was rigged for will just stand by and forget how much they were bitching and how hard they would have bitched had it gone to Michigan instead of Florida in 2006. Alabama lost theirs, but is jumping over Oklahoma State because it sells advertisement time on TV, not because their is anything else built into this system to make it "fair" or well balanced to deliver a true contest and separate wheat from chaff.

Every day Im in Europe I stop and ask myself "how the hell did we ever plan to fight WWIII over here in this Theatre we sure couldnt do it now if we had too." -The weather that can be counted on to be IMC from the floor to 3K that never seems to burn off. -Units that dont even know who has the keys to their arms room much less that ability to get into it without it taking 2 days notice -Contract services that work around German working hours, 2 hour lunches, and holidays you've never heard of (they also take your holidays off too) -No organic movement capability within the military its self. Seriously if the Germans driving our trucks dont show up with their own cranes we cant move anything that wont fit in the back of an LMTV -A military that has no flexibility in planning but to spend 3 days arguing over powerpoint slides and bitching that the kneeboard packet isnt thick enough so it must not have enough of the "right products." Not to say it wouldnt be fun to have a real fight down amongst the trees for the role my aircraft was designed for. But if Ivan really was sitting across that border with any kind of force and they did load up and start rolling, even from the Russian border they'd be in Cologne before we finally got people to stop typing the CONOPs on power point and load the god damn birds.

I hope not, Im only a couple hour drive from Fulda.

Everyone and their brother was screaming that the National Championship had to be Ohio State vs Florida, because even though they were ranked 1 and 2 you couldnt have a replay between Ohio State and Michigan. Funny how all the SEC fanboys change their tunes when its talk of their conference getting to hold both berths and not anybody else.

It was supposed to be an improvement over the Sherpa, and that thing sure as hell wont stay airborn while loaded up on one engine. Again thanks Air Force for kicking us in the junk again.

Well on the plus side for the Paki's. With all the trucks sitting parked at the border and waiting they'll be much easier to pilfer through. Get out of my ######ing Tricons you god damn filthy rats!

12th CAB? That sounds pretty familiar. And yes, thanks big AF for fighting to kill off a program that you didnt really want in the first place just so the Army couldnt have a big new pretty grey plane.