Day and night, Balad is filled with the sounds of jet engines, propellers and rotors. During the day, it's the scream of jets with their afterburners leaving behind an orange/blue streak as they rocket over the base at about 50 feet above the runway before climbing vertically to thousands of feet within seconds at the fence line. When the jets aren't drowning out the noise of everything else around, you'll hear the reverse thrusters of the big cargo planes as they touch down, the C5's, the C17's and even the propeller-driven C130's. It's very neat watching them land. They can't come in at the regular angle that we're all familiar with from flying on commercial aircraft because of the threat of rockets. Instead, they fly to Balad at the customary 30,000 plus feet and then when they're over Balad they spiral down in huge corkscrew circles before touching down. Seeing it and feeling it are two different things though. When I arrived from Kuwait on a big Air Force C17 (there aren't any windows so you can't see when you're going to land) I knew when we were close because you start this quick acceleration/banking/decreasing altitude pattern that feels pretty cool. It's almost like getting a great rollercoaster ride for free!
The nights belong to the helicopters. Apache attack helicopters and some Blackhawk utility helicopters will fly during the day, but Chinooks (the big helicopters with 2 rotors on them) can only fly at night so they're cloaked in darkness and more difficult to hit with small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades. The chop-chop-chop sound of the helicopters can be heard all night long as they come and go on various missions, but you look up and see only darkness, unable to quite put your finger on where the sound is coming from exactly. The pilot's world is a bright green one though as they see everything through Night Vision Goggles .
Down on the ground, I live with a roommate in half of a trailer in a little trailer park. Our trailer is surrounded by sandbags stacked up on the walls to protect us from mortar and rocket attacks. Our "trailer park" is one of about 24, each with about 24 trailers in it that are surrounded by tall concrete "T-walls". They're all organized into little squares within the concrete barriers. Every building here on Balad is surrounded by these concrete T-walls and some buildings like the gym, even have mortar-proof roofs built above them in addition to the T-walls.
In case you haven't guessed the theme yet, Balad is known as "Mortaritaville" and when you first land, you watch a little video about how to react to indirect fire attacks against us. The video ends with a Jimmy Buffett-like scene of a parrot wearing an army helmet, sitting on a branch overlooking a sunset at the beach. Balad is a very big base…it's about the size of Turners Falls for those of you that live up in Massachusetts. I drove over to the East side yesterday and that was a 4 mile drive, so I'd guess that it's about 4-5 miles by 5-6 miles big.
The sunsets here are pretty because they're so much sand in the air. The sun just turns into this huge red ball as it disappears over the T-walls. It's still very hot here but not as bad as it was in Kuwait. I work at the Aviation Flight Clinic but we're still working on developing a regular schedule. The other docs and PA's that I work with here are awesome and we all get along well and share the same sense of humor, so it's a nice working environment. I'll update with some pictures as I'm able. I only get 30 minutes per session on the internet where I can actually access myspace as I'm blocked from it on government computers. Hope everyone is doing well!
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