Alert

We were sitting around watching the office, u know the usual, when the load popped his head through the door "WE'RE ALERTED" The higher ups usually give you a time window the day prior when to expect to be alerted and you have to be at the squadron an hour later ready to do business. I hooped n hollered, the other guys just wanted to finish the episode, but we eventually made our way to the squadron as lightning thundered overhead (one of many mental pictures I tried to take today). We were the first crew to get to fly so it was very high visibility, everyone was anxious to see all their hard work pay off. Awesome to see what had previously been an abandoned hole in the ground turn into a functional work area over night, complete with tactics, intel, life support, command post, briefing room, break room, and of course projector for Halo 3. Side note: we noticed the briefing room's door frame was kicked in and there were 3 black blast marks on the ceiling... I wonder how we obtained this hole?

Each team gave us there support: brief of our mission, binders containing info on all our stops, local intel updates, contingency plans, NVGs, and lunches of course. I was starting to get a big head with all this attention then I remembered all this wasn't being done for me but rather for the person who needed whatever we will be hauling, we are all just another wheel in the great cog that is our military super train. You are either the one kicking in doors putting blast marks on ceilings or the one supporting them, fortunately my support contains perks such as cloud surfing.

Our support today came in the form of an empty dry run just to check the functionality of this new plan, which was highly beneficial for a rookie like myself, but a bit of an annoyance for old pros. I'm glad to say it was uneventful and the Cols back at command post with their eyes glued to the scope only had one moment of worry when they saw us double back on our path (due to weather, our dust bowl is now a swimming hole, your were right Michael) Felt good to be back in the saddle, even if just as a ginny pig.