The chopper fiend

There are few feelings in the world like lifting out of Baghdad in a helicopter under the cover of night.

I was strapped in the four-way seat belt, my bags strapped in around me, but with the sides open I could feel the heavy night air rushing in and the adrenaline of lift off into the unknown. For the first time in over a month of reporting on the Army, I felt free.

It was only my second day in Iraq and the rush of humid darkness, the cutting thwock of the rotor through the air, and most of all the lights, yes, the lights that lit up certain jewels of the city, made music inside me. It was one of those rare, "I'm here" moments many are denied through the grinding monotony of working and living in this country as an outsider. I thought if my friends and family, regular people like me, could experience this ride, it might inspire them to not think of this place as such a sinkhole of death and ruin.

Of course what did I know then? I had only just made it here and was going somewhere in a U.S. Blackhawk. That's all I knew for the next two hours. I tried to take pictures and not one was worth a damn.

I would land in Anaconda and be picked up by an overweight, Marboro Reds smoking public affairs Sergeant and by the next day feel heavy with the alienation of being at another huge, anonymous mega-base. But in the air I felt free. I'm sure many soldiers must feel the same way. Masters of all you survey, if only for a moment.

Since that first night, I've ridden in helicopters a handful of times. But they always seem to be there- in the sky overhead, hovering, the sound of them coming in to disgorge VIPs or, the sobering reminders of ones with red crosses that descend on the bigger hospitals and liters are rushed to them.

Overhearing the radio transmissions of some Medivac choppers rushing into the Theater Hospital at Balad for several minutes was enough to give me and some Indiana soldiers I was riding with one night, the idea it would be better not to knows the details of some of the wounded these birds were carrying.
They are both the life-savers and death-bringers. I've seen them swoop in to save the life of an Indian national who had flipped his tanker truck and had been pinned beneath his wheel, yet heard more than a few stories of them rocketing the wrong house and killing a family inside. The feeling that it might be easier to shoot from higher up, but harder to tell the right target.

Once I flew from Tikrit to Baghdad and back twice in the same day to pick up and drop off some Iraqi TV cameramen. They took pictures of themselves flying and aimed their cameras outward as we lifted over their city. I imagined they might be seeing it for the first time from the air, and from an American helicopter. Had they ever dreamed of such a scenario?

I've boarded with blindfolded detainees hustled under the spinning rotor with their hands tied behind their backs and also with dignitaries and their bodyguards. The helicopter is truly an equitable mode of transportation for opposite ends of Iraqi society.

Across the seat from the governor of Salah Ad Din one morning trip as the sun burned over the landscape, and he in his suit and tie, carrying two phones and two advisors, one American, one Iraqi, who seemed just as boyish as the rest of us to see the early morning patchwork of crop fields from the open door of the fast-moving steel bird.

Once coming into Camp Speicher from Brassfield-Mora, I watched as the side gunner lifted his gun up as we came in over the fence boundary, and a golden wreath of bullets flew out of the open ammo box. Then another wreath flew out and I was tempted to try to catch it.

There's one seat in the back that is impossible to sit in. With the wind screaming in, your face gets absolutely flattened. I learned the hard way. Later, I saw Iraqis laughing while the late comer of their group got battered by the hot air.
I've experienced pilots do stomach-churning dips, supposedly for the journalist's entertainment, and a twin bird come up level with the other in mid-air. Even more of a marvel, is their ability to take different flight paths into Baghdad every time, so you scout the river, the Green Zone palaces, the slums where soccer fields and boys planning in 130 degree heat pierce the hanging poverty on each new path.

I've cursed their circular routes, dipping from base to base in and around Baghdad, first to refuel, then to get this contractor, or let that Major off. After a day of this your ears will ring even with the plugs in.

I've seen Iraqis waving from their farmlands, or amidst their sheep herds, and wondered what they were really thinking.

Tomorrow, I will go on another ride. Thank god. It is one of the genuine pleasures in a reconstruction zone where the best mall is a PX, the best ride an up armored Humvee. Our compatriots are soldiers, contractors, or some State Department attache who says absolutely nothing. You couldn't hear him anyways.