Gulfport for the last time (I hope)

Well I spent another week in lovely Gulfport Mississippi again. No I didn’t try any of the food as I was locked in my room and had the wonderful pleasure of trying many different flavors of MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat).

Again it was a lot of sitting around with only one big work day, and it was a long one. We didn’t know when we were going to get called up to fly so we were in what we call alert status, when they call we haul… It’s kind of hard to adjust your sleep schedule when you don’t know when you are going to have to work, so you just sleep when you are tired. Well a little birdie told us that we should expect to get called at 2230, well we found this out at about 1800 and had been up all day. So I tried to take a nap, but that was not the best sleep.

When we did get called we were welcomed by a nice simulated chemical attach so we got to sit in our gas masks for a little over an hour prior to stepping to go fly a real world mission. The mission was really awesome. We flew to Pope and then briefed up a 3 ship formation to include 2 T-34s that would be filming us dropping 156 total jumpers in one pass across the drop zone “Mass on the DZ”

I had to pain, I mean privilege of leading the formation around some sketchy weather to find the drop zone. After a few dry passes due to winds we were cleared to drop. Even though the #3 plane did not drop 1 & 2 got there sky soldiers out. This was the first time I have seen 104 parachutes all in the air at the same time, now that was impressive! After leading the formation around so that #3 could drop we headed back to Pope and then back to Gulfport.
By the time we got back to Gulfport it was 16.5 hours from when they first called us to go fly, now mind you we didn’t really sleep before they called us either. So as we got back to our rooms we were all a little loopy.

This was all on Friday and the war was now over, but I drew the short straw and had to wait till Sunday to come home. One would think that if the war was over you could go off base and test your luck on the blackjack table there on the coast, but no… more MREs for all.

Sunday we finally returned and had to get ready for regular work on Monday, so you tax payers feel good that you are getting your money out of me. But in all it was not that bad, and the best part is that we won’t have to do this again for about 4 years!!!