The first day in Afghanistan

Our first day started off with a huge (350+ people) ceremony for a fallen Marine LT that we carried. It was the largest ceremony that I have seen and I was glad that we could do our part in bringing him home.

We then flew to Bagram and that place had changed from 2004. They have a new runway and the base is exploding, ok bad choice of words, how about expanding!

Then we went to Salerno, it’s a fun 3,500’ gravel strip. Now this is the kind of stuff that a C-130 was made to do. I had a grin on my face ear to ear going into that LZ. On the ground it makes you think this is what it was like in Vietnam, or at least the little out posts made me feel like that. We had to bump a Humvee as it weighted too much for what we could carry out of there (more to follow…)

Salerno, yes the weather was not perfect

The base fence does not give me the warm fuzzies

Don't see any pavement do you?

Then we flew back home to Kandahar. They asked us when we got home if we could do one more leg for to drop off some water and they said it was very high priority (almost as much as TP) so we said yes.

We took 24,000 pounds of bottled water to some Australian base and when we tried to get someone to take it no one would!? Rob my loadmaster went up to a dude on a forklift and asked if he would take this stuff and he said he has his own work to do. This was a first for us, no one would take this water that was supposed to be of such a high demand. So after waiting for over 45 minutes and no one would take this we had an idea… Just kick it out the back! So we asked tower and for some reason they said yes to letting us drop this stuff off on some dirt taxiway so we did.

Lots of water

The procedure is to set the brakes, push up the power and release the brakes as the loadmaster unlocks the cargo. Well it worked like a champ! The plane went forward and the water fell out the back =) Lets just say that “combat offloading” the cargo more than made up for having us wait 45 minutes. It was awesome, the water was flying everywhere and we made a mess, but they got the goods, we got a good laugh and got out of there!