About six months ago, we ordered two replacement seatbets for a Cobra. We got them in, installed them correctly, signed off all the paperwork, and moved on with our lives.

Today, we got these:

Two radiators, four inches by eight inches by about forty inches long. Painted matte black, which made it hard to take the photo. (It's being held by our civilian technical representative.) They're made by Caterpillar Inc, which certainly suggests that they are designed for some kind of heavy equipment. Regardless, they aren't any good for us. We can't give them back, so we're probably going to throw them overboard at some point.

The good news is that they cost $400 each, which is peanuts for an aircraft component. We can pay that much for a short section of pipe, mostly because of the crazy certification standards necessary for aviation components.

If you're curious, we got these because they have the same part number as the seatbelt. When we ordered we also put down the code for the manufacturer, but I guess the expiditer (who pushes the parts request into the federal supply system) ignored that code.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:10 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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We left the cold and rainy waters of Okinawa yesterday, and the weather cleared right up. Sunshine, flying fish, friendly little clouds... very nice.

Today the sky is back to solid clouds, with rain squalls scattered about. It's getting worse too, with heavy seas predicted overnight. By now (1700), we're already rocking and rolling. Good thing I'm the one person in the shop who never gets seasick.

I do get regular sick though, and I am right now. I'm feverish, aching, and generally bad-tempered and tired. My gunny told me to go back to berthing and rack out, but I can't do that. That would be surrender. I am constitutionally incapable of admiting defeat in such a manner. (My friends have tales about me denying obviously broken limbs out of sheer pig-headedness.)

But even I will confess I wasn't all that convincing when I told Gunny I was fine and didn't need to leave work, since I said it while curled in a fetal ball on the steel deck, with a floatation rescue strop as a pillow.

Anyway, a few more day's travel and we'll be doing our latest set of fake multilateral missions. Whee. No one wants to be here. There was a recent discussion of when the last time the squadron had a Saturday that we weren't working during. We think there may have been a Saturday in early December, but no one's quite sure.

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Happy Valentine's Day. Whee. We're having a grand old time here what with the excellent male/female balance.

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We really are getting used to this. Today we did a horizontal replenishment and a vertical replenishment. (We pull up along side a support ship. H-Rep: run fuel hoses across, and also run pallets along a cable. Vert-Rep: a help carries pallets and parts between their flight deck and ours.)

At-sea replenishment is an interesting evolution, but I've seen it many times. So I didn't even stop to watch. But while I was up on the flight deck working on an seat gripe, I saw dozens of Marines from the other (newly-arrived) units with cameras, snapping away. Ah yes, I did that. And I've got dozens of photos on flickr now to prove it. So I don't feel the urge to do it again.

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In the Air Wing, we work two shifts on the boat: 0700-1900 and 1900-0700. I was originally day crew, but with Cpl W back in CONUS with his brother, I'm doing swing crew to cover some of his responsibilites in addition to my own. So I work 1000-2200. Which is kind of nice, because that fits my natural sleep schedule quite well.

Today I showed up at 0945 as usual, then was back in berthing by 1015 packing a day pack.

You see, we left two helicopters back at our base in Futemna while they underwent phase maintenance, which is easier to complete in our home hanger with an overhead crane that doesn't swing around with every wave. Right now the ship is still doing the "Oki 500", cruising around Okinawa in circles while we get the new elements of the MEU up to speed. So a stay-behind group is a doable proposition.

Anyway, one of the birds back there was done with phase and ready to start its functional check flights, and it needed the explosives installed that jettison it's exernal fuel tanks. We hadn't left anyone behind that had the required qualifications to install explosives, so an ordnace guy and myself were tasked with going back onshore to do the work.

It was too late to get us assigned on a regular Passenger, Mail, & Cargo run, so we kind of snuck aboard one of our helos that was also doing functional check flights, and it ran us out to Futenma and dropped us off, then took off to continue testing. If it's test was going poorly, we might have to stay overnight, thus the overnight bags. Ahh, to sleep in my comfortable barracks room, and go offbase and feast on sushi... far be it for me to wish ill upon an aircraft I was a passenger on, but if it was stuck overnight I'd be a happy camper.

Such was not to be. We did the ten-minute job to install the explosives on the one bird, then sat around for a few hours waiting on our ride to finish testing. It came back good, so the two of us helped load a huge pile of spare parts on it, then loaded up with about three other unofficial passengers. I'm not saying we don't have way to much paperwork of our own; but we Marines are all about mission accomplishment, and if we think the Navy is being an impediment, we'll find a way to go around them.

An hour before we launched back to the boat, I called Anthony's Pizza and got a pair of large pies delivered to the hangar.* They were still warm when I got on the boat, making me the hero of the shop. When we had just a few slices left, we were summoned to a training in the ready room (on the Naval Aviation Maintenance Discrepency Reporting Program, if anyone's curious. I got every question right, to no one's surprise, since I'm really good at reading painfully opaque texts and remembering the details.) We brought along the last few pizza slices to torment everyone else with. Ahh, the games you play on the boat!

* When my OIC heard me refer to a pair of a pizzas as "some pies", he cursed me out as a New Englander. A palpable hit!

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This is our sixth time on the Essex during the current MEU cycle. By the fourth time, we'd worked all the kinks out of embarkation, rolling on smooth as silk. I think we got overconfident, because this time it was a disaster from start to finish.

The first problem was that we were boarding over three days, at the same time we were doing the MEU Certification Exercise, a VBSS- that's Vertical Boarding Search and Seizure. So we, the aviation element, were very heavily tasked with dropping a large group of Recon Marines onto a "potentially hostile" merchant vessel. So instead of being dedicated to getting us onboard and settled in, we were flying dozens of hours each day.

With the limited flights available for embark, most of our shop was stuck riding a Landing Craft, Utility aboard. Only Cpl P and myself got to fly on, and I barely made it. I was at the hanger with all my gear at dawn, only to get bumped from flight after flight, not launching until after 1900 on an overloaded helo. We managed to get to the boat, and then P and I had to drag all our classified and controlled gear into the shop with just the two of us. Normally we have six people do it in about an hour. With just two of us, getting increasinly exhausted, we weren't done until midnight. The next day we started butting heads with the Harrier guys we share the shop with.
Because of our extension, we're the only unit on the MEU that didn't switch over the new year. It's new infantry, new jets, new supply, new command element, and same old helicopters. So there's been friction. Especially in the shop.

Our shop is a room shared with the Harrier Flight E and Seat Shop. For Harriers and F-18s, the job my shop does is split between two different shops (FE and SS). So, they figured that there were three shops in the room, so each should get a third of the space.

Now, the way we see it, most space in the room is taken up with the aircrew's gear inside lockers. The harriers have twelve aviators onboard. We helo guys have almost a hundred and thirty flyers. So, if they get more than 10% of the space, it's due to the kindness of our hearts.

Anyway, the Harriers loaded on a few days before us, so they claimed all the lockers near the door, which normally go to the senior officers (from both units). They refused to budge. Diplomacy with the Harrier enlisted broke down. With so many people still waiting on the LCU, I was the senior Flight E guy we had. As I prepared to move their gear like it or not, the harrier F/E people got one of their captains to come by and talk to me. All our officers were out flying, you know, doing their jobs, but the harrier guys always have plenty of time to hang out. That fine figure of Marine leadership gave me a direct order not to move any of their stuff. I was a bit hot under the collar by then, so I said "Sir, my colonel should be back in about two hours. When he gets here, I'm going to request permission to throw your shit into the ocean so the colonel can put his gear where he has been putting it for the last five floats, while you guys were snapping towels at each other in Yuma." He turned a little purple and said "Yeah? Well, I'll bet my colonel will have something to say about that!", and I said "Yeah, like 'How come a captain managed to get his gear thrown in the ocean?'" and he reminded me of his order and stomped off, undoubtdly hearing the other helo enlisted snickering at him. Which made me feel good but didn't really help the situation.

But I had a order and I was waiting for someone senior to countermand it, when a harrier major came in and he and I talked it out. We moved their captains gear, took about 60% of the shop's floorspace, and I let them put their captains where we normally keep night vision gear. Which will be more inconvenient for all concerned, but one does have to compromise occasionally.

After our pilots returned from their mission, they naturally heard about the drama, and the Maintenance Chief (a Master Gunnery Sergeant, the seniormost enlisted rank) came to see me. He just walked in, shook my hand, said "Good job with the diplomacy!" and walked out. I like that guy. Soon afterwards came our Maintenance Officer, who said "Well, I was hoping you could work it out among equals, but I heard you had to get into it with a captain to get things worked out." "Well, sir," I replied, "the captain and I didn't see eye-to-eye. I actually had to work it out with a major." The MO kind of sighed and said "Well, whatever level of 'equality' works, I guess," and left. I like the MO, but he makes me nervous. He's a big upper midwestern Swede with a sense of humor so dry it can be hard to tell whether he's amused or angry and hiding it.

That night the rest of the shop arrived at about midnight, and we started to get things together. Now we had a Gunny for some firepower, although unfortunatly our Gunny is a terrifically friendly guy that has trouble with confrontations. The next day some harrier warrent officer came to complain about our hanging our garmet bags in the shop. We asked him what the problem was, and he claimed that they were a fire hazard. After he said that silence fell for a good ten seconds, as we all stared at him like he was an idiot. The shop has about seventy pounds of miscellaneous explosive and pyrotechnic devices in here. The additional hazard that our uniforms provide is so trivial as to be laughable. Our garmet bags are still here.

It's been a few days now, and the drama is wearing down a little, as we try to be polite to each other and do trivial favors for each other. We've got to be in this small space for a month together, so we need to ratchet down the tension.

I think that there are two sources for the tension: experience and culture clash. Experience is, well, we've been doing this for almost two years now, and we've got it all worked out. But the harrier guys have no interest in listening to us about how things work. That's because of culture clash- harriers and ground attack aircraft that used to be fighters, and they are keenly aware of their bad reputation in the Marine Corps. Harrier pilots mostly really wanted to be F-18 Hornet pilots but couldn't hack it. Harriers are known as "The Lawn Darts of the Corps" throughout the air wing. But they can look down at us poor helo guys- our pilots don't even need oxygen masks! We fly low and slow, and we work for a living, instead of cruising at altitude and pretending we have a chance in an air-to-air duel against a modern fighter. And MEUs are all about landing troops on unfriendly shores, so they get annoyed when the MEU command prioritizes troop-carrying helos above under-armed ground attack planes.

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Whoops, look at the time! It's Boat-Thirty!

Assuming the weather gets a little better than it is right now, I'll be flying out the the fabled USS Stressex tomorrow. I'm filled with glee and happiness at yet another month living in quarters tighter than are permitted for prison, doing pointless excercises interrupted only by a stop in a third-world country's second-class port. Yipee!

Well, it might not be that bad. A few people are going to spend a week or two ashore, and I might manage to become one of them. Also, we've done this so many times that you'd think all the problems are worked out already. The people that think that are wrong, though.

What's amusing is how depressed this has made everybody. Even the staff NCOs whose job it is to keep the unit motivated and moving, are all depressed and bitter. Two year! Two years of this!

But enough of my complaining. While at sea, I'll be able to check my civilian email account infrequently at best. I recommend contacting me via my military email, which is "firstname dot middleinitial dot lastname at usmc dot mil". If you've forgotten, my middle initial is "P".

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Work today doesn't start until 1330, to give us a chance to watch the Super Bowl. Which is nice, because last year we were onboard ship, and in rough seas, so the ship couldn't maintain a fix on the satellite broadcasting the game. So we'd get one second of game, ten seconds of static, one second of game... the true fans were horrified.

Me, I'm not a true fan, but it was a nice game. Unfortunaly I was watching it on the American Forces Network of course, so they couldn't show the ads, which are always the best part.

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There's a newly-arrived sergeant in the airframes shop that I knew from my previous unit, a reserve light/attack helo squadron. He's a reservist, so I was quite surprised to see him out here in Okinawa.

My prior unit got reactivated, him among them. But they decided they had too many airframers, and rather than just deactivate him again, he got sent out here to join the 31st MEU. He'd rather be with his home unit, naturally.

They got reactivated to go to Iraq. That's where my prior squadron is right now. I am so jealous I can't stand it. A MEU is normally a one-year cycle, but our CO decided we'd all love it when he volunteered us all for a two-year stint. Two years of sailing around the West Pacific, playing grab-ass with the Koreans, visiting Olongopo City ("The Pimple on Paradise!"), and doing jack-all. The only worthwhile thing we've done was provide four days of medical services to a few small towns in the hinterlands of Cambodia. Four days out of two years.

And meanwhile, my old comrades are in the fight. Again.

People join the Air Force to suck a paycheck from the government teat. People join the Army to get a free college education. People join the Marines to fight. But here I am, posing for photos with South Koreans in front of our helicopters, before doing a pretend amphibious invasion, that we probably couldn't do for real anyway, because so much of our armor has been stripped away for the real fight.

Thanks, Colonel! Thanks for the two years on the USS Stressex!

Meanwhile, the CO is about to move on, there's a new boss on the way. That guy's about to get screwed very hard. After two years on the MEU, our aircraft are in terrible shape. Our programs are a disaster. We're going to get a couple of inspections within two months of finally leaving the MEU, and we all know are going to get shut down for weeks until we can convince the Wing that we are safe to fly. I personally manage a program- last inspection, it got an "outstanding" rating and the inspector complimented me by name in his brief for the general. (My reward for exceptional performance: bupkis.) My program now? It's a disaster. It a direct safety program, and I know for a fact that half the squadron is not in compliance. But that's OK, because I know tool control, ground safety, hazmat, and training programs are all off-track too. We've been so busy doing pointless missions that our aircraft are falling apart, we've done the required weekly training sessions thrice in the last year, and people are getting hurt.

In the last six months (i.e. the time after we normally would have passed off the MEU and gone into reconstitution mode) we've had a rash of aviation mishaps and ground mishaps. As I write these words, the senior flightline mechanic is getting vertebrae fused as a result of a work mishap. The second-senior airframes guy had a nasty multiple compound fracture a week ago, he'll be down for three months until he's done with surgery and casts. And the newest guy in flightline fell twenty feet onto tarmac and was lucky to have only a shattered shoulder. He'll be months recovering too. Aircraft mishaps? We had a CH-53 damage four rotor blades in flight over water, which is as close to death for all four aboard. We had a CH-46 blow out a transmission with a full load of passengers, luckily on final approach to the ship, so the pilot had enough time to slam it onto the deck; before he could complete the emergency shutdown, the rotors seized up. A little further away from the ship and that would have been sixteen dead on water impact, because you can't autorotate without rotating rotors.

The official DoD policy on blogging is that discussion of morale and unit readiness are off-limits. Fuck that. This unit is a disaster about to happen. In a few days I fly on to the ship again. Half the unit is going to fly on, and normally that's where everyone wants to be, because the alternative is two hours on a bus and a wet hour on a LCAC. This time? Hot competition for the busses. Does it tell you anything that the people that fix the aircraft don't want to fly on them?

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Our shop has two people right now that know anything about Hueys and Cobras- me, and Cpl W, the guy that came out with the skid detachment specifically to work on them. Me being here and knowing them is just a convenient bonus.

Some bad news came up, this morning: Cpl W's brother was in a serious car accident. The brother was unconcious, and rushed to the hospital.

Good news is, he woke up, with just a few broken bones and a concussion. Broken bones will heal, and a concussion is nothing to get all excercised about.

I said there was worse news. "Punch in the gut" news. For a patient that has been knocked unconcious from trauma, standard procedure is to get a CAT scan to look for brain hemhorrages or other problems. They found those "other problems".

Cpl W's brother has three brain tumors, at least one of which is malignant. I didn't get the prognosis, but it's bad enough that they're doing brain surgery about 30 hours from now, which is inherently risky and also a bad sign. It'll take 24 hours to fly back Cpl W to the bedside, so that's the schedule we're on. The Red Cross message arrived via fax, and we got him approval for emergency leave in full bore crisis speed: the CO and XO were both out flying, and the CO or XO had to give assent for the leave. They were out of range of our squadron's normal communication radio, which is unsecure anyway. So we had to squack their bird using a communications method that is, shall we say, not normally used. We got the CO's verbal assent, the duty officer signed off the CO's spot on the paperwork "by direction", and Cpl W is going to the airport tomorrow morning. If the duty driver can't take him there, I already volunteered my services, but I suspect our OIC's volunteering overrides mine.

Cpl W's only been here a couple of weeks, and he works nights, so I don't know him all that well. But Marines are family. We squabble and quarrel, but when trouble strikes, it's horns outward. I am literally sick with worry for this guy.

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