Posted on 09/02/2005 11:24:23 AM PDT by BenLurkin
LANCASTER - Flying as crew chief in a CH-53E Super Stallion at 12,000 feet in the mountains of Afghanistan is like riding "the scariest roller coaster at Magic Mountain," only the ride lasts hours instead of minutes. With a laugh, that's how Staff Sgt. Kingslee Gourrick described his job to fairgoers who turned out to participate in the Real-time Heroes forum sponsored by the Valley Press.
Gourrick and Sgt. Timothy Reed accepted the invitation to attend the fair and speak a bit about their work as crew chiefs on the Super Stallion, the "biggest helicopter in the free world."
The Super Stallion, which delivers cargo and troops to combat zones in the war on terror, "weighs 6,500 pounds," Sgt. Reed related.
It's bigger and heavier than a Freightliner semi-truck.
Staff Sgt. Gourrick logged tours in Afghanistan and was in the first wave of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
"Our job was to carry out a couple of Humvees and bring them to Umm Qasr," he said. "It was something, because there we were with a .50-caliber machine gun, and you could see women and children on the ground running, smiling and waving; meanwhile, there were guys on the rooftops who were shooting at us."
That provided a snapshot of the complexity of the job of door-gunning a heavy Marine helicopter in 21st-century warfare.
"We had to fly with 'weapons tight,' " Gourrick recalled.
The order "weapons tight" meant don't let stray rounds scatter to kill or wound the "friendlies."
Sometimes it meant not shooting when you were taking fire.
"We had a fair amount of battle damage," Gourrick recalled.
Gathered in the "Real Times Heroes" alcove in the Lilac Pavilion, Gourrick and Reed told their audience why they believed their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were significant to the nation's defense.
"For me, it is the protection of my family," Gourrick said.
Reed said that, with generations of men in his family serving in the military, he was determined to be a Marine.
"This is what I wanted to do," he said. "We are volunteers. We do this because we want to, and because we realize it's important."
Gourrick added, "From my first tour in Afghanistan, and then when I came back, you could see things really had gotten better for people in that country."
He said he remembered watching a girl, weighed with the burden of a dozen water buckets, walking to each isolated farmhouse.
"This is not an easy country for people to live in," he said. "I watched that girl from the helicopter door, and I had no doubt she would carry those water buckets to each of those homes."
Civil improvements, road improvements, school and sanitation improvements show progress since the Taliban was ousted, he said.
The subject of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain GI, came up, and both noncommissioned officers reflected on it a moment. Sheehan's anti-war protest at Crawford, Texas, outside the ranch of President George W. Bush has occasioned spirited debate in the military as well as the general populace.
"She has had the greatest loss there is," Sgt. Reed said. "We do what we do so that she can protest. That's just the way it is."
Staff Sgt. Gourrick affirmed that. "We do what we do for the protection of everyone."
The NCOs expressed doubt that terrorists would cease their attacks on democracies if the anti-war protesters were to prevail.
"No matter how much they might want to believe it, if we were to bring everyone home right now, there's no way that it would stop this (terrorist) thing," Sgt. Reed said.
Both NCOs described the hazards and the elation that comes from flying in an enormous rotary-wing aircraft that looks like a poor candidate to defy gravity.
"A jet with fixed wings and one engine? That's easy," Staff Sgt. Gourrick said. "A helicopter, that's a real challenge. When you get to 14,000 feet and the air thins out to support those blades, then you know what excitement is."
Other satisfactions include ferrying ground troops - infantry - to the place where they are needed to bring the fight.
"Nothing gets done without the infantry," Sgt. Reed said. "Unless you have that man on the ground in the fight, you don't have anything."
Another dimension of that work is to bring wounded troops out of the "hot zone" to where they can get care.
"It is not easy to see arms, and legs and bodies," Staff Sgt. Gourrick said. "It stays with you. Those mental pictures will stay with me all my life, and I just have to deal with that."
"That is war, and that is what happens in war," Sgt. Reed said. "We have to have a professional distance; otherwise we endanger ourselves and others and the mission."
Rewards of the mission are getting wounded comrades to safety and seeing the patience and hope in the faces of their charges, the men said. Or just getting a squad home safe.
"There is nothing like getting infantry back on board, to come in from a mission, where maybe they have been out for weeks, no shower, no mail, in danger," Staff Sgt. Gourrick said. "You see the gratitude and the relief on their faces, and that's when you find out, this is what I do this for."
The other reward of delivering cargo to remote forward operating bases out in the mountains of Afghanistan or the remote deserts of Iraq is the pleasure of bringing the mail.
"The troops love us because we bring the mail," Staff Sgt. Gourrick said.
Both NCOs said anyone who knows someone in the military who is deployed for combat can raise morale by writing a letter.
"A real letter," Staff Sgt. Gourrick said. "I don't care how many e-mails you get, or if you have cell phones or calling cards, there is nothing for troops better than a real letter from someone who cares about you.
"It humanizes you," he said. "You read a letter from someone who loves you, and you become human."
The Valley Press-sponsored forum runs tonight at 7:30 p.m. in the Lilac Pavilion foyer area with guests invited from Blue Star Mothers, parents of sons and daughters in service.
Uh, closer to 65,000 lbs?
I have this mental image of Mr. Six (a.k.a. "the little old guy in the Six Flags ads") harnessed up, wearing a flight suit over his regular suit and capering around inside the chopper.
I was gonna say, sheesh, a Humvee can weigh more than that..
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