That’s what happens to me at least. I got a call from the CO CDR last night saying that the BN CDR wanted to meet both of us this morning to talk about additional duties. At the meeting, he told me that based on the recommendations of the senior warrants in the battalion, he was tasking me to be the BN Flight Operations officer.

BN Flight Operations is a full-time job. To accomplish this, I’m being pulled out of Charlie Company and moved into HHC: I’m a staff aviator now. I get my own office, immunity from most random details, and I drop every additional duty except my other BN one: Flight Records. Keeping even one is unusual, and that particular one more so: for years, those jobs have been split to keep the workload manageable. I get to buck that trend. This doesn’t exactly help me build up my flight hours or earn my PC orders, but it can’t hurt my career to have on my OER that I was picked by name to do both these critical BN jobs while still junior.

The job itself is a bit of a cipher to me: I’ve never yet touched the Operations side of things. Scuttlebutt has it as complex, data-heavy, and requiring flexible work hours: perfect, in other words, for me. Hopefully the match works as well in reality as it does on paper.

I’m not completely unambivalent about this: it means even more delay until I get my PC orders, a lightened flight schedule even once I have them, and a lot of work in the meantime. It means that even when I earn my callsign, it won’t start with Comanche, but Wild Card. I regret both of those things. Still, the regret is minor compared to the excitement. This seems like it could be a lot of fun.

Working on this has been an education. I’ve written before, but only short fiction and nonfiction, not comedy scripts. I’ve shot video before, but only in webcam/home movie contexts. I’ve never even attempted to edit video before. All I bring to the table is an active mind, a powerful computer, and a borrowed camcorder that was on the low end of the scale a decade ago.

Actually, those may well turn out to be sufficient. The basic plan was to take five times as much footage as would end up in the final cut, and spend five times as much time editing as filming; so far that’s proving an effective strategy. Still, I can’t help but sense that unless I pull several more all-nighters working on it, this thing isn’t going to be good enough.

As for what I learned today in particular, there are two major points. The first is that even though this ancient video device claims to have native support in Windows 7, it simply doesn’t appear when plugged in. It’s a good thing I have a spare old XP box lying around, or the editing process would be even more painful. Also, while transcribing these digital video cassettes is at least easier than working with analog, they still have a major drawback in comparison to solid-state storage: they only transfer their bits at 1x speed, meaning that every hour of video takes an hour to transcribe before I can begin editing. It’s an anomaly in a world in which everything else digital happens at some high multiple of realtime.

If only I got paid overtime, I could double my salary. At least I can probably show the Army that they’ve got a bargain in me.

[edit 20100531:2152]

Ok, so the actual numbers worked out like this: 2 hours filming to produce 1 hour film. 15 hours of editing later, I managed to complete this 8 minute first draft. Submitted it to the XO for review, and he said that with this quality, the maximum length should be 5 minutes. So: this draft is guaranteed to contain rare material not contained in the final release! I’ll put the final version up when it’s done; the challenge is to use the cutting to improve the overall quality.

[edit 20100531:2250]

Oh yes: I don’t expect this to be comprehensible, let alone amusing, to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the outgoing commander of 2-2 ASLT. 90% of this is in-jokes.

[edit 20100601:0437]

Final cut. If it’s not down to five minutes exactly, it’s at least less than six; it would have been very difficult to remove much else without gutting it. Enjoy!

Branch Managers are the people in charge of moving people around within the Army, to meet both the Army’s needs and the needs of the individuals which it is comprised of. The two in charge of all Warrant Officer Black Hawk pilots had come to Korea for the express purpose of educating us as to the exact process by which they decide where we go and which schools we attend.

This held news both good and bad for me. Good news: coming to Korea immediately after flight school was a very good thing career-wise; my peers elsewhere are often not even RL1 at this point, let alone approaching their PC checkride. Bad news: unless I get my PC qualification quickly and spend the rest of my tour here awing people with my prowess, I’m unlikely to get the IP course enroute. Good news: I’ve got an excellent chance of being assigned to Germany immediately after leaving Korea. Bad news: I’m unlikely to ever be stationed in Japan unless I stay in the Army substantially longer than I want to stay. Good news: I’m fairly likely to be sent to WOAC enroute.

The day would have been substantially improved if we could have simply skipped the morning sessions, or at least split the day in two. This morning’s showtime was 0515, and we didn’t get back to K-16 until 1910. Still, I can’t say that it was entirely a waste; the talk by the Branch Managers was well worth attending. As for the morning, if nothing else, I took away a page full of notes about how not to give a speech.

The ground crew showed up a day early and left a day late with all the gear.

Our stealth camoflauge was perfect.

Eventually, the flight crews showed up.

This is the point of the exercise: to prove that we can operate our helicopters in the field.

This is the payoff: an air assault operation with live troops.

My role: open the Arms Room at 4am for the ground convoy.

So at 0350 this morning, I was on my way to the company building through the freezing rain, seemingly the only human awake within miles.

The weather’s been moody all week. It’s mostly been a frustrating kind of fog: breathtakingly atmospheric, kind of warm and comfortable, but absolutely impossible to photograph. No matter how you set the camera, the picture looks like it’s underexposed and out of focus. This morning, though, it just seemed vicious. This was the kind of weather that in a more mountainous country would demand Frankensteinian mood lightning.

As the morning wore on, things seemed to get better. Things stayed cold, but by sunrise, there was no more rain. The whole battalion was churning with pre-mission preparations. The ground convoy eventually set out to set up the ATC site and the tents. The flight crews ran up the aircraft to make sure everything was working. Half of ours turned out to have broken deicing gear, but that only meant that they couldn’t fly into observed icing conditions. We joked about the weather report: winds gusting from 30-44 knots. It’s only a joke when you know that Black Hawks are prohibited from running up or shutting down the main rotor in winds at or greater than 45 knots. Half an hour before planned takeoff, the aircraft were loaded and set. The crews gathered for a final brief.

That brief never happened. Outside, the first flakes of the first snow of the year were drifting from the sky.

For the next four hours, the situation didn’t change. We all watched movies, or watched each other, or watched the weather. The snow skirled and danced in the wind, enthusiastic in its role as winter’s leading element. Every half an hour, someone called the weather station to get an update on its predictions. They never reported a change. Every once in a while, someone called the ground convoy to see what conditions were at the destination. The only change there was the steadily increasing depth of the snow.

We made pilot jokes. “Check this out: Osan’s reporting ‘unknown precipitation.’” “What do they have, meteors?” We waited.

Eventually, the commander called everyone in. Despite the BN CDR’s enthusiasm to get out into the field, it wasn’t going to happen today. Everyone go home, get some rest. Be back at work at 6am tomorrow. New takeoff time is 9.

So we put the sensitive items away and all walked home, in the bright blue sky and the quickly vanishing snow.

“Yeah, the S2 shop at Brigade has to approve all travel not to the US. It’s all to cut down on the Prostitution / Human Trafficing stuff. Still, I’m surprised they’re giving you so much trouble; they usually only really give roadblocks to single soldiers traveling alone.”

“You mean like that civilian from the maintenance shop who goes to the Philippines like every other month? He’s always trying to show me his pictures.”

“That guy is just whoreible.”

Last Friday: 2pm – 2am
Saturday: 11am – 9am Sunday
Monday: 3pm – 5pm
Tuesday: 9am – 9am Wednesday
Thursday: 8am – 3pm
Friday: 2am – noon

This has a lot to do with the fact that half the BN is currently tasked to do a big Korea-wide exercise, and the rest of us have to pick up the slack. Still, as of right now not only do I not have a regular sleep schedule, it’s hard to claim that I have a time zone.

Monsoon season in Korea isn’t a huge deal for most people. Sure, it’s a bit rainier in the middle of the summer than other times of year, but it’s nothing that really affects daily life. Once you’re past a flood or two in July, you’re alright as long as you can stand the humidity.

As a pilot, that’s not at all the case. We have weather minima required to fly: cloud floors of at least 1200 feet above ground level and two miles of visibility. If you’ve got those, and no thunderstorms predicted en route, you’re good to go.

Despite the seeming leniency in those requirements, so far Green Platoon is running a less than a 50% uptime because of weather. Today we at least had good weather predicted, to much rejoicing. Three hours after that forecast, once we’d preflighted and completed every requirement prior to startup, I went to get the weather update: it’s necessary to have one updated within 90 minutes of takeoff. That requirement is a good thing, because when I went in, they were predicting half a mile of visibility. They were right: I went outside a few minutes ago and could only see the buildings down the street because they’re lit.

There was nothing to do except tie up the aircraft and head back to the briefing room. In theory we were dismissed more or less immediately thereafter, but what actually ended up happening was a Pilot’s Social Hour: four young warrants just out of flight school listening to the war stories of the retired CW4 and CW5. It wasn’t as good as a proper flying day would have been, but it was entertaining, and almost as educational.

Wear all of the above for five hours. You now know what it’s like to operate under NVGs.