NEW UNIT

Well, it is almost time to get out of COB Adder and back up to my unit so I can start flying again. I wanted to pause and reflect upon what the new unit has done to me over the last month.
At first it looked like the unit and I would butt heads a lot over some issues, but it turns out they have completely left me alone. I haven't been tasked to do anything for them except to provide slides and aviation information. That being said, I did have three issues.

1. After asking everyday for mail and explaining that even though I was part of the last unit for a couple of months, I was still here and my mail would be coming to them. Well, they sent all my mail back to the old unit because they thought I wasn't here anymore, they didn't even mark it return to sender, and so I won't get it until I get home to Fort Hood.

2. They gave away my room. One day there was someone new in my room moving stuff around. They thought it was wmpty so they put someone in it. When I made a comment to the Brigade Commander, they got me a new room right away. So now I have my own room, but it is in a different part of the base. The shower trailer doesn't have any hot water and there are no latrines so I have to use the Port-a-johns.

3. After extensive discussions with the new unit it appeared the Commander was willing to let me go back and they would do without a liasion officer. However all the rest of the staff was upset and said I needed to stay here since they enjoy my briefings so much. They said that my humor and interesting briefings were the highlight of their day. So now they get dry humorless briefings. One Major made the argument that I don't need to be here since I can send the slides from Balad and they should let me go back so I can fly. Then another officer said no it was important to have me down here because our unit does so many amazing things that the information needs to be desseminated down to all the soldiers so they know how well things are going. He said it was a big morale booster to see on a daily basis all the great things the unit does. The major then responded that we only have 8 pilots total and I am down here. That leaves 7 pilots and 2 pilots per aircraft mean that we can fly 3 missions a night. If they are so happy with what we are getting, then why not send the pilot back so can fly more and get even more intelligence?
It has honestly been a very rough 3 months. I know that I haven't done a lot here and that some people would kill for a job where they work for 3 hours a day and then just spend the rest of the day waiting for it to end so you can do it all over again. However, I didn't join the ARMY to sit on my behind at a desk making slides. I can't wait to get back to Balad and fly.

Scandal in Iraq

I will admit that the Army has had a couple black eyes with respect to our involvement in Iraq. Abu Ghraib was an embarrassment to the Army. The WMD never materialized in the capacity we expected. These two events pale in comparison with what is currently occurring right now in Iraq and the Liberal media is not covering it. President Obama can say the failing economy and Afghanistan are problems he inherited, but this occurred on his own watch. He allowed this to happen and I think that our political leaders should be held accountable. While I could get into a lot of trouble for writing this, the truth must come out.

For the last 5 days there has been no Diet Coke at COB Adder. No one can explain why there is no Diet Coke, but it has significantly impacted my morale. I would understand if the only thing we had was Diet Pepsi, while I am not a fan of Pepsi I could live with it. However there is no diet soda in the whole dinning facility. No Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi or even Diet 7-Up. I have been looking in the national papers and this isn't even mentioned by the media. No one is holding our leadership accountable. What do they expect me to drink when I eat my lunch? Water? I drink 2 gallons of water a day, but as human beings we have come a long way from living in huts in the jungle and I will not go back to drinking water with meals. Our ancestors came to this country because they wanted a better life for their families. I happen to think that part of a better life is the ability to drink a sugar free beverage instead of having to settle for water.

I know when many of you read this you will be so angry you will be called to action. While I know it may seem like a good idea to take up arms and march on Washington, violence is not the answer. Instead write your congressman, go on a hunger strike and remember this when you take to the polls in the future.

If I was able to ask the media one question it would be: Why is it that you haven't held the administration responsible for this mistreatment of America’s troops? I know the answer would be: well you can just buy Diet Coke at the shoppete 100 feet from where you work. So I am supposed to pay 45 cents for a can of Diet Coke? I don't think so! That's not the America I want to be a part of.

Regime Change

The unit I am currently with is switching out to redeploy back home. It has been 11 months for them and they are anxious to get home. I however will remain here for the next month. There is a generally distrust amongst units that are replacing one another. The outgoing unit thinks that they have done so much in the last year there is no possible way the new unit can keep up with their accomplishments and that they will drop the ball and lose some of the momentum that was created. The incoming unit thinks that the leaving unit is trying to push all their problems onto the incoming unit. For instance last time I was here we worked to get a new hangar built for our airplanes. We did almost all the work and then we left to have the new unit come in. I thought that they were going to mess it up, but they thought oh great CPT Weipert is leaving us his hangar mess so we can finish it for him. This is experienced by all incoming and outgoing units, so it isn’t new. This new unit coming in is a reserve unit, so they aren’t real Soldiers. This is pretty evident by the way they look. A lot of them probably haven’t seen a gym since they were in basic training. They are already whining and complaining, and I have to get stuck in the middle of it. The outgoing unit complains about them all the time and the incoming unit complains all the time. I imagine this situation is very similar to when Bush and Obama changed places at the white house. The two presidents were very professional, but their staffs probably acted like what I am seeing.
The new unit also doesn’t want me here. They said that they don’t need me to be a Liaison Officer and that they want me to do something else here. I just know we are going to butt heads the whole time. The last time I was the Liaison Officer on the last deployment the unit and I had a really hard time working together. Imagine that a bunch of people in an office are all really busy (not working hard, but busy) and as a boss you see one officer worker who is better trained than the rest and has been there for a while studying over in the corner. You are obviously going to try and task that person to share the others work load so you are as busy as they are. In my case though I am like an outside contractor that is contracted to do a very specific job and nothing else. So I realize why this annoys the other people, but like we always say, if you want to be pilot, flight school starts every two weeks. We picked our branches and I got aviation and you got Military Intelligence. We have different jobs, so that is why I am over here studying Physics and you are putting together power point slides.
BYU Football
I love BYU football, however they let me down a lot. This year when they beat Oklahoma, they were ranked high enough to get air time on our cable over here in Iraq. If you are in the top 15, they show your football games in the dining facility. When we lost to Florida State that was the last football game we will see until playing TCU. I am annoyed because I just got done eating breakfast and watching TCU beat Air Force. Seriously BYU, I don’t think you should have been ranked that high, but you couldn’t hold on and beat FSU? Oh well, I wont have to speak of this again until I get a phone call from the BYU alumni association asking for money. Oh you want a donation? How about you stop spending millions on an average football team and use it at the school. I have no problem with you spending the student’s money on the football team as long as you win. BYU you have one last chance this season, beat Utah and I will forget about the FSU loss. Lose to Utah again and you are dead to me (until next year).

Reflections...

I thought I would take a minute to reflect upon all the little aspects of life that you take for granted until you have to live without them.

Running Water- You can’t drink the water in Iraq so everything is in bottles. You brush your teeth out of a bottle, you wash your hands with purell, you clean things with bottled water (like when you use your pocket knife to cut up a piece of fruit and need to get it clean).

Indoor Plumbing- While there are quite a few hard stand bathrooms, they are not located where you live or work. To go to the bathroom at night I have to get out of my room, put on shoes and a reflective belt and walk 100 meters to the bathroom and then 100 meters back to my room. Just to give you a mental picture, imagine how nice those porta-johns are after a couple hundred Soldiers use them in 100 degree heat.

Your Own Food – Every day you go to the Dining Facility to see what is for dinner. You have no control over what they serve you. Some days there are a couple choices that seem okay, other days you have to decide what sucks the least. Either way, you can’t decide you are going to have Chinese or Mexican food, you are stuck with what they serve you. The other great part of the dinning facility is when the group of guys who suck out the porta-potties sits down right next to you and asks you to explain why you think American football is better than their football. Also sometimes you have meetings during the two hours they are open for dinner. You can’t just go back and make something, you have to wait until midnight chow or you need to go to the Shopette and buy a candy bar or a bag of chips.

Alone Time- While I am not a solitary person, I would like a couple minutes to myself each day. I wake up in a room with a roommate, I take community showers, the bathrooms are community, I eat in a dinning facility with hundreds of people, I work out in a community gym, I can’t even get in a car and just drive because we don’t have vehicles. I do get alone time on my way to and from work, but in the two mile walk I end up having to salute close to 300 people. Unless that person is a Captain, I out rank them and they salute me, or I have to salute them because they outrank me. I end up having to salute them and say, “Good Morning” a couple hundred times or if I can see their patch I reply with “blood on the ax or steel tigers lead the way or never quit or always ready or rise above it”. That gets annoying after a couple hundred times in a row.

Having a Vehicle – Walking everywhere really makes you appreciate how nice it is to be able to drive somewhere in the heat of the day. It doesn’t happen very often, but when you forget your id card inside your computer (all computers have an id login required) and walk the half mile to the dining facility and can’t get in, you wish you had a car to make the trip back and forth. I haven’t seen the statistics, but I think that the dining facility guards probably turn away 100 Soldiers a day and 0 terrorists.

1/2 Marathon

This morning I ran the half marathon here in Iraq. It coincided with the Air Force marathon that was being ran all over the world on this day. By the time I was able to register for the run, they did not have anymore bib numbers, so I did not receive a medal for completing the run. I ran it in 2 hours 2 minutes, but it was longer than 13.1 miles.The route began off at the airfield at 5 a.m. and we started to run around the little part of the base that we could. The base only being 2 miles, means that you can only run so far until you have to double back on itself and with 500 runners, the roads aren't wide enough to accommodate two lanes of runners. By mile two, we began to run outside of the base. We had a scenic view (and smell) of the incinerators (where they burn feces), the burn pit (where they burn trash) and the dump (where they dump things like soiled mattresses, old cars, metal junk and other things) and yes the incinerators and burn pit were running. Why they couldn't have shut them off for a couple of hours to let us run by, was a mystery to all us runners. We were seriously 15 feet away from them running on the road in smoke and flies. There is nothing like breathing in burning trash for a couple of miles. The rest of the run went by pretty uneventful as I was listening to my Harry Potter book on tape in my iPod.
The ending however was ridiculous. Since we ran out and around the whole base, the run didn't stop at exactly 13.1 miles. There was a mile marker every mile and I was looking forward to hitting the finish line at the 13 mile marker, but I became a little confused that there was no people at the 13 mile marker. The race finished at the same place it started, but that was 14.2 miles from the start point. As you hit the 13 mile marker there was a sign that said, "just .1 to go" and a big sign that said 13.1 miles, congratulations! However, there was still another mile to go until you reached the finish line where they were reading times and giving medals.
So yes 2:02 minutes wasn't that great for 13.1 miles, but for 14.2 it wasn't as bad. The time was just under 9 minute miles. I wasn't winded or hurting too bad. I had to walk another mile and half to my room after the run, take a shower and then walk 2 miles back in to work. I figured that since I burned off enough calories I could eat whatever I wanted for Breakfast. I was going to eat, two sausage patties, two hash brown patties, French toast sticks and a cheese omelet. However I ate about half and got sick from all the grease.
Last year I ran the half marathon in 1:47, so I need to run a little faster in the next 1/2 marathon on October 4th. Maybe the race coordinators can get the incinerators and burn pit to shut down for a couple hours. This next time I will be sure to register early enough to get a medal.

Since I learned that someone is actually reading my blog, I should probably update it. I am no longer at Balad Air Base. I am at COB Adder, which is a little bit further south in Iraq. The further south obviously means it is hotter down here than back in Balad. I am in a non flying position working for Brigade (one eschelon higher than my job in Balad). The reason I am down here is because we fall under a unit here in Iraq that has no idea what we do as pilots. My job is to explain all the great stuff that our unit does. I spend all my time dumbing down briefs and answering questions. I will be here until November so since it will be a while I am going to put out my address here in Iraq in case anyone needs it:
CPT Michael Weipert
504th MI BDE
COB Adder
APO AE 09331
The one good thing about this place is that we have internet inside our room and the chow halls are really good. I have to share a room with a Lieutenant that stays up almost all night playing video games on his side of the room. At least I outrank him so he has to play his video games in the dark.The biggest reason why this place is lame is that I live 2 miles away from work. It takes me a half hour to walk to work each morning and night. I guess I am getting in good shape, but it takes forever to get around here. Oh well, two more months and I can go back to flying.

Kuwait

I went to Kuwait the other day for some training and to go into the city to have some fun. We drove into Kuwait City and we saw a lot of the city. I didn't bring any civilian clothes so I had to borrow a pair of pants from a really skinny Soldier and a shirt from a Soldier that was a lot bigger than me. I had been a bunch of times to Kuwait, but I was never driving, so we got lost a lot. We eventually made it downtown towhere we saw the Kuwaiti Towers. These were built a while ago and are some kind of very famous land mark in Kuwait. I don't really know what they mean or what they signify, but I got a picture with them. We saw the ocean and it was funny, but the women were out swimming in their Berkas (they were covered head to toe while the men wore speedos). We went to the Sharq mall which is the largest mall in Kuwait. All the stores were so expensive we couldn't buy anything in them even if we wanted to. I looked at a Mont Blanc pen, and I noticed the price was about $10,000. It had diamonds and platinum with a solid gold tip. Who would pay $10,000 for a pen? I think maybe I need to find a knock off Mont Blanc, kind of like my knock off Breitling watch. We ate at Applebes, in the picture you can see the Kuwaities in their man dressesbehind us. I then bought a candy bar from a store and it was a real piece of honeycomb, stuffed with peanut butter and dipped in chocolate. It was very weird but it tasted great. Once we got back to the base I bought a man dress from an Arab vendor and I almost bought a 6 foot Hookah but I knew Amber wouldn't be happy with that. The flight back was horrible. It was 128 degrees in Kuwait and the AC in our plane was broken so it was actually 130 degrees in the back. I have never been so hot in my life except in a sauna. Normally I would be going down there to Kuwait every two weeks, but since I am going on up to Sikes, it will be the last time for a while I will get to go down there.

Rotten Food!

I don't normally like to rant and complain, but something horrible happened here in Iraq. Our dinning facility closed down yesterday and the new one that was opened is absolutely horrible. The old dinning facility was fantastic, but it was very small and run down. After two years they have finally finished the new dinning facility. While it was huge and clean, the food is the worst. They have done away with all the fresh food and now they only serve reheated food. Everything is frozen and bland. Worst of all, I eat really healthy all week long so that Ican eat good food on Sundays. When I went in to eat today, they didn't have any hot food, it was just cold cereal and roast beef sandwiches. It is really hard to eat cereal since the milk is not cows milk, it is very rough to choke it down.

Hello and welcome to my blog. While I am not able to see this blog on my government computer, Amber has been considerate enough to create this blog for me. I am currently serving in Iraq where I fly Army airplanes and serve as our Bn logistical officer. This blog is going to be a way for me to communicate with my family and friends back in the states, although I know that there is a good chance the only person who will read this blog is Amber when she posts it for me. If you ever want to get a hold of me you can email me mikeweipert@hotmail.com or Amber can give you my work email that I check multiple times a day.

The trip over here was extremely difficult. We stayed in a tent in Kuwait for 5 days waiting for a flight up to Iraq. We all were living in 16 man tents on old Army cots just waiting until a flight became available. The Army has a policy that all incoming units get at least 5 days of training and up to 15 days of training for National Guard units. Even thought we had all of our training previously at Fort Hood, we were unable to leave Kuwait until our 5 days waiting time was up. The heat was 125 degrees and the sand in Kuwait is as fine as makeup face powder. These conditions made it unbearable in Kuwait since the sand blew so much there was a fine dust in the air that made visibility only about 100 meters. The air conditioner in our tent was very good and it was freezing cold at night when the outside temperature dropped to 90 degrees, but during the day the tent only cooled down to 110 degrees. I am so happy that I am in Iraq and out of Kuwait.

I have begun to settle into Iraq and this place is the same as when I was here last time. I am in the same room and I work in the same building. My room is pretty large, but I share it with another Captain, so it seems pretty small. We just have to wait for the outgoing unit to get out of our way so that we can get access to the computers and phones in my office. They don’t want to get out of the way so we can take over which I guess I understand.

There is a massive sand storm that blew in last night. It is so bad that I have these killer headaches from breathing in all this dust. We joke around and say that being outside is like smoking a pack of cigarettes. The sand gets everywhere because it is so fine, it even gets through surgical masks. Not through the filter, but around the nose and chin the dust seeps in. Visibility is so bad I would honestly say that you cant see farther than 20 meters. It hurts to breath outside, but as you can see, it is almost as bad inside covered areas like our hangar and in the halls. We usually don’t see more than a couple of these a year, but it has been bad (not this bad though) for the whole week we have been here. I was able to fly twice this week, but the weather was really bad and I thought we wouldn’t be able to land here and have to go down to Qatar to land.

Quarters in Kuwait

RC-12

F-16

July 06
We flew again tonight and nothing was special until we came in for a landing. The weather was great and we did a visual approach. As we were about 4 miles out, ATC cleared two blackhawks to cross over the runway on their way out of Balad. At about 50 feet from landing at night, we flew into their dust cloud that they kicked up. We couldn't see anything. We didn't have time to go around and we couldn't see therunway. We just held the attitude we had in a couple of seconds we hitthe runway and taxied back to the hangar. I called ATC and told them there was a brown out at the approach end of the runway and they said,"sorry, we cleared those helicopters and I guess they kicked up the dust. Our bad". It is funny that even the most boring of flights can get very scary very quickly.

My room

July 05
I flew on the 5th even though we were on the tail end of the big sandstorm. The weather was really bad on preflight, but it eventually got better the longer we waited. We took off about 3 hours later than anticipated, but the weather was supposed to be a lot better than it had been the previous month. As we flew we heard that the normal runway that we take off and land on was out due to some sort of electrical problems. This runway was the only runway that had an instrument approach, so if the weather was bad when we came back we were going to be in trouble. Every hour we checked the weather and the ceiling was supposed to be 2000' and visibility 3200', right as we broke track to come home Balad put out a new weather brief and the ceiling was less than 800' and visibility was a mile. We knew we were in trouble, but we really didn't have enough fuel to land anywhere else but Balad, so we went in knowing we were going to have to land. We had to do a PAR approach which is something I hadn't done since flight school 5 years ago. I flew the approach and it went really well, but it turns out the weather wasn't nearly as bad as expected and we saw the runway about two miles out. I made an appropriate landing, but it wasn't anything special. It was my first night landing in over a year and it showed. Any time you can walk away from a landing people say it was a good landing, and it really wasn't anything too bad.