Wednesday email from Zach

It was so nice to get this email!

I’ll keep you posted, but there may be a picture of me on the USMC website soon. There was a guy from Combat Camera testing out his new night vision camera on one of our flights. He got some pretty cool pictures of us.

Dinner was good the other night. Sundays we get ice cream (which doesn’t last very long in this heat) and usually steak and seafood. The flights here are long but I’m pretty much in the swing of things now. I’m not half falling asleep by the time we land at the crack of day!

The flight crews work about a fourteen-hour day, and maintainers about twelve hours a day. I go to work in the afternoon when the sun is high and it’s halfway up the sky the next morning by the time I get to sleep.

The days pass quickly though, since every day seems the same…it’s like the movie Groundhog Day.

More folks moved in yesterday. It’s going to be nuts around here until everyone gets settled in and in a routine.

I’ve spend the last few days putting together a brief for my guys about what to expect and how things are run out here flight-wise. I catch a lot of grief from maintainers since I’ve moved up to operations because they think I don’t work. They don't really know what I do behind the scenes and how much of my time it occupies. It's okay. The experience I get managing this program will be a benefit in the real world. They also don’t spend seven hours a day in the back of the plane :-)

Everything’s going well, though. Thanks for getting that coffee and stuff, that will be way better than sugar-filled energy drinks. Give Riley a pet for me and tell everyone I said hi, and that I love you all,

Zach

Courtney relays that his predictions were correct: unloading the massive baggage that was needed to support their squadron was a huge job. Getting to work was hard because the buses were tied up with shuttling people from the airfield to their tents and bunks. And it will be meetings, and training them in the new procedures at an extremely rapid pace, and flying right away, and them getting adjusted to the heat and where to eat and how to get to work...so much, but it will, I'm sure, very neatly and quickly resolve itself, and in a day or so the whole squadron will be running the operation well. And the folks leaving can go home to a well-deserved rest.

And to welcome the new guys, the A/C broke, so everyone got to enjoy the 130 degree heat right off. Oh, and the phones went out.

Thanks for checking in,
Katie