Wednesday, July 4, 2007

03 July 2007: Afterburner Insomnia

My hooch is adjacent to the southeast corner of the airfield. It just so happens that the AF has a mechanic shop there. Part of their maintenance checks involves placing jet engines on stationary mounts where they can be started up and run for extended periods of time. This doesn’t mean running the engine on idle. If it’s an F16 engine they’ll fire-up the afterburners. It is extremely loud. I believe in maintenance. However, most of the time the mechanics wait until after midnight to run the engines. What’s the result? A lot of soldiers – including me – get blasted out of bed by jet engines. It always happens just as I’m hitting deep REM. WHOOOOSH!!!! I can’t stick my head out the door and yell, “turn down that jet engine would ya? I’m trying to sleep here!” I must say, it’s very rude. I asked one time and the answer I got was that it’s too hot in the daytime for the mechanics to work on the engines. Well tough shit! The soldiers are out working in the middle of the day and I don’t see them complaining. Sometimes the AF personnel do things that reinforce how all the other services view them – there’s the AF and nobody else. By the way, I bring this up because I was up most of the night while the AF worked on their engines. I still had to go to work in the morning.

Fortunately, the day was calm. My new personnel are settled in. We’re just gearing up for our next mission. The big news on Anaconda is that Josh Gracin will be performing later this week. I’d never heard of him. Apparently he’s a recent American Idol champ. I reckon I’ll have to skip that performance. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a single episode of American Idol. I probably never will.

It’s been very quiet here. I don’t think there was a single IDF today.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've watched Idol only when forced to because I was a guest at your Uncle Joe's and they watch it faithfully. A big waste of time in my book - rather watch the History Channel.

Anonymous said...

Happy Independence Day to you and your fellow enlisted personnel.
Josh Gracin is a country-western performer who was one of the top few on AI during the Ruben-Clay season. He's pretty decent. You might just want to check him out. He's also a former Marine, which is one of the reasons he's "giving back".