We’re now approaching the middle of our second week of being tied to the pier in Korea. We took on several hundred additional Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Army and Korean military personnel for the current exercise. This is all a part of demonstrating “Joint / Combined Interoperability” with the other services and the host nation, and even if it doesn’t quite live up to the utopian ideal of inter-agency cooperation, at least it makes the ship a very colorful place to be right now. The majority of our guests are currently sitting 8+ hour shifts in darkened control rooms, engaging in computer-based warfare exercises. This is what is typically referred to in the Navy as a “Fast Cruise” – going through all of the motions of an at-sea war scenario without all of the hassle of actually pulling out of port, burning a lot of fuel, or worrying about anyone falling overboard in the middle of the night, etc. Of course it is a cheaper, lower-risk evolution, but it tends to be rife with artificialities. (I mean, c’mon. We’re still tied to the pier!). The exercise goes 24/7 for the participants: No liberty. No beer.
…Fortunately for the Air Detachment and a few other essential departments on the ship – (who have “real jobs”, as it were, and can be called upon for real-world tasking) – we are not classified as “exercise participants”. Therefore, we’re extended the privilege of going into town after normal working hours and even retain the latitude of attempting to gag ourselves by imbibing the Korean interpretation of beer. Out of shear politeness, we purposefully avoid mentioning this fact in front of anyone who is an “exercise participant”. (…Hey I did a month-long exercise in Osan, Korea, back in the day and the same rules applied then, so I have felt the pain!).
While we’ve been sitting on our duffs in Busan, we have had the opportunity to do some flying. I flew my first VIP transfer last Sunday, transporting the Admiral over to Chinhae – a Korean Navy base about 20 miles west of here. The interesting thing about the Chinhae helo pad is that it’s perched atop a steep 900 foot hill in the middle of the base. The pad is at the pinnacle of the hill, so there’s basically nowhere to go after lifting off but back down the side of the hill, gaining speed as you careen below the elevation of the pad. (O.K. – yeah, so you could just continue to maintain altitude or climb away from the pad, but what fun would that be?). After we dropped the Boss off we talked the tower into letting us make a few rounds in the pattern. Max took the first go from the right seat and planted it in the middle of the pad, (…it’s easier to fly from the right seat, o.k.). After lifting back into the air, he coaxed the helo over the edge of the pad, gradually getting faster and then dumped the nose of the bird straight down the hill as we cleared the edge, quickly accumulating airspeed. Max had a giddy smile on his face as we sailed through 100 knots and I could see that a few pedestrians on the paved road below us had stopped dead in their tracks, trying to figure out if we were actually going to continue the descent into the ground (…and probably to ponder in which direction they should make a panicked flee for their lives). We leveled the dive around 400 feet and I laughingly accused Max of being “still in Saigon”. We took turns making a few more steep approaches to the pad and the now obligatory kamikaze descent off of the pinnacle into the valley below.
Later in the flight we had to take the Admiral into a port storage facility located at the head of pier. The approach was interesting because we were flying up a sort of canal with several huge shipping cranes at eye level on both sides of the helo, terminating in a steep approach to a very small pad. The only way out of this spot was the exact reverse of how we’d gotten into it. It was interesting flying to say the least of it, and I have to once again here admit how much I like this gig.
In the mean time, being the only ship in Busan for the last week, and not having a lot of competition for available resources, we’ve pretty much exhausted just about everything that there is to do here (which is not much, by the way). …And what happens when aircrews get bored you ask? Hi-jinks & shenanigans, I tell you!
Our little run of being the only game in town came to an abrupt halt on Wednesday, when an entire US carrier group pulled into the pier next to us. Let me tell you, after being on the Kitty Hawk for 3 years, there’s nothing like hitting the pier with 7,000 of your closets friends. It’s as if a plague of locusts has descended onto the town: all of the ATM’s are empty, all of the stores are sold-out, all of the beer is gone, and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting at least 25 obnoxious, round-eyed sailors in their baggy Hilfigers’.
Max and I are both former carrier aviators, so our fascination with the big boat next door has long since expired. “Been there. Done that.” This carrier is, however, the first to deploy with two squadrons of the latest Navy helicopters off of the building block: the MH-60 Sierra and Romeo models. With naval helicopter aviation being as small a community as it is, we figured that the chances of us running into someone we knew from our former squadrons was pretty high up there and that it might be worth a visit to the big boat after all in order to get a first-hand look at the new digs. This also introduced the possibility of engaging in a little ‘ole tradition in military aviation know as “zapping”; that is, slapping your squadron or detachment sticker onto another unit’s aircraft while they ain’t looking. On occasion, limited time & opportunity dictate that you have to quickly “zap” it onto an obvious external part of the airframe. But if the situation is right, you can get your moniker into a place on their aircraft where it may not be found until a depot-level aircraft inspection reveals that they’ve been flying around with your squadron insignia on their aircraft for 100 hours or more. This is a pretty typical example of inter-squadron hi-jinks. Back when I was with HS-14, I went on a mixed detachment aboard a small ship with another helicopter from HSL-51. During a pre-flight inspection, I decided to look inside the transition area compartment – an interior section of the helo behind the main fuel tanks where the radio amplifiers are located and which, thusly, hardly ever gets looked at. I found that the inside was covered – completely – from head to toe with little HSL-51 zappers. There must have been over 200 stickers inside that compartment!
Max and I made our way over to the carrier and visited both helo squadron ready rooms, and - just as expected - bumped into several folks that we’d known from other squadrons in the fleet. Mike O’Neil – an old nemesis of mine from HSL-51 – offered to give us a tour of one of his brand new Romeos. What he didn’t know was that two of our enlisted guys were holding a ‘loose trail’ formation on our little show & tell, zapping everything that they could get our stickers onto. Now some of the zapped locations were pretty obvious, …but there are some others that are going to take a little while to find. "Welcome to Asia, fellows. Happy hunting!"
