Snow Falling On Cherry Blossoms

With our requirements for this underway period completed, Loren and I launched 702 from the ship early on Tuesday morning for the 30 minute hop back to Atsugi. Even though this was only a short 5 week deployment, there's a been lot of transitional acvtivity on the homefront that I've missed. I left for deployment from the front door of our hotel-room abode at the Navy Lodge and returned to the on-base house that we'd been assigned in mid-March. Charlotte was stuck (for the umpteenth time) with the task of 'catching' all of our wordly possessions in my absence as they arrived on our doorstep a few days later. More importantly, little Reese has already grown what must be at least another foot taller than she was back in February ...and is babbling like a little creek! Other older and more experienced parents are always warning me that kids "grow up fast". I can verify that there is probably no better way to gain a fuller appreciation for this sentiment than by the painful process of getting to sit in the 'parenting penalty box' for odd months at a time out at sea and then observing how she's changed in the interim. As much I dislike this aspect of the job, it does make the time that I have at home with Charlotte and Reese a lot more precious.


It'll only be a short pause before we're back underway in a few weeks, but for what it's worth, I've never actually been in Japan during the Cherry Blossom season. (I've always been out on deployment). Cherry blossom season is a finite period in late March/early April when the cherry trees suddenly bloom, then fall away just as fast as they appeared. The Japanese tradition is to sit underneath a cherry tree with your closest friends, drink a lot of saki and just take in the view. (No, I'm not making up the saki part. ...This is the only other culturally endorsed form of public drunkeness that I've ever heard of besides Oktoberfest).


Over the next 2 weeks we've got a new pilot arriving, the Cherry Blossom Fest here on base, (featuring the Base Air Show this Saturday), BADMAN Week (an annual, week-long intra-squadron sports competetion -- what we like to refer to in the military as "Mandatory Fun": you WILL show up and you WILL be happy about participating, OR your fitness report will reflect your piss-poor attitude about it). In addition to those, we have a detachment NATOPS evaluation and the looming spector of the fact that we've got a lot of work to do on our aircraft in the remaining time in-between. ...It's going to be an action-packed "operational hiatous" to say the least of it. I'm convinced that this is all a scam put on by the Navy -- we're always inundated with work when we're at homeguard, so everyone is continually eager to get back out to sea where they can actually get some rest!

But none of that matters right now. I'm just enjoying the great feeling of finally being back home. I woke up this morning in my own bed listening to the sound of a light snow falling on the cherry tree behind our house that's just starting to blossom. ...And the pitter-patter of tiny feet in Korean-made slippers...

Helicopter Zen and the art of “Zapping”

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!"

“Yeah, I Fly The Shiny One”

After months of nervous anticipation, re-tread flight training, and all of the hassles associated with moving overseas, (which are regrettably still ongoing), I’ve finally made it out to the ship to join up with the “Blackbeards” of Det-11 – my new home.

I caught a Japan Airlines flight out of Narita last Saturday for an uneventful 5 hour hop down to Manila, P.I. …Embarrassingly, despite all of the time I’ve spent in the Pacific, I’ve never actually been to the Philippines before. That has largely to do with the current batch of Islamo-militants who’ve been trying to takeover the central and southern end of the Sulu archipelago for the last 50-odd years under the banner of whatever “cause-du-jour” it is this week. OEFP (Operation Enduring Freedom Philippines) – which has been going on since shortly after the September 11 attacks – is probably the biggest on-going counter-insurgency conflict you’ve never heard of. …And the way the US and international media have handled Afghanistan & Iraq, I wouldn’t blame the Pentagon at all for keeping journalists away from this one. …But they really don’t have to: no one in the US media (or anywhere else on the planet for that matter) really seems to give a damn about what’s gone on the in the P.I. as far back as anyone can remember. …Oh well. As long as the media at large maintain their current level of interest in the situation, we shouldn’t have any problems. Gorilla resistance here is pretty pathetic and disorganized at best, so it’s just a matter of “smoking them out” of the jungles down South. …But that’s almost a world away from here…

Manila, itself, is relatively safe, but it’s always nice to keep your guard up, as it’s not unheard of for someone to kidnap an American citizen or soldier on occasion and demand a ransom of some sort. LT Max Oliver, one of the Det Pilots, met me at the Manila terminal as I stepped out into the heat & humidity of the southern Pacific air. The P.I. maintains a strong trade relationship with Mexico, and from the look and feel of it, you’d swear that you had just stepped into Acapulco. After paying a taxi driver more than two times what Max had paid to get to the airport to meet me, we were at the pier. And I set about to getting my gear stowed on board. As evening rolled around a good meal and a couple of cold San Miguel’s (the local brew) really hit the spot. I was exhausted.

Underway on Tuesday, I had my first intro to flying “The Big Shiny One” – Blackbeard 702. They don’t let those things get dirty for the Admiral. After giving it a good once over, I suggested that our maintainers should get overtime for all of the hours they spend polishing that thing. The attached photo doesn’t lie: In 19 years of flying, I’ve never seen such a clean aircraft!

The Blue Ridge (in the photo background) puts out quite a wind burble on short final to the flight deck, so as big and fat as she is, she ain’t exactly easy to land on! I haven’t put a helo down onboard a US ship in over 5 years, so it was nice to spend some quality time in the DLQ pattern. (My last flight in the German Navy was doing deck landings on a Belgian cruiser – “Daddy’s from Bruges”). The Blue Ridge is somewhat of a museum piece herself: She was the last ship to pull out of Saigon in 1975. Many of the film clips you may have seen of helicopters being pushed over the deck edges to make room for Vietnamese refugees were shot onboard the Blue Ridge. She had a much bigger flight deck back then; big enough to take multiple Hueys or larger helos. They've since erected the Helicopter Control Tower on the aft portion of the ship, effectively cutting the flight deck down to one third of it's original size. ...Still plenty of room for big, shiny 702.

Low & behold, our services here at Det-11 cannot go maligned for long: we had MEDVAC flight on Wednesday for an acute appendicitis into Kadena air base on the island of Okinawa. As ‘candy’ a deal as this job is, it’s nice to know that we are, in-fact, needed by someone other than the Admiral on occasion. 702 did super job. We had 35 knot tail wind into the island, so we were kicking along with smoking groundspeed of 168, turning the 200 mile flight into just over an hours’ work. The base commander was down at the ramp to meet us as the ambulance arrived. I figured that he was probably more interested in weird-assed, shiny green helicopter sitting on his tarmac than he was worried about the medical emergency. 702 tends to turn heads. I can’t wait till we get 701 out of the shop and back out here on the boat. …If you think that one of ‘em looks good coming at you, how ‘bout a pair of twins?

Big 'Ole Buddha

Now that we're finally mobile, we decided to take Reese out for a day trip to the world famous Big Buddha at Hase. It's a relatively short train ride (:45) from Atsugi to the scenic costal enclave of Kamakura. The statue itself stands about 45 feet in height and is constructed entirely of bronze. It's the principle shrine among the seven others in this area and it's construction originally began in 1252, taking 10 years to complete. Without going into much more detail in this writing, it's suffices to say this thing has survived a lot of ugly weather and turbulent history. It also plays a prominent role on the aviation side of the house as it's sort of nice gouge point for flying course rules back into Atsugi, (although it's embarassingly difficult to spot from the air). It's one of those things that we fly over with regular occasion and then say to ourselves, "Y'know, I think I'm gonna go down there this weekend and check it out". ...And so we did.

Charlotte and I had made several "pilgrimages" to the shrine when we were here years ago, but this was Reese's first Buddist shrine, so we wanted it to be a big, American-style "cadillac of all the shrines" just for good measure. You gotta start the youngins' out right, I say.

After two weeks of typical Japnese winter chill in the 30's and 40's, the weather turned suddenly hot and muggy reaching up into the 80's yesterday afternoon. A perfect day for a field trip! Reese really enjoyed the train ride and insisted on holding onto the safety handles along with her old man!










Even the normally lethargic surf along the Fujisawa shoreline was alive with 10-15 foot waves. (We've got a running joke about surfing in Japan as we fly over hundreds of surfers lounging on their boards in the Sagami wan, waiting for waves that never come: All you need to surf in Japan is a surfboard and the ability to fog up a mirror). Check out this candid snap of a Japanese surfer with a pretty unique method of getting his ride to the beach!


Inside the grounds of the shrine Reese busied herself with crawling up on things she wasn't supposed to, collecting rocks and visiting with the locals. ...All-in-all, it was a pretty good day in Japan.

Until the next update,
Hick family -- out

Feet Dry In The "Land Of The Not-Quite-Right"

Many apologies to all for the two-week delay in our "Hicks in Japan" blog. One of the crazy, unforseen obstacles to blogging from overseas is that all of the edit functions come up in the local laguage -- Japanese in this case! After only 2 weeks of attempting to get into the edit page, Charlotte managed to find the edit function by clicking on some random kanji, ...and "voila!"- we're up & running again.

We did make it to Japan on the 28th of January and are currently living large in the Navy lodge while we await housing assignment. Since we lived "on the economy" in Germany - 6 hours from the nearest US base - it's safe to say that we have had enough of the foreign experience and are really hoping to live on the base. Prospects, however, are looking pretty slim and it appears that Charlotte, Reese & I may be experiencing frozen shampoo sometime in the near future. (Most Japanese houses are not insulated, but that's another topic I'll discuss at a future date, if need be).

As of right now, we DO have our own "Gomi-mobile" - a very nice Honda CRV - so we are officially mobile and are mostly checked into the base. I've finished all of my initial introductory flights in the squadron and will be leaving for a few weeks of sea-time with the VIP helo detachment next week.

Thanks to all of you for your patience. The next 'hicksinjapan' blog is soon to follow!

Hick Family -- out

On The Road Again

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the question that you're all asking yourselves right about now: "What happened to 'On The Brink Of Homelessness Part Dieux'?" I promise that I'll get back to discussing more trials and tribulations of packing up house in a future post. But due to the pack out, the drive across country (read: completely off-line), and a bought of some sort of nasty flu bug, I'm already light years behind everything that happened over the last week. Just indulge me here folks and think of my out of sequence writings as the artistic dissonance inspired by being back in Louisiana - the land of the not-quite-coherent. "Mon Che're done taught you dat!"

Last Saturday morning Charlotte and I woke up, put Mom and Reese on a plane, said our last goodbyes to San Diego, turned in our cable receiver and then hit the road mid-afternoon, bound for Louisiane. I mention the cable receiver here only because it took the longest of all of the above tasks, and lends a note of finality to our reluctant departure. (Man cannot live without cable, ...or so I'm told). We hadn't planned on a hectic pace. Our goal was to make it a leisurely drive across country making it home on Monday or Tuesday. That still didn't leave time for a lot of diversions and byways, though. We knew that the biggest obstacle after a rapid succession of AZ & NM state lines was the insufferable drive across Texas. Nothing wrong with TX mind you, but you just never seem to make any headway when you're not clearing a state line every 4-6 hours or so, and we probably took the longest possible route - El Paso to Longview - totalling nearly 800 miles across!

When Charlotte & I were stationed in Monterey, we had a friend from Sweden who had seen twice the number of US states than we had (combined). Over 4 cross country drives in the last 11 years, and until this past September, neither of us had ever seen the Grand Canyon, owing to time constraints, blizzards or myriad other misfortunes. The point of this diatribe being that once again, we had to haul ass across the "fly-over" states and didn't really get to dedicate the kind of time we would like to truly seeing America. ...Well, there' always a future PCS somewhere down the road where maybe we'll have the time. But all whining aside, we love being out in America ...and it just keeps getting better every time we see it!

On The Brink Of Homelessness (...once again) Part 1

Well, moving day has come once again for us and as the packers box up the last few items of our wayward homestead I'm trying to recount all of the different moves that we've made over the years. And by and large, (with the remarkable exception of our last moving experience from Germany), we've fared pretty well: no lost or damaged items and almost everything arrived either on or ahead of schedule. Amazing results considering some of the other moving horror stories that a few of our friends have experienced.

On the average, a typical Navy family will experience a PCS (Permanent Change of Station) move about every 4-6 years. This average accounts for service members taking follow-on jobs in the same area as the last. There are a lot of Navy people who have served their entire careers in San Diego, never once having PCS'd, which has prompted my recent slogan with which I've been taunting these 'fixtures': "Join the Navy. See San Diego County". These type of folks seem to have an absolute aversion to moving anywhere, much less over-seas. I don't bear any particular resentment towards these folks, mind you. It's a really tough time to try and sell your house and move away. ...But you're in the Navy for Christ's sake! This ain't no hometown militia! (This subject broaches my other pet peeve which is the overwhelming number of people in the Navy who cannot swim. But I'll save that grievance for another forum somewhere else further down the road).

...But if they won't go, then who will? Enter: my little nuclear family of flying Gypsies. It's seemingly a different job on a different continent every I time I roll the dice, as it were. Like a pack migrant workers following the cucumber harvest, we go where the flyin' is. We've actually bagged some very good jobs in the Navy on the pure merit of the fact that we will (hold on to you hats folks) actually move to where the cool jobs are! 11 years in the Navy so far and - (let me count 'em) - 8 moves under our belt. That's an average of one move every 16 months for the last 11 years. 6 of those moves were inter-continental. (That average doesn't even include our piddly little initial move down to Pensacola, nor an intermediate move we made there in order to be closer to the base. Those were both amateur moves. I'm only considering PAR, no shit, full-on, pack-it-all up, complete household moves in these figures!). ...So it goes without saying that we have become somewhat "mobile". (Although "nomadic" is probably the more correct term. Or should I maybe create a word like "Bedouinian" here?).