Vampires, Shooting Stars and Lightsabers
It’s six AM and I’m getting ready to go to bed. No it hasn’t been a late night at the dance club; I’m living the life of a vampire. Except for the blood sucking, the superpowers and the fear of garlic that is; okay, pretty much just in the sense that I sleep in the day and live at night.
In order to for our airplane to be where the guys on the ground need us at all hours of the day we operate 24 hours a day. This means that many of us work night schedules. There are pluses and minuses to this. Pluses include sleeping during the 110 degree parts of the day and getting to enjoy being outside under the stars in the coolness and quietness of the day. Minuses are the fact that you don’t see much of the sun, worry about getting run over by MRAPs careening around base in the dark and have to eat things like lasagna for breakfast and pancakes for dinner.
I do enjoy the flying at night though. There’s always been something quiet and peaceful about it. Now I don’t have my nice bubble canopy, but due to the different mission I do have more time to just look around. The other night there was a major meteor shower which showed up with unusual brilliance through my NVGs. Because of the light amplification I could see many falling stars that normally wouldn’t be visible. Stunning. Another cool parlor trick is that we have a laser on our plane that shows up in the NVGs like some sort of death ray from a Star Wars movie. We can wave it around and use it to do different stuff like point something out to guys on the ground or zap some tighter coordinates, but I just enjoy firing it cause I think it looks cool.
In order to for our airplane to be where the guys on the ground need us at all hours of the day we operate 24 hours a day. This means that many of us work night schedules. There are pluses and minuses to this. Pluses include sleeping during the 110 degree parts of the day and getting to enjoy being outside under the stars in the coolness and quietness of the day. Minuses are the fact that you don’t see much of the sun, worry about getting run over by MRAPs careening around base in the dark and have to eat things like lasagna for breakfast and pancakes for dinner.
I do enjoy the flying at night though. There’s always been something quiet and peaceful about it. Now I don’t have my nice bubble canopy, but due to the different mission I do have more time to just look around. The other night there was a major meteor shower which showed up with unusual brilliance through my NVGs. Because of the light amplification I could see many falling stars that normally wouldn’t be visible. Stunning. Another cool parlor trick is that we have a laser on our plane that shows up in the NVGs like some sort of death ray from a Star Wars movie. We can wave it around and use it to do different stuff like point something out to guys on the ground or zap some tighter coordinates, but I just enjoy firing it cause I think it looks cool.
posted by Jonathan Hassell at 06:34
2 Comments:
I have heard about that deathray! Pray'in for you guys.
Bham Hassells
Hello Friend! Tommy snet me your blog link, funny we live i nthe same house and some things still take a while to pass along! We think of you and G often and you are both in our prayers. We of course pray you get to see and talk to each other often. What an amzing vantage point you had for the meteor shower, I too looked up in the skys wondering if i would see it. We're all under the same big sky, but I know what your see on the horizon is way different. thank you for being there, while we are here. I kind of feel like a smuck saying that, but know that I am grateful! Be careful!
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