“Do you know why a chicken coup only has two doors?” she asked. “Because if it had four it would be a sedan.”
The quip was well timed. The remainder of the flight went smooth and unremarkable.
Every day and night, these trusty planes continue landing in the combat zone. It’s a landing which first pilot 1st Lt. Dennis Slowinski said can be hectic.
“It’s like coordinated chaos,” the lieutenant said. “It’s pretty cool when the plane touches down and we’re on the ground and you think about what we just did.”
He said, “I’m trying to talk to the ground and ATC (air traffic control). The engineer is trying to get a check list done and the navigator is punching 50 different things into the computer and trying to coordinate us into the airfield that we can’t see.
[The airfield]is blacked out,” Lieutenant Slowinski said. “We’re blacked out. And we’re trying to get to a point on the ground -- and we don’t know where it’s at.”
It’s not a glamorous job. The C-130 crews know that. News media hounds aren’t standing on the runway waiting for the first glimpse of a C-130 returning from a combat mission over Iraq.
Never-the-less, these Airmen and their “Hercs” continue a mission that started more than 40 years ago. They put boots on the ground, sometimes in harms way. But always where they’re needed.
