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I shouldn't have watched last night's episode. It was good, but definitely brought back bad memories. It is tough to watch, but I love that this show attempted to displayed the tragedy and insanity of war. 99.9% of Americans don't understand what is going on to the men and women serving over there. Picking up the dead and dying day after day can do incredible things to your sense of normalcy. It is surprising how normal a GSW can seem on a daily basis. I still remember my first missions over there and just thinking...this is insane. We go out and see the worst of the worst...when we get back to the TOC, dudes (officers and enlisted) just go back to playing X-BOX or whatever they were doing. I always encouraged my crew to check up on our really bad patients when we got off shift. It wasn't for everyone, but it made me feel better. It is hard to describe what war really looks like...and granted, we are only there to pick up the wounded. We are rarely in the actual fight that caused the injuries, but it is still impossible to describe. The look of desperation, fear and chaos seeing the injured carrying the dead to the helicopter is impossible to really describe. I don't give a ###### who does more missions, who's balls are bigger...I am just glad that someone is there to be there for the men and women on the ground. Cheers to Tricky, Dustoff and Pedros alike.

Spoo, -69 points for liking your own post.

Chuck Norris was in the Air Force so all other branch's are invalid!!

Had a mish where the Army Aviation leadership thought the weather "too risky" for their guys to fly...so it got passed to us. We flew to a FOB where there were Army HH-60s sitting on the ground, loaded the pt up, and then flew to the Role 3. To be honest, the WX wasn't great...but wasn't close to "bad" either. I felt bad for the Army guys; knew I'd be PO'd if the same thing happened in reverse. Turns out, I knew a guy in that exact Army unit and the morning after, they were told that we had "stolen" the mission from them...but I guess their leadership didn't share the mIRC chat history with their guys. Totally different story that we saw firsthand in the ROC.

[thread derail] Going on 25 years now, I've used the phrase (and the accompanying horrible accent) "It's an illusion, you're being tricked! You don't like it? Fuck you!" periodically, without knowing where the hell I heard it or who said it. Now I know... [/derailment]

I left out the AFT part (1.5 run) since that's fairly self-explanatory. Like I said in my first post, if I were king, this would be the test for people who couldn't pass the waist-measurement on the normal PT test, as a way to distinguish between the fat-asses and the dudes who are mini-hulks. If you can't do a single pull-up or push-up and you fly a desk, fine, I can (easily) get over having people who are completely out-of-shape in the AF, since many will never need to be, ever. But I can't accept seeing some fat f*ck who can't look at a treadmill without working up a sweat max-performing his blues belt or wearing a flightsuit way past bingo-velcro. It makes us look bad. You don't have to work out to not be fat. Somehow this country managed it 50 years ago, and many other countries are still doing it today. Eat less.