Letters from War—The Journey

By Donald Harward

A friend of mine, Gerry, said something the other day that stuck in my head. We were getting ready to go flying on Thanksgiving Day and were preflighting the aircraft. He and I have both flown various helicopters and jets during our careers. Looking at the modern lines of our AgustaWestland AW-139, he said, “You know, with airplanes, it’s about the destination; but with helicopters, it’s about the journey.”

Gerry’s words certainly struck a chord and they started me thinking. When flying jets, you are always “parked” on some airway miles above the surface watching while the autopilot flies the aircraft precisely to a point when ATC starts squawking at you to descend. But with helicopters, you remain connected with the earth; it is never all that far away. Sometimes it’s a thousand feet below, while at other times, it’s just a few scant metres beneath the gear.

When I was driving Canadair regional jets around my corner of the globe, I remember listening to another Gerry—one whom I have written about here before. He was relating the circumstances of an “emergency thing” that had happened to him. He said “Yeah; when we turned final to…one-eight right—or two-two right at Chicago…or maybe Cincinnati? Heck; I can’t remember which one. Well, anyway…”

And that’s how it is with jet flying. No one ever remembers where something happened; they only remember the incident itself. Why, you ask? Because every airport is the same. They’re all just big pieces of concrete with bunches of nasty jets and vehicles scurrying around the outside of some big dirty buildings… all the same. In any given week, I might land in the Bahamas, in Canada and all over the US—and it was always all the same. I’d disembark the passengers, do a quick walk around, refuel, get back in my seat, do some paperwork, punch some numbers into a computer…You get the idea. Yes, it might be hot and humid in Nassau, and cold and breezy in Denver, but it is still just the same; trade palm trees for pine trees and throw in some mountains and voila!

With helicopters, you do not go from VOR to VOR, from airway to intersection to airway. No; you go from this bend in the river to that gap in the mountains in the distance, turn left up the valley and look for an airport on its right side near the smaller peak. Along the way, instead of taking that big gap, perhaps you might bend the thing over a little more steeply and take the narrower gap further to the right instead. Heaven forbid that there might be some girls sunbathing beside the river—now we’re talking “automatic low fuel warning!”

Helicopter flying lets you see more of the world and to stay connected to it in a more personal way. I have heard my Harley-Davidson biker friends say the same thing about driving the open road astride 88 inches of Milwaukee muscle compared to driving the same route in a cushy SUV. The Harley—blasting out its distinctive melody to travel—puts you point blank in the middle of it all: in control but still “out there” just a tad. By comparison, the SUV affords you the opportunity to span the distance virtually in REM sleep! Yeah, I get that. To fail to “get it” would tell me I was not experiencing all that life has to offer.

Flying over the world at low level has afforded me some fairly remarkable views—and a million still-vivid memories. Like the day I rushed across the desert at around fifty feet before crossing over the edge of the Grand Canyon. In an instant, the world fell away to more than a mile below me. That exhilarating experience was like being “super alive”, if only for a moment. The canyon walls were ablaze with colour, and I felt like I was a part of it.

Then there was the time when I crossed over the Main River valley in central Germany one foggy morning. The valley below my trusty JetRanger was like white cotton, brilliantly illuminated by a rising sun in a cloudless autumn sky. The feeling of peace and serenity it conveyed was overpowering. And yet it was right there. I actually dipped down a little to skim through the top of it, watching church steeples and towers pass by. The feeling was like one of floating in a calm sea without a care in the world—secure and buoyant, resting on those calm white rivers of mist.

“It’s about the journey and not the destination.” The words just keep running round and round in my head. Doesn’t that sum up life itself? Isn’t it really all about the thousands of little moments in which we really live—really experience things—and not about the big rewards or vacation home or dream car? Indeed it is, and for some reason, in my mind, the two have become connected in a real sense—the two, being helicopter flying and the journey.

My journey through life has seen me in the front seats of a multitude of flying machines for many thousands of hours—over decades—over most of the planet’s continents in times of war and in peace. It has somehow changed the way I look at things. I don’t see the sides of a mountain; I see the scattered rubble on its peak, and its sides sloping down and away. I don’t see a bend in the river; I see a living thing coming from a distant ridgeline and passing forty miles away into the sea—a hapless snake meandering its way across the landscape. I wonder: does the place we helicopter pilots inhabit in our work somehow modify the way we think? Who knows? The answers are the stuff of psychology and philosophy. Nevertheless, when I think of my “calling”—for what else would any real pilot call it? —I see a direct correlation between each journey and the experience of human life itself.

I remember a Thanksgiving Day journey far from home that took me to several outlying US bases during the course of eight sorties. We carried men and supplies, mail, boxes of every size, tools and all sorts of things. As we skimmed along ridgelines and flew high across valleys, my mind drifted to my home back in Kentucky. There, many thousands of miles away from this hostile place, I knew my family would soon gather over a grand walnut and mahogany table in a seldom-used dining room in my home to share a meal together. I pictured my boys talking loudly and playing with their mashed potatoes and gravy, and the girls being the perfect ladies they are so much of the time. I could picture my wife at the head of the table watching over them with a loving smile born of so many shared experiences with all of them. I could almost hear them laughing and talking—chatting happily about nothing in particular—and I knew they would be thinking of me. My family has endured many Thanksgivings without me at the table, so it has become somewhat “normal” for my wife to lead the event—something I liken to “herding cats”. But in my mind’s eye, I could see them all as clearly as if I were seated at the other end of the table—the end where I would normally be doing a mediocre job of carving a great turkey. I would be looking outward at eyes full of anticipation of the great meal we were about to share. The boys would be feigning starvation, and the girls would be a wearing a mixed bag of smiles and a look that says, “Are you ever going to get that thing cut apart?”

Such is the journey of life; it’s found in a million moments just like that. But for soldiers, those moments are mostly solitary in nature. My family can’t be here with me; nor would I want them to be. Heather often asks me to describe things about the war but when I try to, I realise I actually can’t. You see, my journey is so different from “normal” domestic life that I struggle to describe and explain things that cannot easily be described in words.

My journey connects me to this place and, at the same time, separates me from those who matter the most; what an odd contradiction it all is. The journey that acquaints me with the colour of the rocks and the knowledge of where that next valley leads also keeps me on a course that separates me from another journey—that of my family and loved ones. What a strange existence I have come to call “normal”.

Despite being separated from my family—again—this Thanksgiving Day journey was good to me; very good indeed. If I cannot be with the ones I love, then let me be with others who really matter—our nation’s selfless warriors. I had that opportunity this Thanksgiving Day and took it. The timing of our mission just happened to put us in the vicinity of a good-sized US camp at around noon, so we swung in there for Thanksgiving dinner. We parked our three aircraft alongside the fuel pits where giant bags of jet fuel lay protected behind berms of dirt and rock. As the throttles were closed and the rotors slowed to a stop, about a dozen eager air crewmen stumbled out of their aircraft—not used to standing on the uneven rocks of the helicopter landing area. We had already been sitting in our cockpits for more than five hours this day, so it was a very welcome break.

A short walk took us to a line leading into the dining facility. As the line grew shorter, the smell of freshly cooked turkey and ham grew ever stronger. Inside was a cacophony of sound from hundreds of happy soldiers, airmen and marines, as well as soldiers from other nations. The sight inside was one to remember. The cooks had done a fantastic job on both the setup and the actual food. There were life sized bread statues, cake-shaped “horns of plenty”, fruits, desserts, drinks and sides of everything imaginable arrayed from wall to wall!

A few days earlier, I had actually delivered six hundred pounds of frozen turkey to this very outpost; now it was my turn to enjoy the fruits of that labour. We all sat down at a long table and began to savour the rich traditional American food. The Romanians were picking through it but enjoying it just the same. We were joined by an Air Force captain wearing a flight suit identifying him as an MH-60 Pave Hawk pilot, while a soldier from the 82^nd Airborne Division sat across from me with several pieces of pie, all smothered in Baskin-Robins ice cream. We all laughed and joked and thanked the Lord for such an amazing meal—relishing the tranquillity of a little piece of America confined within the deadly hills of central Afghanistan. We all knew it might turn out much differently later in the day, but for a short time, it was indeed heaven on earth.

I could hardly eat two bites without thinking of home. I drifted again. Now as my mind’s eye stared past my wife’s blonde hair to the fire in the hearth, the distinctive smell of hickory logs snapping and popping in the fireplace mixed with that of the meal, making me feel like it was a hundred years earlier in a log cabin. Above the brass pots on the hearth, I could see a framed photograph of all of us taken a couple of years earlier. Below me at my feet, Jack, our husky, sat impatiently waiting for me to sneak him a morsel or two when no one was looking.

These thoughts came with such realism and intensity that I could almost touch them. All too soon, our meal was over and it was time to walk back to our birds. Time again to crank those powerful engines, make the blades disappear in a whirl above our heads and turn some more jet gas into noise!

As we left the base, we turned north up into a narrow alpine valley that followed a stream and we passed several villages of mud and stone huts. Above us, the peaks were already covered in white after their first dusting of the impending winter’s snow. Our next destination was a lonely outpost occupied by Special Forces soldiers where we had dropped off a couple Army chaplains earlier that morning. Having shared blessings and a meal with the troops stationed there, they were now awaiting pickup by our aircraft. As I looked at my watch, I realised our timing was perfect—it was 1430 and we had ten minutes to run to our scheduled pickup time of 1440!

That particular valley was very picturesque. Situated some seven thousand feet above sea level, with ridges well over ten thousand feet high on either side, it had a sandy sage colour. The rocks looked tortured, as does much of the terrain here, running from black to chocolate in colour. There were no real roads, just animal trails—and a path I would have loved to negotiate with my four-wheel drive. The stream in the centre of the valley was crystal clear and moving with some speed between clear pools dotted amidst the rocky rapids. For all its beauty, it was not a safe place. Recently, our soldiers had met the Taliban there in a bloody clash. Such is the way of this place; naked beauty overlaid by a deadly war of high technology and tenth century idealism.

With a northerly wind swirling all around lower in the valley, we had made our approach from the south in the morning. Taking the principles of tactical surprise and diversity into consideration, we peeled out of the formation in a diving right turn and quickly disappeared behind a ridge. Lead and I would land, while “Three” went high and circled to look for anything that that might surprise us.

My thought was to mix it up and approach from the east, turning into the wind only in the last couple of hundred metres. Lead flew up the left side of the valley away from the village and made a straight in approach. I came in at ninety degrees to him and turned onto final to land about a hundred metres to his right on the hard rocky soil of the LZ (landing zone). The dust cloud built quickly but passed well behind the other aircraft. We kept the rotors turning at one hundred percent—giving us the ability to “didi-mau”—just in case someone decided to drop a mortar shell on us.

A Toyota Hilux and a heavily armoured Hummer drove up with our passengers. A gruff-looking bearded soldier got out of the truck and walked to the front of the Hummer. He was wearing ACU (Army Combat Uniform) pants combined with local garb and had a cigar stuffed in the side of his mouth; SF guys start looking pretty wild when left in remote places for too long! He shook hands with the two chaplains then turned to look at us. Seeing us return his look directly, he gave us a salute with two fingers—more of a wave, actually—before turning and walking away. It was the language of soldiers; a casual acknowledgement between fellow warriors. He had probably seen our approach and knew that we “knew”. With our passengers safely aboard, we took off while Chalk Three covered our departure from above.

In short order, we were back in the cruise mode on our way home on our final leg of the day. “Turkelepsy” was beginning to take effect on all of us. There was no silly chatter on the radio and none within our cockpit either. People were tired; with bellies full, we were ready for a nap, not nap of the earth flying!

I swung into a tight echelon right to check out a panel on Lead’s aircraft that looked to be open. It wasn’t, so I dived away to the right and then corrected sharply back to the left. Pat looked over at me for a moment after the jink as if I had interrupted his rest, then turned back to look out the left side of the bird.

I was just beginning to drift back to that table in Kentucky when I noticed a plume of rising smoke to the left of Lead. I was studying it—realising there was nothing there to burn—when I saw the second explosion; this time, it registered in my conscious mind.

“Lead! Explosions left. Break right!”

“Roger that. In sight,” he responded, breaking right, away from the area of rising rocks and debris. None of us knew who, why or what the explosions were all about. Perhaps someone was just pissed off at some rocks; we didn’t care—I didn’t care. It was Thanksgiving and no one was going to take that away from me.

My mind drifted slowly back to Kentucky—back to that safe place where another part of my journey waited quietly and patiently.