A month and a half ago I made my way to Japan, and I've spent a grand total of 12 days in the country. That's the way it tends to go out here, the squadron I'm in is what's called forward deployed, so rather than the normal one time 9ish month deployment that most squadrons do, we do several, and constant, short deployments. I'm going to see as much of the Pacific Ocean as I will Japan over the next 3 years.
At the end of July I flew out to Brisbane, Australia to meet the fellow Golden Falcons as they were in port there for a few days, not a bad way to meet up. The feeling of checking into a new squadron, at least this time around, was very similar to the feeling I had when I was younger and we moved from one town to another. Up until now I've gone from training command to training command, typically with a group of other people which is nice because a) there are people you know that are coming with you, and b) it's a training command so there isn't much socially expected of you. This time around I was coming by myself to meet not teachers and instructors, but co-workers. Everyone was nice though, the traditional new-guy hazing to be expected but all in good fun.
After a few days to enjoy the Australian culture (and by culture I mean food. The exploring that I'm most interested in has always been around a dinner plate) we made our way onto the ship and headed out for a few weeks underway. A few things I learned while being underway.
1) The days are pretty long. On land the work day is broken up by drives to work, going out for lunch, separating yourself from the workplace. This is impossible when you live where you work. Also, between the studying I need to do and the job I now have, the days can get long. Nothing terrible, just something that becomes noticeable as the days go on. Which brings me to the next thing I figured out.
2) There are no weekends on the ocean. There is no Monday to Friday, there is no break. I guess I should have expected this, what would the entire ship sit around playing video games for 2 days? It's not so bad though, if anything that 3:30 feeling on Friday when you're waiting for the weekend and it seems to drag for the last couple hours is gone, you just kind of get in a routine and cross the daily things off your list as you do them.
3) The carrier, the big wigs at the top anyway, really only care about what jets are doing, which is a shame. Helicopters are incredibly capable platforms with a variety of important missions that we can preform, but the carrier only sees us as the child in the kitchen while mom is cooking thanksgiving dinner. The mom will hand him a spoon saying "here, your job, and it's a very important job, is to hold this spoon while mommy cooks dinner, think you can do that?" Our man job while on the ship is to fly what's called plane guard. Essentially, any time anyone is flying we need to have to have a helicopter in the air in case anyone goes down so we can pick them up. They have a variety of rules for us, we can only go so far, we can only have certain things in the helicopter, but for the most part we take off and do our own thing for a few hours. We take advantage of this lack of supervision, getting as much training as possible. In the end I get to fly a lot, more than most of my fellow helicopter pilots in other squadrons, so there's definitely nothing to complain about.
I'm back home for a few weeks before we head back out and do it all over again. Sure to be a blast
Sayonara
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