On Fixing Things That Were Broken —

— even if we didn’t break them.

Yesterday, two Mi-17s landed on our ramp for fuel . The Iraqis like to land on our side rather than the Air Force side – the older pilots can walk over to visit their old buddies in the training squadron (and a lot of them know me and they’ll pop in for coffee), the crews know that we’ve got plenty of cold water for the asking (and usually they don’t even have to ask), and they get fuel a lot faster here than they do on the US side–no interservice paperwork to fill out.

So, I wasn’t too surprised to see this:

I wasn’t even surprised to see this:

I was surprised to see this:

Not your everyday freshly-washed and shiny Mi-17. That’s dust on the roof and dust all over the windows, and that’s what surprised me – they’d flown through a dust storm rather than over it, or avoiding it altogether.

After I saw the crews, I wasn’t surprised any more. Both Aircraft Commanders were 2008 graduates of my “Inadvertent IMC Recovery and Dust Storm Crashproofing Program” and both Co-Pilots were 2009 graduates of the Flight School. They’d called Metro (the weather-guessers), talked over their options before they went into the soup, got radar handling, and chogied through it – which, when you consider they lost an Mi-17 and crew last month in a sandstorm near Karbala, showed they were confident they could do it.

The old Iraqi Air Force pilots got no instrument training. That program was broken, and even though we didn’t break it, we’re fixing it.

I yakked with the crews for a bit, and asked them if they were still working the op around Mosul, and I got re-surprised.

“No, we are just returning from Kurdistan. We were – working? – no, training – in operations together with the Pesh Merga. And after three days, we all had a party, just like here!”

“With” the Pesh Merga. Not “against” the Pesh Merga. Ten years ago – hell, five years ago – they would have been trying to kill each other on sight.

Now, we certainly didn’t cause the break between the Arabs and the Kurds – they did that on their own about 4,000 years ago – and I don’t believe for one second that “I” had anything to do with fixing something that’s been broken for about 4,000 years, but if it hadn’t been for us fixing things we “did” break, the two groups would never have gotten the idea that they didn’t “have” to keep killing each other.

Geez, silly me – did I forgot to mention that each of the 2009 graduates occupying the right seats were Kurds? When you’re working with folks who speak a different language, It helps if a couple of your crew happen to speak that language like – heh – natives. Which is something else they learned how to fix from watching us.

So, I’d just like to pass along to the Home Front Umpty-Million what each of the crew said to me before they left – they meant it for me, but it should really go to all y’all.

“Shukran!” “Supaas!”

“Thank you!”