Photo by MCS2 Joshua J. Wahl. Modified.
By Lt. Jason Gelfand, USCG
e had been on the LHA flight deck for more than an hour. Behind me stood several CH-46E Phrogs full of grunts and a couple of AH-1W Cobra escorts, all of us turning and listening intently on the squadron frequency to the weather bird. I had taken a couple sips of hot gas to try to keep my UH-1N topped-off for the flight. I had the infantrybattalion XO in the back of my command-and-control aircraft. He was the raid force commander for this visit-board-search-and-seizure (VBSS) mission, which was part of our predeployment certification and evaluSeptember-October 2008
ation process. The battalion XO got more irritable as we waited for the weather to clear to at least 500/1. Not surprisingly, we heard little chatter on the ICS. The weather bird that morning was a CH-53E, which was inbound to the boat from homeplate. Because the 53E carried so much fuel, it could orbit the boat and provide weather reports for hours. At no time that morning was the weather ever 500/1 or better on the flight deck. After about an hour, the squadron representative in the tower called on squadron frequency and said my squadron CO directed me to go ahead and launch. I glanced at my copilot, Beaver, and he returned a puzzled 41
