Finishing My Tour of the South

The mission the next evening was for a team of Marines to drop in from the air, cross a mile of forest, and capture an insurgent leader and get him back to the ship for interrogation.  My mission was to meet their V-22 at the LZ, and get a drive of footage from our crew member who was supposed to be onboard, shooting the extraction team in flight.  And I was supposed to give them some extra cards and batteries we had bought, since they were coming up short on the ship.

 

As I heard it overhead I was racing to try to get the truck to the right part of the clearing in the woods, and then hopped out to run the rest of the way, since they were usually only on the ground for a couple of minutes.  As I got closer all you could see was dust.  I hoped that the blades were fully upright or I was going to lose me head.  Finally I could make out the back of the aircraft, which was open, with a tail gunner standing on the ramp.  I could just see his NVGs reflecting at me as he made some emphatic hand motions to direct me, but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to get me to do.  After a couple seconds I decided to interpret it as a wave off, and withdrew a ways back, which seemed to be accurate, since they took off a few seconds later.  I was a bit frustrated to have missed the hand off when Mike Svitak appeared out of the darkness.  He had offloaded with the Marines and was sticking with that team for the duration of the mission.  We opened our pelican cases, exchanged the items in question, and then separated into the darkness.  I drove the mile to the insurgent compound, but I didn’t get there soon enough, so the MPs stopped me at edge, and I waited as the mission took place, watching the Marines infiltrate in the darkness, and leave a half hour later with their captive in tow.  It was a faster paced scenario, so I didn’t get any other media from the crew until it was over.  But once I was back at the hotel, I had plenty of data from the second ship to keep me busy.

 

For the mission the next night, I was assigned to be a camera assistant, and help one of the main operators with lenses and batteries.  I don’t remember the full mission profile, since I was only involved with a narrow part of it, but we spent a while in the top of a building waiting, and ended up talking with one of the marine guards for a while.  It was a short enough mission that I didn’t need to start backing up data until it was nearly over.

 

Our last mission was back at Camp Lejeune, so we took a charter bus back to our original hotel in North Carolina.  That mission was a night vehicle raid.  They would land a convoy of humvees on the hovercrafts, and then proceed overland to a village a few miles inland.  When the crew arrived at the village, I ended up helping the electrical department setup power to imitation street lights to improve our camera shots.  The “buildings” were mostly old shipping containers, which I had to climb on to get the power cables run.  The actual mission wasn’t very interesting, and I hardly saw the vehicles.  The Marines drove to the edge of town, dismounted and interacted with some of the local extras, and did their thing and left.  I guess half the action was getting off and on the hovercrafts at the beach, but I didn’t get to see that.  When the mission was over I backed up the last set of data, and was happy to be headed home after two weeks of travel.  We flew back to LA the next day.  I don’t remember how I got my new cold weather wardrobe home, probably as “padding” in the equipment cases.