Remote Post

Wanted to share this with all of you, Brian wrote it from the boat on Sunday:

Well if you have been paying attention to the world news, you all know that we were in Busan, South Korea for the past few days. I had a good time there. A bunch of us guys got a room at the Westin Chosun, a very nice hotel. Situated right on the beach and along a board walk, it offered lots of opportunities for various food and drink. Cass and Hite beer were the Bud and Miller of the city. While we were there we dined in many countries. We ate Italian (Papa Johns), Indian Food, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and American (Hamburgers). Papa Johns was a treat for us, in Japan all we have is Pizza Hut and it is $30 a pizza there. Papa Johns in Korea tasted just like home. The beach would have been nice had we been allowed to go swimming in it, but the George Washington decided that we all should not enjoy the water. They were worried about all the various types of “sickness” we could bring back on to the boat. Going in to the port I had low expectations, based on what everyone else was telling me. All together, I had a pretty good time. There are a couple spots where cheap shopping can be had. Valued items there are leather, sport jersey’s of any team you can think of, knock of purses, and any number of other things. Managed to pick up a couple things for Allison and myself. As always, all good things must come to an end and now I am back on the ship waiting to fly.

I was pretty surprised at the coverage the GW was getting on CNN. Base on reports from other people’s families, we have been in the news quite a bit. Funny how you can loose perspective on the situation when you are in the thick of it. Our roles as helo pilots is to protect the ship, wherever she goes we go, pretty simple and it makes it easy to very near sighted on our overall mission. All the guys in the room and I got a kick out of watching the news about us. To tell you the truth, we do get CNN on the ship, but we rarely take or have the time to watch it. We also got a kick out of the photos they were showing on CNN, most of the photos were taken out of the back of our aircraft with my buddy at the controls. Not less than fours after he had taken the photos, they were being broadcast on the news. Crazy.

Now that we have pulled out of port we are off to exercise and show off what skills we have as a Navy. If all goes well I will be seeing Allison at our next port call. If that happens, we run the risk of seeing each other once a month. Really doesn’t give me much room to argue with dad about how rough the Navy is now days.

Big items on my plate for the next month is making Helicopter Second Pilot (H2P). Just a basic designation provided by the squadron to say they trust you as a co-pilot and that I have proven my worth. HS-14 uses it more as a hazing ritual, we go into a room with all the H2P and they just badger us with questions based on knowledge from any one of many publications we must reference from time to time. Some questions are legitimate and some are off the wall just to see how you respond. Hope that they will go well for me. In the meantime I will being hitting the books hard and living this groundhogs day they call deployment.

As always, I think of you all often. Hope all is well back home. I love and miss you all.