Sandstorms offer 'welcome relief' to Carson squadron

Halfway through a 15-month tour in northern Iraq, a Fort Carson helicopter unit is waiting out frequent sandstorms in Kirkuk that have grounded reconnaissance and attack missions.

Troops in the 1st Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment use the breaks, when the storms turn the sky red and sand whipped up from the deserts of western Iraq blot out the sun, to fix their two dozen OH-58 Kiowa helicopters and prepare for a busy summer ahead.

"For some, it's a welcome relief because they get down time," squadron commander Lt. Col. John W. Thompson said last week.

Flight crews could use the time off after eight months of nearly nonstop flying. Combined, the squadron's birds average 30 hours in the air a day, on reconnaissance flights to spy on insurgents and riding shotgun on ground troops.

Thompson said the region around Kirkuk, a hub of Iraq's oil industry north of Tikrit, remains relatively calm compared with hot spots such as Baghdad and Mosul.

But it's still a war zone, and Thompson's crews frequently find themselves targeting teams burying roadside bombs or setting up mortars or rockets to attack American and Iraqi forces, he said.

"We have our challenges like anyone else," Thompson said.

The squadron's crews, most of them veterans on their second or third deployments, have shown a knack for finding bombs before they get used.

The 350-soldier unit's Kiowa helicopters were designed during the Cold War to scout ahead of armored formations.

The choppers carry ballshaped containers of camera gear atop their rotors.

The cameras, which work in day and night, have enabled the crews to spot the enemy hiding arms, and those stashes are then captured by American or Iraqi troops.

Thompson said the crews find as many as three stashes a week, taking large numbers of bombs, rockets and other weapons off the streets.

The key for the squadron is keeping up that effort for seven more months. The unit marked the halfway point of its tour April 15.

"They seem to be holding up pretty good," said Command Sgt. Maj. Stephen Waller, the squadron's top enlisted soldier. "We're at the hump point and we've maintained focus and we've maintained a type of sanity."

Soldiers in the units spend much of their offtime using the Internet to connect with loved ones back in Colorado.

"It's an awesome capability," Thompson said of the morale-boosting computer hardware.

But leaders watch for signs of complacency that can appear as the deployment grinds through its second half.

"It's not that from here on it is downhill," Thompson said. "I explained to them we are halfway up the hill."

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0240 or tom.roeder@gazette.com