I had my first puker of the summer on my aircraft the other day. He was a little Indian guy that I picked up from FOB Wilson on the other side of Kandahar city. After we took off he told me he wasn't feeling too good, at least he had the sense to do that. I opened up the windows to cool it off inside and gave him a garbage bag. Then we landed at another base called Frontenac in the Arghandab valley. I dragged him off the chopper and told him to wait by the stairs as I went out and got the rest of my passengers. Well he decided that that would be the perfect time to get sick but he couldn't just get sick like normal people do. You'd think he'd never puked before from the panic that he threw. He ran up to the front of the chopper (I'd told him specifically not to get back on board) and started pounding on the pilots window for some reason. The pilot just stared at him and then BLAAAGHHH! as he was standing straight up, frantically trying to get the pilots attention for some reason, he let loose with a savage blast of breakfast.

I was about 30 feet away and didn't see him let loose with his first burst but I turned around in time to see him still standing straight up and looking around with wide-eyed shocked look on his face, still heaving and puking. A normal person would bend over and let go, it seems to be the natural posture, but that was too good for this guy. He was positively frantic and the look on his face was one of "WTF is happening to me?????". I walked over and asked him if he was ok and he just stared at me and then heaved, again looking straight ahead.

I took my sweet time loading everything up and then told the pilots that I was going to hold for a few extra minutes and I waited until all he was doing was dry heaving and then gave him another bag and loaded him back up.

It really baffles me sometimes when I try to understand the way these guys think. It sounds prejudiced to say but sometimes their way of thinking is just so...for lack of a better word, dumb. They'll crap their sleeping bags and sleep in it rather than get up and walk through the cold to the bathroom. They'll readily have sex with other males but will throw down in a heartbeat if you suggest that they're gay. The list goes on and on.

Happy thoughts:

I'm getting psyched for my R&R....it's not until July but nonetheless I'm pretty excited. It'll have been another 10 months or so by then so I'm once again going to take a full 30 days. I'm missing my cat, my truck, the open road, the mountains...I'm missing a lot of things. I'm in the twilight of my contracting career, I can feel it, so the longing for home and normalcy is growing stronger. The single of my two sisters is getting married this month, I'm gonna miss that but it's real low-key anyway. And my brother has been back for several months so far and already he's gotten a pretty serious girlfriend. I'm starting to think that I might just win this contest of the wills among us siblings to say single. Being the youngest definitely has its advantages.

I've got a few little trips to take when I make it home, I've got to get back up to Utah to see some old friends and family. The last time I was there I went jetskiing and had a blast, I'm gonna do that again. Everything else is still unplanned and undecided. Let's just hope that I don't get roped into any crazy blind dates like the last time. I had a particularly classy girl tell me that if I were ever lucky enough to spend the night at her place, I would wake up with her sitting on my face and farting. It wasn't like the conversation was really drifting in that direction, it just came out of nowhere. Shortly thereafter I committed the cardinal sin of insulting Star Trek and it all went downhill from there. She was kinda cute though lol. Ah well, life is an adventure. Live and learn, love and lose, laugh and cry, then laugh some more.

Tomorrow is another day, another early wakeup. Let my work week begin anew!