One officer in particular

In the last couple of days, as a result to a couple of posts I have had and comments on those posts, it has reminded me of some random things I had forgotten about.  This will probably take a couple of posts to avoid these being too long. 

Let's start with a certain Lieutenant we had, who happened to be a West Pointer. He was a pilot that came to our unit after we had already been deployed for a couple of months.  He was one of those individuals who didn't often think before he spoke, which is how he found himself in three circumstances that he didn't live down.

The first of those two was during a meeting the crew chief office (all enlisted personnel), he walked in and somehow got into a conversation with a couple of the crew chiefs.  How the next part came up, I don't remember, but I don't think there was one person in that room that didn't remember what was said next.  His reponse to whatever had been said was 'Well, quality people don't enlist in the Army' - the room went silent and everyone looked to see if they had heard what they thought they had.  In a last ditch effort to try to save himself from the situation he rephrased 'I meant West Point quality people don't enlist in the Army...'.  Needless to say, saying that in a room full of enlisted people isn't going to be the way to get them to respect you. 

Shortly after this incident, this same officer was a pilot in chalk one of a flight that I was on chalk two of.  It was just after dark and the moon was coming up over the horizon.  That night it happened to appear larger than normal, which prompted a conversation between this officer and one of the crew chiefs.  He asked the crew chief if he saw something out to the 3 o'clock (nose of the aircraft is 12, tail is 6).  The crew chief responded that he didn't see anything out of the ordinary.  So this went back and forth a couple of times before the officer finally described what he was seeing, a large white thing, but he couldn't identify what it was.  The crew chief was a little confused because the only thing he saw that resembled what the officer had described was, in fact, the moon.  As soon as the crew chief explained that it was the moon, the officer quickly tried to cover it up by saying 'oh, I knew that'. 

This guy's third and final strike with the comfort level of the crew chiefs was during a flight where was one of the pilots in the aircraft I was in and we were flying chalk two.  We were en route to Baghdad when chalk one had a bird bust through one of the chin bubbles (the 'window' by the pilots feet).  Chalk one radioed back to let us know they would be slowing down since they now had wind coming through the chin bubble at a pretty high rate of speed.  This officers response was total panic.  Since we had flown to a location out a little further than normal, we were flying over an area of nothing much more than desert.  The officers first instinct is to perform an emergency landing.  Chalk one again assured him that they could make it to the next location.  In the meantime, the crew chief and I was in the back giving each looks and thinking 'this guy can't be serious?!?'. 

With all of this happening within a few weeks of each other, he didn't have much of a positive reputation when it came to competence, nor did he live any of it down the rest of the deployment.