TOP • Robin Brown takes the last few steps onto the summit ridge of Halgurd, at 11,834 feet the second-highest peak in Iraq. Climbing the steep, icy headwall below the ridge was Robin’s first time using crampons and an ice axe. BOTTOM • Stacy Bare drops into the main chute off Halgurd. Although the local snowpack was decent, the area hadn’t seen a storm in weeks, meaning a sketchy descent on serious sun crust. served two tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, as a helicopter pilot, and on December 9, 2003, I was shot down by an SA-16 shoul-der-fired, heatseeking missile in Fallujah. My copilot, Jeff Sumner, and I survived the crash, evaded the enemy and were rescued. Three days later, we were back in the rotation flying missions and fighting the insurgency in Iraq as if nothing had happened. Every day we took off from our airfield outside of Fallujah to fight the insurgency, looking for IEDs that had been buried in the roads and providing security for our ground forces. Our battalion conducted operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were no days off, no time to think about anything but the next mission. We lost four aircraft to enemy fire in three months, and the fighting only intensified as the insurgency became more sophisticated. I Too many soldiers died. Too many friends died. Most of us stuffed the guilt of surviving out of our minds, and just kept fighting. It’s hard to put into words, beyond that it was a terrible time and a terrible place. It was the Iraq War. As a pilot, I spent the majority of my time at an elevation of about 100 feet. When I picture Iraq, I picture rooftops. My interactions with Iraqi citizens were limited to a few interpret-ers. When I was on the ground, the women wouldn’t look at me and the men wouldn’t speak to me. At the time, I didn’t really understand the Shiite were different than the Sunni. I didn’t understand the Kurdish people were a different ethnic group entirely, one that didn’t identify as Iraqi, and they were carving out a separate nation-state in the northern part of the country. 050 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume Eleven, Issue Two: Page 50
