Repeated Stories
We came back from one flight and I was eating in the wardroom. I saw guys either looking really beat up or amped up. An F-14 pilot was telling a story that they had dropped all their bombs and the guys on the ground were screaming for more, so they came in and strafed with their cannon. I went back to my room and turned on CNN before going to bed and heard the exact same story an hour and a half later. That happened at least three different times.
     — Lt. Hartley Postlethwaite

Dirty Landings
The aircraft fills with sand on desert landings. Having the sand blow back at you is actually a pretty severe threat. At times, I literally could not see my hand in front of my face. We had to wipe off the instruments to see them.
     — Maj. Bruce Taylor

Plan Your Trips Wisely
I remember sitting through a thirty-six-hour sandstorm in my tent, waiting for it to fall down. Going to the restroom was a major decision, since it was in another tent. You had to really need to go.
     — TSgt. Brett Allen

Cool Motivation
A crew chief would be more motivated to work on an aircraft that had just come down from 30,000 feet because it was cooler to the touch. We scheduled most of the heavy maintenance at night.
     — Maj. John Church

Blistering Hot
The heat would sink into the aircraft. Even working inside the aircraft could blister your hands.
     — MSgt. Donnie Porter

Night Precipitation
The cold air from the air conditioners and the humid night air created a lot of condensation. It rained inside our tents at night.
     — SrA. Justin McClellan

Boredom And Excitement
The missions were peaks and valleys. They were four-, five-, or six-hour missions. They became hours of sheer boredom followed by seconds of sheer excitement. We pretty much roamed the countryside. TST is a flexible, more dynamic environment. We spent three hours waiting to drop our bombs, then we dropped, and then we went home. There is nothing else to do. We wanted those munitions to drop off the jet and do real work.
     — Capt. Jason Charrier

One Less SAM
The intel folks had spent all night poring through sources, and they gave us a list of potential SAM sites, but no imagery. We started looking in downtown Baghdad and located the area where the SAM was supposed to be. We used a targeting pod to visually identify the radar, which was up but not operating. We dropped GBU-12s and destroyed it.
     — Maj. Akshai Gandhi