The Final Days: At least I’m home
April 10, 2008 | Military Life, Road Trips, South to Santiago
(Photo courtesy Sagar Pathak)
FORT WORTH, Texas — I’ve just finished an 11-hour airplane ride from Santiago to here, NAS JRB Carswell, just on the fringes of Fort Worth. I’ll catch a flight home from DFW tomorrow. Then take a a few days off.
This TDY had a number of pluses and minuses. The pluses? The location. The missions. And a few others. The minuses? Not being able to release anything until almost eight days after the fact. No sense grumbling about it any longer, however. Worse has happened and ultimately, the photos and video did get released. Unfortunately, none of it will be used. One image used out of about 45. Again, the delay delivering them hampered any chance of publication.
Overall, it was one of the strangest efforts I’ve done in a long while. However, the entire effort was chaotic from top to bottom. In the end, there was a lot to be learned about dealing with foreign media, community relations and attempting to push stories to Air Force News doing 17 things at once. 
I’ve created a gallery of imagery from the 14 days. I’m not satisified with the imagery as a whole because it was a rushed, chaotic grab bag. My camera and lenses were dirty. And much more. There are a few good images and some of the kids are cute, too.
I’ll be home Friday. Back to regular reports then. Here’s some video of an F-16 alongside our airplane on the ride home.
