The Bat that went Splat

We had a two stop MEDEVAC last night, one patient to each of the major theater hospitals north of us.  One patient had spinal and neck fractures and was being sent up there for further treatment and evacuation, the other was going for routine medical stuff.  As usual the call came right around dinner time.  We ran up the birds, loaded the patient, and were off without dinner again.  Due to the timing, we were able to squeeze in a little daylight flight though before switching to NVGs. 

These dual stop MEDEVACs can take us over some of the roughest parts of Iraq, and you have to keep a vigilant eye out.  You can never tell if the Bongo truck in the field has a missile on board or not.  Its also starting to get uncomfortably warm here, which doesn’t make the trip any more fun when your birds don’t have A/C.  However, the trip itself was rather uneventful, if a bit long.

On our way back, the crew was discussing mundane things, when one of the pilots said he felt something in his foot pedal, a little thump.  He wondered if something had come loose in the patient compartment, so I checked.  Everything was tied down, the helicopter wasn’t having any issues, so we chalked it up to a possible bird strike somewhere on the airframe.  Its not uncommon to have bird strikes, its just not a daily event.  You have to check out the airframe when you land to make sure there is no real damage is all.  We didn’t find anything after we shut down, there were still no malfunctions, so it was forgotten in the need to find something edible.

Well, this morning my relief asked me if we noticed anything last night, and I told him about the thump.  He said he had found a small bat in the windshield wiper.  What a bat was doing at over 1000 feet is beyond me, but we had in fact struck a bat.  The poor little bat had hit us head on and had literally lived out the old joke “What was the last thing the [insert creature] saw before he struck the windshield…”.  He was compressed from head-to-toe but intact. 

I know, a bit of dark humor, but the fact that there is nothing really more interesting to report lately is a good sign here in the desert.