"I wanna be a Race Car Driver!"

I had a pretty cool experience last week. We were sitting a bravo alert and got the call to be launched. Maybe there was a wounded soldier who needed airlift out of the theater so he could get home. Or maybe and emergency airdrop was necessary to save the world from terrorism. Or maybe there were just a bunch of morale and welfare performers that didn't properly schedule their airlift out around the theater.

Turns out it was the latter.

I wasn't really looking forward to it until we got to the ops building and they told us we were going to pick up some race car drivers. My interest was piqued but not that much because I don't really follow racing and my mullett is not impressive enough to care about NASCAR. (though for a while my son's was almost there, I bought him several Lightning McQueen t-shirts).

So then we get to Balad and the handler gives us the pax manifest. We scroll through to see if we recognize anyone and right there at the top are the names Mario Andretti, Johnny Rutherford and Al Unser. Wicked cool.

We got them all settled and then I invited Mario and Johnny up on the flight deck. We gave them a pair of headsets and chatted for a couple hours on our flight to Bahrain. It was awesome. We talked about a thousand things and I really appreciated them taking the time to hang with us. This was very early in the morning, they had been up all night with the troops in Iraq and like everyone else in that plane they really would have rather been asleep in the back. But they came up and spent the morning with us because we asked them to and I thought that was pretty cool.

So here's the picture of my crew and the winners of no less than 6 Indy 500's.