The Herks

Engines are revved to the limits; while propellers are chopping the air,
The fuel leak is patched to a trickle; it can wait for a better repair,
It’s a clear moonless night over Baghdad,
And the tensions are running on high,
But the mission we hack in the skies of Iraq,
As the tracers will light up the sky.	
  Bullets and beans, the Herks they will fly,
  As their legacy’s always been said,
  We’ll bring in your troops and their needed supply,
  And then we’ll fly out with the dead.
The propellers reflect in the moonlight; though the plane’s mostly covered in mud,
The passengers huddle in darkness, midst the smell of the vomit and blood,
As the pilots descend through a valley,
In their nimble and slow-flying plane,
With their night vision sight, all alone in the night,
Sticking dangerously close to terrain.
The fighter boys all have their war tales; and they’re heroes their stories imply,
Though patrols they are technically “combat”; but they fly their routes eight miles high,
But the Herks do their work where it’s messy,
At a fraction the speed of our sound,
As the mission proceeds through the marshes and weeds,
At three hundred feet off of the ground.
A Warthog’s an Army grunt’s savior; and a BUFF raid can save a man’s day,
The Vipers are somewhat less useful, while the Raptors just frolic and play,
But the infantry’s ticket to freedom,
Though we treat them like self loading freight,
For the flight may be rough, but for them it’s enough,
That they’re not shipping home in a crate.
From Baghdad we fly to Fallujah; From Tikrit and Kirkuk to Mosul,
From Kandahar Air Field to Bagram; From Salerno L.Z. to Kabul,
For our routing is flown to precision,
Where we measure our speed by the knot,
As we fly in the dirt, staying ever alert,
Trying desperately not to get shot.
Our defenses are nothing to laugh at; though we fly most our missions at night,
For our goggles allow us some vision; and we’re too big a target in light,
But although we get warning for missiles,
Soft tones of impending attack,
But its tone has just said, that you’re already dead,
Without even a gun to fight back. 
If the runway’s been hit by a mortar; other planes would just simply divert,
But the Herk touches down past the crater; or we’ll land in the gravel and dirt,
For the FOBs that exist in the mountains,
Where a runway there’s no room to spare,
Then we’ll fly out our route with the load in a ‘chute,
And we’ll drop them their cargo by air. 
Engines are revved to the limits; while propellers are chopping the air,
Anxiety mixed with excitement; form a feeling that’s with-out compare,
For there’s two more long months of deployment,
Till I tell this foul region good-bye,
With our pallets and PAX, and the throttles to max,
The old Herk claws its way in the sky.

  Bullets and beans, the Herks they will fly,
  As their legacy’s always been said,
  We’ll bring in your troops and their needed supply,
  And then we’ll fly out with the dead.

If anyone is familiar with the works of Rudyard Kipling, this is my attempt at mimicking the style of his poem, "Screw Guns." The "Herk" is an affectionate nickname for the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, a medium weight tactical transport in use by the U.S. Air Force for the past 60+ years. The "Warthog" refers to a close air support fighter aircraft, the A-10, the BUFF is a slightly less affectionate nickname for the B-52 heavy bomber, and the Viper and Raptor are two of the more advanced fighter aircraft the U.S has in its arsenal, the F-16 and the F-22. A "FOB" is a Forward Operating Base, used primarily in areas that are difficult to resupply by road or air, so airdrop becomes a common occurance. "Pallets and PAX" refers to pallatized cargo (cargo is loaded on metal pallets to speed up onload/offload) and passengers (called PAX by the aircrews). The meter and rhyme scheme is not my normal style at all, but if you look at the original poem by Kipling, I think you'll see what I was trying to get at. Hope you enjoy...