HMLA- 775 Coyotes - The Desert Hunters

The job here is, it's really rewarding but it's also humbling. You get to see the pilots who come in and this ready room when they're here and they're training and if they were to deploy, it's probably the most experienced ready room in the Marine Corps. The pilots here, they show up extremely professional and they bring more hours than a lot of squadrons have. You have pilots here with combat deployments all the way back to the early 2000s and watching them show up and getting to support them and ensure that those pilots could be ready to go out the door when they're needed, it's pretty rewarding. Any time to lead Marines is an awesome opportunity and the Marines here are no different. Watching how professional they can be when they show up and train and how hard that active duty and active reserve work, it's as rewarding or more rewarding than any other job I've had. Watching what these gentlemen do and Marines do is pretty amazing. It'd be a cool opportunity to do. This is the greatest job in the Marine Corps. I'm so lucky to have been able to do this for as long as I have. It's cool to see what the other side and what those guys can do and what they can provide the Marine Corps and the nation. We need both components to ensure we can be ready when they need us. This is a fun thing to do. You're flying utility helicopters around. You're doing the same thing without the same restrictions that the active duty has. You can go home at the end of the weekend. We are a reserve light attack helicopter squadron based here in Camp Pendleton, California. We've got 18 aircraft assigned and almost 400 Marines, 10 Cobras and 8 Hueys. One of the major differences is that our personnel are mostly comprised of Marine Corps reservists, the weekend warriors who drill one weekend a month and two weeks a year, oftentimes more, but have civilian jobs, careers and families outside of the Marine Corps. My name is Lieutenant Colonel Jack Guevara, call sign Chili. I'm the Commanding Officer of Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 775, Coyotes. I commissioned in the Marine Corps from the Naval Academy and was an active duty Cobra pilot for about nine years. I served with HMLA 267, the Stingers, as well as HMLA 469, Vengeance. I did three deployments at SoCal, MU, Afghanistan and the Unit Deployment Program to Okinawa. After that I got out in 2015, went to Columbia Business School, served as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company for four years in San Francisco and moved back to San Diego and I'm now the Senior Director of Operations and Strategy at Clearway Energy Group. I think this is one of the best jobs in the Marine Corps. One of the things I got to do yesterday, which is one of the highlights of my duties as Commanding Officer, is I got to teach at the Lance Corporal Seminar, the Corporal's Course and other professional military education and professional development for the young Marines who are the next generation of leaders, impart some of our hard-fought lessons learned and watch them grow and develop as leaders. So it's very different from an active duty unit. Instead of one Lieutenant Colonel and a bunch of folks who are developing in their qualification and progression, we've got a lot of very experienced aviators in the ready room. Nearly half are weapons and tactics instructors and probably three-quarters are night systems instructors, which is the second highest qualification. You'll never see that concentration of qualifications, designations, combat flight hours or just years of experience in any kind of active duty squadron. That's pretty unique to the Coyotes. It's pretty awesome. I mean, some of the folks in this squadron I've known for almost a quarter of a century. These are guys that I went to college, flight school, you know, deployed with. We were roommates in Afghanistan or other places. We're in each other's weddings, godparents to each other's children. So these are some of my closest friends and to be in a squadron with them on the weekend after your civilian corporate job or whatever and to be able to strap into an aircraft and go flying and do the thing that we were trained to do, it's a pretty awesome feeling and to keep up with their camaraderie with the rest of the Marines as well. It's just a great time. The resourcing that we have on a day-to-day basis is roughly a third of what the active duty has. But with that third, we fly about two-thirds of the flight hours of active duty. We maintain readiness at a level that's very comparable and we were able to accomplish a lot of the same mission sets as our active duty counterpart despite not being here day in, day out. My name is Lieutenant Colonel Russell Ramatka, call sign is HVAM. We're here at Camp Pendleton, HMLA 775, the Coyotes. And my name is Brian Clegg, call sign is WARSAID. So I came out to Camp Pendleton about 2009, joined the Vipers, HMLA 169. I did a couple deployments with them. Brian and I deployed on two of those deployments and then he departed for the weapons school after about five and a half, six years. I left HMLA 169 and went over to First Marine Raider Battalion, the MARSOC unit that was located out here in Camp Pendleton. Did about two and a half, three years with them, deployed to the Pacific. And then after that, I left active duty service, joined HMLA 775 in 2017 and have been here ever since. HMLA 169 did most of my flying there initially, training, deployments, everything there. Then I went out to the weapons school in Yuma. After that, I got out, joined the reserves, a different reserve unit out in Louisiana. Did my first reserves out there while I was doing my civilian jobs, also flying. And then came back out here to the West Coast where I fly HEMS and now fly for the Coyotes. I like flying it because again, I've known these guys for decades. It's slightly different than active duty. We're all trained up. We have the quals and everything. So when you come in, you're still doing training, but you're really training on what you're not proficient in. So if you're not used to flying in the clouds, you can come down here and fly in the clouds. If you haven't been doing night brownout landings, then you can take a bird out and go do night brownout landings. If you haven't shot in a while, you can go shoot. So kind of our job is to be ready. Like we don't have a routine deployment schedule. Our mission is just to be ready. So it's kind of nice. It's not the same strict bounds that the active duty has. We just have to get proficient on what we're weak in and that's kind of up to the individual. And everyone's an adult here. We all have the quals. We've all gone through the same process. So that's kind of fun. You come down, you already know how to do the things. You just have to brush up on it and stay ready. It's pretty flexible. The requirement is the weekend a month, two weeks a year, like your standard reserve advertisement. For the aviation side, if all the pilots showed up over the weekend, obviously there's not enough aircraft to support that. So it's pretty flexible. There's a lot of guys that are local. They can come in during the week. My job in the private sector kind of prohibits me from coming in on that schedule. So I come about every, I usually come for five to six days every three months or so. It's all dependent on your civilian job. So currently I fly for a helicopter area ambulance. So my schedule is seven days on, seven days off. So I can't always make the drill weekends or the exercises or whatever that may be. So I can combine those times into my off week and then come in and fly then. So I would say probably once a month, I'm trying to make my way down here. But if it's once a quarter, that's fine. I just have to come in for a longer period of time. It ends up being probably 40 to 50 days a year that at a minimum that you're out here and do all the ground training stuff, but then just meet the aviation requirements of, you know, the flight hours and currency that we have to get. My name is Lieutenant Colonel Vince Teixeira, callsign Klang. I am the active duty site commander here at Site Support Camp Pendleton with MAG-41 Detachment Alpha. The active duty and active reserve component here at supporting HLX-775 resists to make sure that the pilots and the maintainers in reserve have ready aircraft, facilities, and training available when they show up to do their drill. So Lieutenant Colonel Rivara leads that squadron and in his absence, you know, our job here is to make sure it's ready when they need us. So my job is a bit to provide support to him, all these Marines, pilots, maintainers, and support staff, and to lead them until he's on deck and then be available to support them in what they need for their training and their readiness. You know, they have a limited amount of time to show up and become as ready as they possibly can, and it's our job to have the squadron and the aircraft ready when they're here. In 2018, San Diego had been here for, you know, the previous decade, moved to Fort Worth, Texas, working the oil and gas space, the trucking and that job. It's obviously traveling from Fort Worth, which can be difficult to make each of the weekends, so it works out well for my work schedule to basically set aside a week, week and a half, come out here every, you know, three to four months. In doing it that way, you're able to kind of knock all the rust off rather than coming out, you know, doing a sim, doing a flight, and then leaving for a month. I tell you, look, if you're not ready to fully leave the military, that's really why both of us are here. I think, you know, doing 10, 11 years active duty, you're kind of at that halfway point, but that's been your life for the last decade. So it's a great transition out of active duty service. You're still getting to do what you love doing, the flying aspect. I think the downside is it might be, you know, three or four months before you are flying again, so you want to make sure that you're competent and, you know, comfortable flying on that kind of frequency. It's a great transition step. It's a way to continue wearing the uniform and still kind of be part of what we all joined for. I think there's a whole plenty of reasons to do the reserves. Similar to what H says, this is a good transition, but it's also, this is a fun thing to do. You're flying, you stack utility helicopters around. You're doing the same thing without the same restrictions that the active duty has. You go home at the end of the weekend. You're a little bit on the kind of an independent contractor. You make your own schedule. You come in here, you do what you love or what you used to love to do, and you hopefully still do, and you get to do that. I mean, some of the other perks are for reservists is it is a great benefits package. It is good money. So if you're getting out, you don't have a job lined up, this is a great place to make money. You have the benefits package and everything like that, and that's works out well too. Venom, I came from flying Novembers initially when I joined the Marine Corps and hopping into the Venom was going from like Fiat to a Lamborghini. So he has two big engines in it. It can carry more than you can fit in it. It's nimble. I mean, it's a great, it's a great platform and it's fun. It's durable too. There's little issues with it here and there, just like any helicopter, but ultimately like the machine is durable. That's been proven multiple times. Yesterday we took three aircraft out. Two of them were shooters. They had ordnance on board and their primary mission was to go out and support the ground force that was on deck with JTACs, TSV controllers, the whole ground gamut. Our responsibility as kind of the third aircraft was the photo bird to try to capture all of this. The great thing about Huey or the Ancient Malaysians, we're able to actually execute the ground force mission and support them in what we were fragged to do. But then also we're all familiar with flying with one another, like everybody's comfortable having kind of a third straggler in the flight as a photo bird. One of our missions is to support wherever we can. So we are a supporting element of active duty or whoever else calls us. In the Red Dogs, we supported, you know, SOF units for their training. We can support basically any joint force that we're fragged to support. So it's not just active Marines. It is utility helicopters. They are attack helicopters as well. So we support whoever asks the question, whoever our bosses tell us to support. So it is pretty fluid customer base. So I commissioned in 2008. I've been a Cobra pilot my entire career. So I remain active duty, flying Cobras as a captain. Then again, as a major when I was an executive officer with the normal active duty fleet squadron. And then now I'm returning here as a site commander here. So in between multiple jobs like most active duty Marines do in and out of the cockpit, which is a little different than Lieutenant Colonel LaVar and his pilots who predominantly flying is what they do. And that's what they're best at. This is the greatest job in the Marine Corps. And I'm just, I'm so lucky to have been able to do this for as long as I have.