CAMP 35, KUWAIT — Chinook tail number 211 hasn't even been to Iraq yet, and already it's seen better days.

Here on the helicopter landing area of this Kuwaiti military base, the mechanics, pilots and crew chiefs of the Army Reserve's A Company, 5th of the 159th Aviation Regiment, home based at Fort Lewis, Wash., have put all their "birds" in a row. Their mission: put each CH-47D Chinook helicopter through its paces, and make sure each one is ready to start moving beans, bullets and humanitarian aid to troops serving in Iraq.

One by one, the Chinooks rise off the broad expanse of asphalt, take a lap around the tarmac, and softly alight again. Hot exhaust from turbine engines turn the desert air to rippling mirages, while spinning rotors swirl the surrounding desert into tiny sandstorms.

But the only thing turning atop tail number 211 is a wrench.

"There's an internal part breaking down, and it's getting little bits of metal into the oil lines," explained Spc. John Rae, a basic-level Chinook mechanic. Sitting atop 211 with two of his colleagues, Spc. John Kennedy and Pfc. Tom Nicholson, Rae said "We've got to pull out this whole gear box and get a new one sent here, otherwise this bird isn't going anywhere."

Rae drives a tow truck with Gus Cooper Services in the Seattle neighborhood of Freemont. He noted that the mechanic skills he's learned in the Army Reserve often send him back from a call without a vehicle in tow.

"More often that not, I can fix it right on the spot," he said.

But he marvels at the skills some of the more advanced mechanics around him use keeping these Chinooks safe to fly. "We flew this one in from the port the other day, and it was working fine. By the time it landed, the flight engineer already knew it'd be sidelined for a while. Some of them can tell just by listening what's wrong and what needs to be done," he said.

So Rae, Kennedy and Nicholson are spending this drizzly desert morning in 'surgery,' covering exposed oil lines with plastic bags to keep the dust out, filtering bits of ground metal out of the fluids and loosening the watermelon-sized gear box so it can be taken away to the junkyard.

"They're all getting pretty beat up in the conditions here," said Nicholson as he picked at a patch of sand pitting on the helicopter's broad black flank. "This sand is punishing them worse than anything the salt air back home was dishing out."

Rae added, "But this one, we call the bad-luck aircraft. We've been using it for most of the desert-landing training flights, which is probably why it's in the condition it's in compared to the other ones. But it was actually doing pretty well until this happened," he said.

But the military likes to say, having things going wrong makes for good training, and these three mechanics will need all the practice they can get for when their real mission kicks off in the next few days.

"These birds were all built in 1990, which makes them at least middle-aged," said Nicholson. The Seattle computer programmer, who said he grew up "fascinated with flying," has spent more time with CH-47Ds than with PCs in the past year. He finished his specialized Chinook training only a month before being called to active duty for Operation Iraqi Freedom - and he figures the next few months will leave him a seasoned veteran in the care and feeding of the military's birds of burden.

"The amount of dust that gets into these aircraft, and the amount of hours we're gonna be flying them, there's always going to be work to do," he said.

Kennedy, a student at the Art Institute of Seattle, got into his line of military work for the same reason many reservists find a specialty — location, location, location.

"In my area, it was either this or Chemical Warfare Operations. Bless those guys, but it just wasn't for me," he joked.

He at least found one up-side to his unit just joining the fight.

"Now that the war's almost over, we probably won't have many bullet holes to deal with. But we're still carrying everything from rations to ammunition to food, water and medical supplies for Iraqis, still going anywhere and landing everywhere. These things are going to take a beating," he said.

"We've just got to get the new gear box in from Camp Doha, and we should have this 'old hooker' up and running by tonight," Rae said as his unit's crane truck carried the broken part away.

"Like they say, you're either in the infantry or you support the infantry. These birds support the infantry, and we support the birds. They break down, we fix them. And the busier we are, the more important we feel," Rae said.