ROCK SOLID WARRIOR Published April 27, 2009 737th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron SOUTHWEST ASIA -- Staff Sgt. Pablo Herrera Job: C-130 Instructor Loadmaster Home unit: 40th Airlift Squadron, Dyess Air Force Base, Texas How do you support the mission here? As a C-130 loadmaster, I pre-flight, on- and off-load cargo and passengers into OIF and OEF theaters. I compute weight and balance and ensure aircraft safety of flight. I guide and instruct new mission loadmasters to become proficient in their job responsibilities in the desert environment. How many times have you deployed and what makes this one unique? This is my fourth deployment and the toughest one yet. You are always learning from every deployment and every mission. It is an awesome experience to fly with new crewmembers. Every crewmember's Crew Resource Management score factors into a safe, smart, disciplined and successful mission. It is a lot of hard work but the crew flying and working together in making the mission happen is a great payoff. How does your job differ in a deployed environment vs. home base? At home station, we return to maintaining our proficiencies and ground training events. We maintain our airdrop qualification events as well. This enables us to deploy back into the system on a one-to-one dwell schedule; meaning for every day home we owe one day in theater. At deployed locations, you are assigned to a hard crew. Through hard work, the crew becomes a very tight-knit group performing desert ops and combat missions for our county.