This Is Why You’ll See Lionel Richie’s Face At The Quad City Air Show

This weekend at the Quad City Air Show, when you're looking at the static military displays, you'll come across a face that looks familiar - painted right on the side of a Chinook.

Back in 2011, during Operation New Dawn, Company B, 2nd Battalion, 211th General Support Aviation Regiment of the Iowa National Guard was part of the drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The Iowa and Minnesota troops provided the only CH-47 Chinook helicopter support for the operation, leading up to its formal end in 2011.

The Chinook - a 98-foot-long, dual-rotor beast - helped the company moved nearly 50,000 passengers and over 4 million pounds of cargo, according to Stripes. The crew racked up 7,700 flight hours in a year, almost all of them at night to use the cover of the darkness to get around.

It was because of this, that the crew adopted the codename "Night Long", finding All Night Long by Lionel Richie to be a funny but inspirational backing track for their assignment.

Sgt. Ryan Hoover then incorporated a stencil of Richie's face into the unit's logo, which would become something painted around the base, made into a highly desired patch, and make them known throughout the country.

“Everybody knew us around the country,” 1st Sgt. Charles Iams, who also served as a flight engineer on the deployment told CBS. “The special operations guys would see our patches and trade stuff."

In 2012, Major Benjamin Winborn told CBS in a special about the adoption of Lionel Richie that he would have to order three batches of the highly sought after patches. Hoover mentions in the special that someone even traded a GPS unit to them for one of the patches.

The stencil made it onto just about any paintable surface around the base - shirts, the bottom of a swimming pool, walls, trash cans - it was everywhere.

Hoover told us, that when their crew was back home, they had to fly a Chinook out to a Toby Keith concert. Backstage, they got to meet Keith, who immediately called Richie when he saw the patches and told him "You've gotta see this."

CBS would take the crew to Los Angeles, where they'd get to meet Richie and visit with him. Richie is the son of an Army captain, and the crew made him an honorary member.

Check out the special here:

See more photos below, and check out Ryan's interview with Dwyer & Michaels.