Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Gaza

The Gaza Strip was once a prominent trading center, historically advantageous for its location along the coast of the Mediterranean. We know from the Bible, Judges chapter 16, that Israelite warrior and judge Samson died in Gaza “with the Philistines” to get revenge on them. From Jeremiah chapter 47, we also know that Pharoah attacked the Philistines in Gaza. In fact, the Bible has more than a dozen references to Gaza, beginning with Genesis in which the borders of Canaan are identified. Then, in Judges 2:3 we read that God punished Israel for not driving the Canaanites from the Promised Land after He delivered the Israelites out of Egypt. In response, the Bible says God told the Israelites, “they will become traps for you, and their gods will become snares for you.” Some might say they're still paying on that penalty.

But setting that aside, history informs us that in addition to the Philistines and the Egyptians, Gaza has also been occupied by the Babylonians and even Alexander the Great.

Time eventually saw Christianity take root in Gaza, but then it was conquered by Muslim general Amr ibn al-Aas in 637 A.D., soon after Islam was founded. In 796 A.D., however, the city was destroyed by Arab infighting. It was reconstructed a century later.

In the modern era, Gaza was part of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries until it and the rest of the land called "Palestine" was captured by the British during World War I. The Ottomans were allied with Germany, which became a losing cause, resulting in the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the surrender of Palestinian land. In the aftermath of the war, the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, placed Palestine, including Gaza, under British administration with the requirement that Great Britain would oversee it until it could stand on its own, which has always been the rub: standing on its own. That mandate also required Great Britain to implement the Balfour Declaration which provided that the Jewish people would be granted a “national home” in Palestine.

There was a vagueness in the language, however, that led the Jews to believe that they would have all of Palestine. The British later said that wasn’t the intention of the Balfour Declaration, although the document didn’t explicitly support that view or provide implementing instructions that would establish limits. (See the illustration below.)

The Declaration also expressed support for safeguarding the rights of the Palestinian Arabs.

On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181 that would have divided Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate ended. The UN would have administered the religious areas around Jerusalem. However, the Palestinian Arab leadership refused to accept the UN resolution. They refused to accept the idea that it would have its own state side-by-side with the Israeli state.

Then, when the British mandate ended on May 15, 1948 and Israel declared its independence, five Arab countries invaded the territory that had been governed by the mandate. When an armistice agreement was signed between Israel and the Arab nations, Israel gained some of the land that the UN resolution would have given to the Palestinian Arabs had they accepted it. That area—reduced in size from what the UN resolution offered—became known as the Gaza Strip. Egypt kept control over the Gaza Strip where it had its headquarters during the war, and Jordan kept control over the West Bank.

In 1956, tension between Israel and Egypt peaked again when Egypt blockaded and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The Straits of Tiran sits at the north end of the Red Sea and at the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel has a port, Eilat, at the southern end of the Negev at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba which allows Israel to conduct shipping trade with nations to the east through the Indian Ocean without having to transit the Suez Canal. Israel invaded Egypt as a result. (See the map below.) The ensuing war was brief, but in the end, Israel announced that closing the straits again would be an act of war.

That act of war occurred again in 1967 when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that he was going to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping again. He then positioned Egyptian forces all along the Israel-Egypt border in anticipation of the war that Israel promised. As it had warned, Israel attacked Egypt again and destroyed most of its air forces. The Israeli invasion included assaults and the ultimate occupation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. Since Jordan entered the war on Egypt’s behalf, Israel retook the West Bank from them as well.

Over the years, Israelis built settlements near Gaza which the Palestinian Gazans resented. The First Palestinian Uprising (or Intifada) broke out in 1987 and gave birth to Hamas, which has its heritage in the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. (See also the links below to my series of articles on the Muslim Brotherhood.) The intifada lasted for six years.

Hamas' relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood is not inconsequential to understanding the situation in Gaza. Hamas’ charter calls for Israel to be replaced by a Palestinian state, hence the battle cry “from the river to the sea.” The "river" refers to the Jordan River on the eastern Israel border and the "sea" refers to the Mediterranean to the west. As a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, the elimination of Israel and Israeli people from that land is part of a broader objective to establish an Islamic caliphate. Peaceful coexistence isn't a part of that model.

Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party led the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which in 1993 ended the intifada and signed the Oslo Accords that gave Palestinians limited control of Gaza and Jericho. The agreement held some prospect for statehood for Palestine after five years, but that never happened over an allegation that the PLO had reneged on security agreements. The pressure on the PLO from within was likely a factor as Hamas opposed the PLO and its efforts to make peace with Israel. When it seized control of Gaza, Hamas repudiated all agreements signed between Israel and the PLO.

While Israel and the PLO sought to reignite peace talks, Hamas and another terror group, Islamic Jihad conducted attacks on Israel in an attempt to sabotage the peace process. Why? Again, peaceful coexistence isn't part of their model. That resulted in Israel imposing more restrictions on the ability of Palestinian Gazans to travel outside of Gaza.

The distinction between Palestinian Gazans and other Palestinians is worth a mention here. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million Palestinians live and work in peace in Israel proper. There are more than 2 million people who identify as Arabs who live in Israel, about 20% of its population, and they enjoy all the rights of citizenship that Israeli Jews do.

A new intifada broke out in 2000 which resulted in more Israeli reprisals, including the closure of the Gaza International Airport in 2001 that Israel deemed a security threat in the aftermath of 9/11 (which we ought to remember involved terrorists using aircraft in an attempt to destroy America's political, military, and economic structure).

Israel hasn’t been alone in restricting the movement of Palestinians with Gaza under Hamas control. Sensing that Hamas is a threat, Egypt has also placed limitations on travel in and out of Gaza, closing its border with Gaza and blowing up most of the tunnels that led into Egyptian territory.

Since then, attacks and counter-attacks have been a regular part of life in and around Gaza, culminating in the infamous October 7 attacks on Israelis and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza.

So, where are we today? Today, Gaza is a walled city, subject to Israeli military rule with neighbors that don't trust those in charge there not to use free travel and the movement of goods to threaten them. Hamas, like the PLO before them in its days of its rampant terrorism, has been dedicated to the pursuit of its charter, to wipe out the Israeli State. That, by itself, makes for an uneasy "neighborhood" in a small nation like Israel.

But what is Israel to do? First, who could blame them for deciding that Hamas must be irradicated? Anyone who doesn't agree with the premise that Hamas must be destroyed will never agree to any action Israel would take toward Hamas from there. Anyone who does agree with that premise and is determined to see it through realizes that achieving that objective would be a brutal exercise due to the environment in which it must occur.

So, if we grant Israel that objective, how do we think they should accomplish it in an environment where there are essentially four groups in Gaza: Hamas, Hamas enablers, the Palestinian leaders who have an uneasy co-existence with Hamas, and the innocent Palestinians? In an environment where the enemy in the first two groups intermingles with the relative innocents in the other two groups, clustered in an urban environment, there is no way to destroy that enemy without a lot of collateral damage to structures and people.

Hamas isn't like Israel. It doesn't separate its military apparatus from its civilian population. Hamas uses hospitals, mosques, and schools to store its weapons and use as launch sites for rocket attacks and safe harbor for terrorists. They've built a network of tunnels under Gaza, under the homes of the innocents and under those hospitals, mosques, and schools. How do you destroy those terror resources without harming the infrastructure around them? Our solution to that during World War II in Berlin and Tokyo was fire bombing. The Israelis aren't firebombing though. They've given the innocents save passage out and they've warned the Palestinians, including Hamas, of imminent attacks, but many who are trying to get out of Gaza find that even their Arab neighbors don't want them, partly in fear of their own security since Hamas would certainly shelter among the refugees.

The solution in Gaza isn't an easy one. Ultimately, it hinges entirely on the persistent determination to wipe Israel off the map. As long as that remains a battle cry of forces capable of achieving it, there is no likelihood that Israel will sit idly and wait for it to happen. If we were in a similar situation, we wouldn't either.

BlitheringOn Series on The Muslim Brotherhood:

References:

Saturday, January 27, 2024

The Flight Line

Marine Corps aviators in fleet squadrons have two “jobs.” The obvious one is their flying job. In my day, the other was simply what we referred to as our “ground” job, an assignment that contributed to the running of the squadron.

When I checked in to HMM-365 in the Fall of 1985, my CO asked me what ground job I wanted, probably just to see where my head was. He was going to put me where he wanted to either way. "I don't care" wouldn't have been a good answer. With my experience as an enlisted infantryman, I wanted to be in a position where I could lead Marines. The place to do that in a squadron is in the aircraft maintenance department, so that’s where I told him I wanted to work. He said that he didn’t put new guys in the maintenance department right away, but he’d see how things worked out. 

He put me in an office pushing paper instead, but when someone told me that the best way to earn my way into the maintenance department was to jump on every post-maintenance test flight I could get on as a co-pilot, I did that. That was great advice. I showed up early and stayed late to be sure I was available when an aircraft needed to be checked out after it was torn down for maintenance or repair.

Normally, the pilot I went out with on those functional check flights was the aircraft maintenance department head, Major Jerry Yingling. Soon, he was teaching me how to perform the functional checks so that I could become a functional check pilot once I had enough flight hours to qualify.

Anyway, flying those flights also got me working closely with the crew chiefs and mechanics who also got there early and stayed late to fix the aircraft and fly those hops. As I watched them work, I soon saw how they earned pilots' trust. Even though we pilots pre-flighted aircraft before we flew them, those guys had the expertise and judgment to spot things that pilots might never notice. They knew the tolerances, the acceptable drip rates, whether safety wire was installed correctly, and more. They knew when an aircraft was ready to go. In fact, they were the ones who signed the sheet that said the aircraft was safe for flight. When I became an aircraft commander, I only signed the line that said I was taking the aircraft.

Before long, the officer in charge of the flight line division where the mechanics, crew chiefs, and ground support equipment technicians worked told me that he was being transferred soon and that I’d be taking his place. Getting that opportunity was great news.

At about the same time that I became the flight line OIC, we started getting a crop of new mechanics, many of whom we’d need to turn into crew chiefs.

To make a long story short, the Marine Corps sent me some very good Marines and, along with the guys who had been there a while, they quickly became an amazing team. They were guys pilots could trust and they were guys who, when the need arose for them to pull a rabbit out of their hat, they made it happen. More than once, I flew a crew of mechanics out to a field in the middle of the night (and in the middle of nowhere) to an aircraft that had made a precautionary landing and they fixed it right there.

I remember one night in particular, an aircraft had to make a landing with an engine problem in a field right around sunset, so I flew some mechanics and a crew chief out to that field so the guys could repair the aircraft. The crew that had flown the broken aircraft took my helicopter and returned to base. I stayed because once the aircraft was fixed, I needed to test it.

I watched those guys change that bad engine in the field that night by lowering it onto a field stretcher. Listening to them talk through it, you could really sense their pride in what they were doing. There was all of the banter that you'd expect, but all eyes were on the job. They finished their work that night, all of it by the light of flashlights, and an inspector signed off on the work.

Since I couldn’t test the aircraft at night, we slept in the helicopter for the few remaining hours until we had some daylight so I could do a legal check flight. Once the sun broke the horizon, I started the helicopter to check for leaks. There were none. Then, with most of the maintenance crew on the ground since they weren’t permitted to ride during the test flight, I did the tests in a hover, then did the rest of the engine set-up work in flight. Everything checked out perfectly. Once the testing was finished, I returned to the field, landed, picked everyone up, and we returned to base. Those guys thought nothing of what they had just accomplished, but it was nothing short of amazing to me.

That was just one of the many times those guys jumped into the middle of a problem and enabled the squadron to accomplish its mission and did it in a way that gave the pilots the confidence that the job was done right. They had mastered the secret to being part of a successful team: trustworthiness. You can't build a good team without trust, but those on the team have to be trustworthy to really build a lasting trust.

I say all of that because I was proud of them the entire time I served with them and today—nearly 40 years later—it’s gratifying to see many of those same guys getting together for a reunion in Texas this weekend. I wasn’t able to join them, but I’m still able to enjoy it through their postings and photos, and a video call a short time ago. Reading what they’re writing and seeing those photos shows that although many of them didn’t stay for a career in the military and many years have passed between then and now, they’ve held onto the camaraderie that bound them together in that squadron. They made those days "the good old days."

Here's to the good old days!

Friday, March 3, 2023

Serving with Uncle Mel

One of the rewards of a career in the military is the opportunity to serve with truly great people up and down the chain of command. That was certainly the case for me. This is a story—part of the story—of one of those genuinely great people, Melvin W. DeMars, Jr. 

On October 18, 1983, Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 261 (HMM-261) and the 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) was underway on the helicopter carrier USS Guam (LPH-9) for a deployment to Lebanon as part of its Mediterranean deployment with the U.S. 6th Fleet. The squadron had already been to Lebanon after the Israelis invaded in June of 1982, so they had every expectation that the plans to return there were pretty firm.

They were at sea for about a day, headed east toward the Mediterranean when, at around midnight on October 20, 1982, the Guam turned south. There wasn’t a lot of information circulating around the ship that indicated that anything had changed, but the Marines in the squadron knew that when you’re headed for the Mediterranean from the United States, you have to head east and that when you're steaming east, the sun should be coming up over the bow of the ship. However, when they woke up on the 20th, they saw the sun rise over the left side of the ship. The sun was on the left side because the ship was headed south toward the Caribbean, not east toward Lebanon.

By the end of the day, Marines on the ship were talking about going to “Granada,” which is a city in Spain. But if they were headed to Granada, why were they cruising south? They soon learned that they weren’t going to Granada, Spain; they were headed to Grenada, an island nation in the Caribbean.

The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States had formally requested United States assistance amid “the current anarchic conditions, the serious violations of human rights and bloodshed, and the consequent unprecedented threat to the peace and security of the region by the vacuum of authority in Grenada.” The United States had already been concerned for the safety of approximately 1,000 American citizens on the island, some of whom were medical students who were being prevented from being evacuated from the island. Grenada’s prime minister Maurice Bishop had been assassinated by hard-liners who had ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union, and Cuba had already placed forces on the island.

As the ships steamed south, the United States decided to commit forces to Grenada to protect Americans, restore a democratic government, and rid the country of Cuban influence. The operation to conduct an assault on Grenada was briefed to commanders on the Guam at around midnight on October 23, barely 30 hours before the operation—Operation URGENT FURY—was to begin.

With planning hurriedly completed, the first helicopters took off from the Guam in the early morning darkness of October 25, in the face of intermittent rain squalls. To help preserve the element of surprise, the twenty-one helicopters that took to the air from the Guam that morning did so without using radio communications.

The helicopter waves made their way inland and disembarked their Marines. While the Marines were consolidating their positions and beginning to move out into the countryside in the east, U.S. Army Rangers were facing heavy resistance at the southern end of the island. The aircraft that had transported them into Grenada encountered heavy anti-aircraft artillery fire and once the Rangers landed, things didn’t improve as they came under attack from pockets of Cubans in the area.

Some of the Rangers were detached from the main force to rescue the Governor-General at the Governor’s mansion, but the compound was surrounded by hostile forces, so four Marine Cobra helicopter gunships from HMM-261 were ordered to fly south to provide close air support for the Rangers. The Cobras conducted attack runs on a masonry fort to keep the enemy at bay, but on their fifth run on the target, one of the Cobras, flying at an altitude of about 1,200 feet, was hit by anti-aircraft fire. One round traveled through both engines and several others entered the cockpit and wounded the pilots. One of the pilots, Captain Jeb Seagle, was knocked unconscious and the other pilot, Captain Tim Howard’s right arm was incapacitated, and his right leg was broken.

Nonetheless, Howard managed to prop his left foot around the cyclic stick and pulled the stick toward himself to keep the aircraft under control as it hit the ground hard. Despite his injuries, he somehow kept the aircraft upright. The impact with the ground caused Seagle to regain consciousness so he was able to drag the severely injured Howard away from the burning aircraft.

As the two pilots got clear of the helicopter, they came under intense fire from troops near the fort they had been attacking. Then, Howard convinced Seagle to go for help shortly before the burning Cobra exploded. Meanwhile, Howard used his survival radio to call for help as enemy soldiers moved down the hill from the fort toward the crash site. Just as the enemy soldiers reached the edge of the field where Howard and the wreckage of the helicopter were, another Cobra flown by Captain Pat Giguere appeared and scattered the enemy troops with 2.75mm rocket fire.

As Giguere provided cover for the downed crew, he called for a medevac for them.

Major Mel DeMars answered the emergency medevac call. He had been part of the assault force that inserted Marines in another part of the island. He approached the crash site, but landing in the field where Captain Howard was would require him to fly right past the anti-aircraft artillery site that had shot the Cobra down, while enemy troops continued to advance on the crash site from the fort.

DeMars later recalled, “I just figured we were all dead men because we were going in there … heavily resisted by Cubans or whoever was there.  …we were going to have to fly in right past this AAA site, right down the throat of who knows what, in the middle of the capital city of this island to land in this LZ and pick up the downed Cobra crew…it was just something we had to do.“

Giguere was still on station to cover Major DeMars’ landing, but with only one Cobra, there was no one to cover either Giguere or DeMars' aircraft when Giguere completed a run and extended his track off-target.

DeMars described his approach and landing into the LZ, “We started our run-in and Captain Giguere [with co-pilot 1st Lieutenant Jeffrey R. Scharver] in their Cobra rolled in on the target and provided suppressive fire … [I flew my CH-46] in at a high rate of speed …and landed in the landing zone right next to the remains of our Cobra that was in the [soccer] field.  Soon as we hit the ground Gunnery Sergeant Kelly M. Neidigh, a Vietnam vet, one of our door gunners…grabbed an M-16 and ran out into the middle of the landing zone about 40 feet away from where we landed, where Captain Howard was.”

While still under fire, DeMars, unaware that Captain Seagle had already been killed by hostile fire, endured the ongoing fire as he waited in the landing zone in the hopes of returning Seagle to safety.

Finally, with no sign of Seagle, with Giguere’s Cobra running low on ordnance, and with Howard’s condition worsening, DeMars lifted off from the landing zone and headed for the Guam with Giguere covering his departure. However, as they headed out to sea, Giguere’s Cobra was struck by anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the harbor, killing Giguere and his co-pilot First Lieutenant Jeffrey Sharver. DeMars was able to get Howard to the Guam in time to save his life, but Howard’s right arm could not be saved.

Finally, with the Grenada operation complete, HMM-264 continued with its original mission in Lebanon.

Captain Seagle who went for help after his Cobra was shot down was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor, and the Purple Heart.

Captain Howard, who was wounded in the Cobra with Captain Seagle was awarded the Silver Star, the nation’s third highest award for valor, and the Purple Heart.

Captain Giguere and First Lieutenant Sharver, who covered Major DeMars’ evacuation of Captain Howard were awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart, posthumously.

Major DeMars who rescued Captain Howard under fire was awarded the Silver Star as was Gunnery Sergeant Neidigh who carried Captain Howard to the rescue helicopter.

Of his Silver Star, Mel DeMars often said, "I'd much rather have those three guys."

Five years later, in 1988, I was a CH-46E Sea Knight assault helicopter pilot in Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 365 (HMM-365) when Lieutenant Colonel Mel "Uncle Mel" DeMars assumed command of the squadron.

Although it had been five years, DeMars never forgot “those three guys” or the lessons he gleaned from Grenada or from his experiences from two deployments in support of U.S. operations in Lebanon and as a Presidential helicopter pilot with HMX-1.

Former Marine Commandant General John A. Lejeune said that the relationship between commanding officers and those under their command “should in no sense be that of superior and inferior nor that of master and servant, but rather that of teacher and scholar.”

DeMars fit that mold. He heeded Lejeune’s admonition to take responsibility “for the physical, mental, and moral welfare, as well as the discipline and military training” of those under his command. He effectively related his experiences in combat to contemporary problems and the growth of his squadron while he led from the front and by his example.

His leadership style was more modest than flashy, but he had a confident bearing, a sense of humor, an intellect, and a quick wit that made him worth listening to and following. He was purposeful, focused, and principled, and he was intent on keeping commitments and doing things right.

Less than a year after he took command of the squadron, we began work-ups to deploy to the Mediterranean for six months as a special operations capable (SOC) squadron. After six months of training, we were ready, but after six months of operating in and around the Mediterranean, we were a very capable unit.

During the deployment, we flew and flew and when the aircraft needed work, the aircraft maintenance department got them back in the air so we could fly and fly some more. We flew more than a quarter of our flight hours at night and flew four of our six exercises during the deployment under zero ambient illumination. The intense night vision goggle (NVG) training was made possible when DeMars boldly asserted in a hazard report that was broadcast throughout the Marine Corps that the Marine Corps’ NVG training policy was hazardous and inhibited effective combat readiness training. In a subsequent message, he requested relief from the policy for the duration of the deployment so his squadron could more adequately prepare for combat. His request was approved.

As the end of our six-month deployment approached, when others would have been thinking about packing their things and going home, we launched sixteen aircraft under zero illumination at 3:00 in the morning from the USS Iwo Jima and seized the airport at Gibraltar, a target we had never seen before, and conducted a simulated hostage rescue there without making a single radio transmission until we landed at the foot of "the Rock."

The Marines of HMM-365 under LtCol DeMars were warriors who confidently went about their duty, satisfied in the end that they had done an important thing well. I think it's safe to say that, to the man, they appreciated having served under Mel DeMars' command, and I know the feeling was mutual.

But the rest of the story resides in the fact that once we returned from the deployment, as usual, many of the squadron members received orders to report to other units. Most of the CH-46 crews remained with HMM-365 while others reported to sister squadron HMM-263, which was preparing for a brief deployment to the North Atlantic.

As it turned out, with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the plans for HMM-365 and HMM-263 rapidly changed when they were ordered to report to the Middle East for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. A few months later, they flew a nighttime raid on NVGs under low light-level conditions into Mogadishu, Somalia to rescue U.S. and foreign diplomats from the fighting there. Both squadrons distinguished themselves and a good part of that success was due to the professionalism of the flight crews and aircraft maintenance Marines whose skills and readiness had been developed under LtCol DeMars.

In a tribute to his Marines during his change of command ceremony at the end of his tour with HMM-365, LtCol DeMars' stood before his squadron and described the spirit of the squadron he led by paraphrasing the narrator at the end of John Ford’s movie “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” Addressing the attending audience, DeMars said, "There they are, the 50 cents a day regulars, the men in dirty shirt green, from the oil fields of the Louisiana coast to the waters of the Caribbean, from the deserts of Israel to the coast of North Africa they did their job, with scarcely a cold page in the history books to mark their passage. The pay is poor, the hours long, the separations many. The names and faces change but the spirit lives on because they are a squadron, and wherever they sailed and whatever they fought for, they preserved the precious gift of freedom for you, me and for all Americans."

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Photo Credits

(1) Lieutenant Colonel Melvin W. DeMars, USMC, at Naval Air Station (NAS) Sigonella, Italy (Sicily, Italy). Photography by Captain Rick Mullen, USMC.

(2) Captain Jeb Seagle drags Captain Timothy D. Howard away from their burning AH-1T Cobra, shot down by enemy anti-aircraft fire near Fort Frederick on Grenada. Captain Seagle was killed while looking for help for the badly wounded Howard, who was subsequently rescued by a CH-46 of HMM-261 flown by Major Melvin DeMars. Reconstructive art by LtCol A. M. "Mike" Leahy, USMCR, provided to the Marine Corps History and Museums Division by the Navy Chief of Information.

Friday, February 24, 2023

Yellow Footprints: An Anniversary Reflection

Hurry Up and Wait...

mcrdI grew up in a small community in southern Illinois–Newton, Illinois–where people generally knew each other or at least knew of each other. It was–and still is–a nice town. It’s the kind of town that still holds a fall parade where tractors and marching bands own the streets. People sit along the curb in their chairs while the kids play along the street. The people there cherish the tempo and lifestyle, quietly aware that if everyone lived that way, it would be a much better world.

I wasn’t exactly setting any academic records in high school, so I needed a change of pace and some way to transition to a successful track somewhere, somehow. I had thought about the military, but I hesitated to follow through. I wasn’t sure I would be cut out for the military life, and I didn’t know which branch of the service to enter. I was very certain that if I did join the military service, it wouldn’t be the Marines because I was pretty sure I couldn’t make it there.

However, when the Marine recruiter called and asked if he could come over for a visit, I said yes. Almost as soon as he stepped through the door, I was in awe. I was still pretty sure I couldn’t get there from where I was in my life, but I was willing to listen. After some kind of black magic and other maneuvers, he had me thinking I could make it and I decided right then that I wanted to become a Marine. I was caught up in all of it and had apparently separated myself from my sense that there was no way I could make it through Marine Corps boot camp. I wasn’t a very big or fit guy at the time. I didn’t run, I wasn’t strong, and I wasn’t very focused. All of that was going to change soon enough though.

I signed the papers in September of 1974, just after my seventeenth birthday and finished my high school work in January. The following month, on Monday, February 24, 1975, my family took me to the Greyhound bus station in the nearby town of Effingham where I boarded a bus headed for the recruiting center in St. Louis.

I boarded that bus 48 years ago on February 24, 1975, with the love, support, and confidence of my loved ones and friends; it turned out that not wanting to disappoint any of them was a powerful motivator.

I spent the night in a so-so hotel in a not-so-good part of town. I didn’t get a lot of sleep because I was afraid of missing my wake-up time. It turns out I couldn’t have missed it because the hotel invested in a wake-up ringer that could have awakened the dead. They obviously housed a lot of recruits because it wasn’t quite a gentle wake-up call. That was okay. I didn’t have another gentle wake-up for three months.

My instructions were to get up early at a time they gave me and report to the recruiting center for processing. I had the sense that it would be a pretty quick evolution since I already had a physical and had signed a bunch of papers. After all, this was the military, known for its rapid efficiency. But I was wrong. I got there early and waited and waited. Then, we did a little something and waited and waited some more. That happened all day long until suddenly near the end of the day everyone flew into action to process us out of there and get us to the airport for a flight to San Diego. What appeared to be wasteful inefficiency turned out to be a well-conceived plan. Very clever.

The staff at the recruiting center in St. Louis gave me all of the paperwork for the group in a large yellow envelope because my last name came first in the alphabet among those headed from St. Louis to San Diego. There was probably a dozen of us. It turns out where my last name fell in the alphabet dictated a good bit of my vantage point over the next three months since we did almost everything in alphabetical order. We lined up for shots in alphabetical order and we even slept in alphabetical order. I got a good look at the back of Private Dibble’s head over that period.

We took off out of the airport in St. Louis en route to San Diego. I wasn’t nervous, mostly because I was too clueless to be nervous. However, as we made our approach into the airport in San Diego, the flight attendant got on the intercom and pointed out the Marine Corps Recruit Depot and the Naval Training Center which bordered the airport. As I looked down on the base which looked eerily serene and darkened except for the street lights, I suddenly felt a little bit of anxiety. As we filed off the airplane, the flight attendant told us recruits, “good luck,” and she seemed to mean it, almost as if she was in on some secret that we were about to learn for ourselves. Those were the last kind, warm words I heard for three months, except for the letters I received from friends and loved ones at home.

To the Wolves...

We got out into the airport and went looking for the Marine Corps liaison. It was after 10 PM and there weren’t very many people in the airport, so the Marine wasn't hard to find. We found him standing behind a podium near some exit doors. I took my large envelope of documents to the podium to let the liaison know we had arrived.

As I walked up, the Marine was looking down at some papers he was working on. I rested my elbow on the podium and told him the group from St. Louis was there. The Marine barely lifted his head as he looked at my elbow. Then, without raising his voice he told me to get my @#$% elbow off of his @#$% podium. As quietly and calmly as he said that, he nonetheless left no doubt in my mind about my need to get my @#$% elbow off of his @#$% podium. I got my elbow off of his podium. I suddenly wished I had heeded my dad’s words to stand up straight and “don’t lean on that.”

He told us to wait outside, and the bus would be along shortly. Groups of recruits from other parts of the country arrived and waited with us. Almost on cue once we had a busload, a white school bus with, “U. S. Marine Corps” stenciled in small letters on the side pulled up. 

When a sergeant came flying out of the bus yelling and screaming at us, I thought, “What am I doing here?!” Years later when I watched the movie Shawshank Redemption and saw the guy who, on arriving at prison, cries out, “I don’t belong here…”, I understood his anguish. I didn’t cry like he did, though. In fact, I didn’t say a word. I was all ears, and my eyes were wide open.

The sergeant yelled at us to fill the bus from back to front, from left to right. He said it so fast, you really had to be listening to get it all.

One of the guys from St. Louis was a red-headed kid who must have been somebody important in his high school JROTC unit because he couldn’t stop talking at St. Louis, on the plane, and at curbside while we were waiting for the bus about how he was going to breeze through boot camp. Well, his fantasy quickly eroded when he jumped on that bus and promptly sat in a seat in the middle of the bus. That’s not what the sergeant told us to do, so the sergeant went tearing through the cluster of recruits, boarded the bus and lit into the red-headed kid. All you could hear was the sound of that sergeant barking in this guy’s ear, then the red-head quickly shuffling to the back of the bus. Welcome to boot camp.

The rest of us got on the bus. If there were any doubts about how we were supposed to do that, the red-headed guy’s experience clarified it for us nicely. The bus started rolling and we made our way over to MCRD on what was probably the loneliest bus ride of my short life. I had never felt more like I was being led to the wolves. "Wolves" was an understatement. 

yellowfootprintsWe arrived at MCRD, and just as there were instructions about how to get on the bus, there were instructions about how to get off the bus. This time, we were to stand on a column of yellow footprints. These yellow footprints were painted with feet at the position of attention–heels on line and touching, toes pointed at a 45-degree anglebecause although we didn’t know what the position of attention was, we needed to be at it.

We got on the yellow footprints and the place was swarming with DIs, or at least it seemed to be. The time was around midnight, and they told us to drop everything we had in our hands. I had that envelope with those papers, but I dropped it and never saw it again. One poor soul brought a beach ball. He must have had a recruiter with a sense of humor who gave him the idea that since he was coming to San Diego, he was going to get some beach time. That got him some unwanted attention right away.

The yellow footprints were located in the heart of the recruit reception activity. Just to our right was the barbershop and it was open for business. The very first thing we did after getting on the yellow footprints was file into the barbershop for a haircut that couldn’t have lasted longer than 15 seconds. There were half a dozen barbers, and they took no time at all to cut all of those heads of hair. Everyone in that column had their own look, their own appearance, but that was about to change. I was standing behind a guy who had long hair and a beard. While I was pretty fixated on not being the next red-headed guy, I couldn’t help thinking that his haircut was going to leave him with an interesting look.

Just before the guy in front of me was supposed to head to the barber, he suddenly fainted right there on his yellow footprints. As the DIs and a medical corpsman attended to him, I moved quickly around him and went in for my haircut. When I came back, he was gone, and an empty set of yellow footprints remained.

A short while later, though, he returned with his hair cut off. He still had his beard. He received the same express haircut I got, but as he stood in front of me, I could see he had these remnants of his long hair here and there that the barber missed. He looked like one of those old dolls that most of the hair had fallen out of (with a beard). He was very pale and not looking good at all. I remember thinking this guy’s not going to make it. It turns out he graduated from boot camp in my platoon as a squad leader with a meritorious promotion. Shows you what I knew.

So, whatever you looked like on the bus was not what you looked like back on those yellow footprints after that haircut. The red-headed guy from St. Louis was an exception.

The red-headed guy was still the red-headed guy and he was proving to be quite a DI magnet. He wasn’t doing anything right and they absolutely were on him the entire evening. Our next stop was an issue line where we were given our toiletries. Somehow, he messed that up too and the DIs hauled him outside where we could hear them giving him the business. I couldn’t understand what they were yelling, but I thought they were going to send that guy out of there that night the way things were going. I, on the other hand, suddenly found the focus that had eluded me all of my seventeen years.

My Marine Corps Everything...

squadbay

We finally made it to bed. I have no idea what time it was, but I was ready for a good night of sleep. I didn’t sleep much the night before and a long day capped off with the hyper-adrenalin always-on environment where DIs who apparently had no idea of what an “indoor voice” was, made me ready for a good night of sleep. We were bunked in an open squad bay, which means it was a very large room with rows of double bunks with aisles between the rows.

I got to sleep immediately, but it seemed that almost as soon as my eyelids hit my cheekbones, the lights came back on, and someone was throwing a 20-gallon galvanized steel trash can down the aisle. There’s nothing quite like that sound, and it sure gave the impression they really wanted us out of bed and standing at attention at the foot of our bunks right away. They counted us to make sure we were all still there then they gave some instructions for us to go to the head (restroom) to shave. We did it in shifts. Half went to the head while the other half stripped bunks of the sheets and blankets. As soon as the beds were stripped, it was time to rotate: the guys in the head came shuffling out (but not fast enough) and the other half went shuffling in (also not fast enough).

marchWe ran back out to our bunks and put our civilian clothes back on and ran outside. We assembled in sort of a military formation and walked–because we didn’t know how to march–in that formation. It was still dark outside, but as we made our way over to the mess hall–now called a dining facility in the military, unfortunately–we could see other recruit platoons who had obviously been there a while. When they marched, it sounded like one heel: thump, thump, thump, thump. That was something. That might have been the only time the DIs let us gawk. Everything they did was as though they were one, in perfect unison. Everything we did was evidence that we had a long way to go. The DIs had a colorful way of telling us how far we had to go yet and whether they thought we had any chance of getting there.

We filed into the mess hall, and it was all business in there too. Once we got to the serving line and grabbed a tray, the mess men behind the serving line kept saying, “keep the chow line moving, privates, keep the chow line moving.” If the chow line stopped moving, there was trouble because the DIs saw that too. Of course, the yelling of “not fast enough,” “what are you looking at,” and “no talking” were echoing throughout the mess hall. I was near the end of the chow line, so I was one of the last to get my breakfast. That didn’t work out so well.

Thinking I should get a decent meal that morning so I would have enough battery juice to make it through the day, I grabbed some scrambled eggs, some hash browns, and a pastry. I should have stopped at the scrambled eggs and hash browns. I shoved that stuff in my mouth as fast as I could because almost as soon as I sat down, we were getting a countdown for when we needed to be finished. By the time we were told to get out of the mess hall, I still had that pastry sitting there. I started to get up, but one of those all-seeing DIs spotted that pastry on my tray.

He told me I wasn’t going to waste his Marine Corps chow. Everything seemed to belong to these DIs, and they seemingly took everything personally–my Marine Corps chow, my Marine Corps barracks, my Marine Corps dirt, my Marine Corps formation–and we seemed to always be messing up their Marine Corps things. In fact, they seemed to be convinced that we were there to destroy their Marine Corps and it was their mission to keep that from happening.

So, I was not going to waste his Marine Corps chow because doing so would lead to the demise of his Marine Corps. I dropped back down in my seat and my new shadow, the DI, was right on me yelling at me to get this thing eaten. I stuffed as much of that pastry in my mouth that I could–the proverbial ten pounds in the five-pound bag–and tried to chew, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It just seemed to get larger and mushier and more impossible to do anything with. I finally got the whole thing in my mouth and was still trying to chew it when he yelled at me (with his outside voice) to get out of there. I must have chewed that ball of grease and dough for an hour, but I finally got it down. That was the last pastry I ate in boot camp.

We got back to the barracks and cleaned the place up then went to get our uniforms. Once again, we became someone different (except for that red-headed guy). We looked nothing like Marines in those green uniforms though. It was pretty clear that we were just civilians dressed up–poorly, I should say–in Marine Corps uniforms. The uniforms smelled like mothballs and were dark green because they’d not yet been laundered. We looked terrible, but at least, in our eyes, we were starting to look like we belonged there.

phoneA little while later, we went to a place where we boxed up all of our personal belongings and shipped them home. The Marine Corps would issue to us anything we would need from that time on. 

Then, we went over to the phone center where we were allowed to make a quick phone call home. There was a script taped next to the telephone that went something like this: “This is Recruit Doss. I have arrived safely at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Please do not send me any food or bulky items in the mail. I will contact you in 3 to 5 days by postcard with my new address. Thank you for your support. Goodbye for now.”

That’s when it really settled on me that I now belonged to the United States Marine Corps. What happened from that time forward was entirely in the hands of a few drill instructors and what I was able to make of it. Every day presented a new challenge and produced more growth. It's interesting that as uncertain as I was about whether I could make it through boot camp before I arrived, once I got there, it never occurred to me again that I couldn't handle it. As much as I missed all that I left behind when I went to boot camp, it turned out that boot camp was what I needed to get on track.

Somehow, in three short months, they took us from raw recruits who needed yellow footprints painted on the ground to show us where to stand and turned us into Marines.

Monday, February 6, 2023

Fuji

fujiI think we all have had times when we did something, or thought about doing something, that didn’t seem like much of a big deal at the time, but then later its importance grew over time, and the decision you made to either do that thing or not turned out to be more meaningful than we had imagined at the time we made the choice.

One such time for me was the time some friends and I climbed Mount Fuji in Japan. We were deployed to a camp at the base of the mountain from Okinawa. It was July 4, 1976 and we had a military parade in honor of the 200th birthday of our Nation and about a dozen of us thought it would be cool to climb it to celebrate the day after the parade.

Mount Fuji isn’t a difficult mountain to climb, there’s just a lot of it: a little more than 12,000 feet of it. A lot of Japanese successfully make a pilgrimage of the climb every year. You can climb it in about eight hours if you follow a trail. It’s certainly no Denali.

Climbing Mt Fuji July 4 1976 2We wanted the climb to be special though, so we didn’t want to follow a trail. Instead, we just started from our camp and walked straight up. We started right after the parade was finished—about mid-morning—and trudged up the cinders all day long. As the end of the day approached, we ran into some weather; it was mostly hail, rain, and wind and it pounded down into our faces as we looked up to climb.

We didn’t quite have a plan for that. About half of our group decided to head back down the mountain, but the rest of us continued on. Not long after we split up, we came across an abandoned building that appeared to be intended as a shelter. It had three walls and, of course, the one that was missing was the one the weather was coming through.

Climbing Mt Fuji July 4 1976 4There was an elevated platform inside that seemed to have been designed for sleeping on so we huddled up on that.. We didn’t have blankets so we slept in the cold and wind. It was just cold and windy enough to make sleeping difficult, but it was better than being outside.

We woke up early the next morning and continued the climb as the cinders turned to a little bit of snow resting on top of the cinders. We reached the summit – the crater – at about mid-morning. Looking back down on Japan on that clear day was quite a sight. We walked around and took some photos before heading back down. The trip down was much faster.

Climbing Mt Fuji July 4 1976 3Like I said, the climb wasn’t a major feat, but it was one of those things you don’t get many chances to do. I’m glad we did it. More importantly, I’m glad we didn’t turn around and head back down the mountain when we ran into the bad weather. If we had, that might have been the last time I ever talked about Mount Fuji. It doesn’t seem likely I would have been fond of remembering the time I climbed half a mountain and gave up on the other half.

I suppose avoiding regrets like that has been a big motivator for me in negotiating the challenges and obstacles I’ve encountered over the years.  I think I’ve recognized for a long time that failure sometimes comes with taking risks, so I’ve not spent as much time worrying about or fearing failure as I’ve thought of ways to overcome those challenges and obstacles. I think I’ve been more afraid of quitting or giving up, and what it might turn me into if I headed down that road (or mountain).

There’s a lot to be said for climbing the other half of the mountain. We do it—or face the decision to do it—all the time. Oftentimes, the consequences that lay beyond the decision not to press on are more lasting than the effects of having tried and failed.

Monday, January 23, 2023

The Silent Legacy of James Henry Harris

James Henry Harris was born near Creedmoor in Granville County, North Carolina in 1832. He apprenticed as a carpenter as a young man before starting his own business in Raleigh. When laws in North Carolina regarding free people of color became more aggressive in the 1840s, he moved to Ohio[1] where he attended school for two years. Within a decade, he traveled to and taught in Liberia and Sierra Leone where over the previous twenty years, thousands of freed slaves from the United States had resettled.

Harris then moved to Terre Haute, Indiana where, in 1863, he was asked by Indiana Governor Levi Morton to help raise a regiment of U. S. Colored Troops for service in the Civil War.  After the war, he returned to North Carolina where he became a teacher for the New England Freedmen's Aid Society.[2]

Harris soon saw a need to ensure that freedom for blacks included legal and political equality, so he entered politics. In 1865, he was elected to the North Carolina Freedmen's Convention where he advocated moderation and reconciliation with whites and education for blacks. That same year, he became vice president of the National Equal Rights Convention. By the time he became president of the Freedman's Convention the following year, he had become increasingly more forceful in his insistence on equal rights for blacks.[3]

As post-war Reconstruction progressed, Harris developed as one of the most influential black politicians in North Carolina. He was a charter member of the North Carolina Republican Party, was a delegate at the 1868 North Carolina Constitutional Convention, and was elected to the North Carolina General Assembly three times and to the North Carolina Senate once. He also used his influence and oratorical skills to urge President Ulysses S. Grant to press Congress to pass legislation that would ensure equal rights for blacks. He attended the 1868, 1872, and 1876 Republican National Conventions and was a presidential elector in 1872.[4]

In 1870, while he was a member of the North Carolina legislature, Harris joined with 11 other legislators led by Senator John Pool and met with Governor William W. Holden to devise a plan to suppress the Ku Klux Klan which had been on a terror campaign to keep recently freed slaves from exercising their right to vote by intimidating them and white Republican officials. They decided to form a militia to stop the Klan; that move resulted in the Holden-Kirk War. After several bloody clashes with the Klan, Governor Holden disbanded the militia. Later that year, however, the Democrats gained the majority in the North Carolina legislature and impeached Governor Holden on a straight party-line vote. (140 years later, in 2011, the North Carolina Senate voted unanimously to pardon Governor Holden.)[5]

In the 1880s Harris edited and published the North Carolina Republican, whose slogan was “Firm in the Right,”[6] and whose work was focused "in behalf of the Republican party and the advancement of the negro.”[7]

During his career, Harris was an advocate for education for blacks, prison reform, aid to laborers, protection for women and debtors, and care for orphans. He also helped create and became one of the first trustees of the Colored Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind in Raleigh. Since even before he began his political career, Harris believed that white and black interests were interwoven, but along the way he maintained his insistence that blacks fight to keep their political rights and to gain equality before the law.”[8]

The end of Reconstruction brought about a persistent erosion of the progress that had been made toward equality among the races after the Civil War. Within two decades, political control had shifted and Jim Crow laws gave legal sanction to segregation and discrimination in the South. Finally, 1901 saw the return of Democratic control in the North Carolina legislature and an end to representation by black North Carolinians in the United States Congress, which had seen 22 black men among its membership over the previous 30 years. It would be another 28 years before another African-American was elected to the U. S. Congress from the state of North Carolina.[9]

James H. Harris' work is largely unknown today and his legacy is elusive, but the contributions that he and many others made to the advancement of African-American interests before the Civil War and during Reconstruction were noteworthy and courageous. Although, many of their initiatives could not withstand the Jim Crow era, their legacy is that although it is easier to throw up one’s hands on racial tension, bias, and bigotry today as if it has never been worse and there is no hope of improvement, the fact is that energetic and courageous Americans can make a real difference with real action, if they're willing. "Real action" includes not turning a deaf and indifferent ear to discrimination in our communities and ensuring that our elected officials back up their campaign rhetoric with tangible action. In order to do that, we have to pay attention and rely on facts and substance rather than fall for the partisanship that favors politicians, not the people and principles they're supposed to represent.


1 Ijames, Earl “Constitutional Convention, 1868: ‘Black Caucus’.” NCPedia. Reprinted from the Tar Heel Junior Historian Fall 2008. https://www.ncpedia.org/history/cw-1900/black-caucus
2 Alexander, Roberta Sue “Harris, James Henry.” NCPedia. 1988. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/harris-james-henry
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Barnett, Ned “N.C. state senate pardons governor who stood up to Klan.” Reuters. April 12, 2011. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northcarolina-pardon/n-c-state-senate-pardons-governor-who-stood-up-to-klan-idUSTRE73B80V20110412?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews
6 Ijames, “Constitutional Convention, 1868: ‘Black Caucus’.”
7 Alexander, Roberta Sue “Harris, James Henry.”
8 Ibid.
9 “Representative George White of North Carolina.” History, Art, and Archives, United States House of Representatives.
http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/35244?ret=True

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Sometimes Better To Ask Forgiveness...

In early 1996, I was a member of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 162 (HMM-162), the aviation element of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) on board the USS Guam (LPH-9). We were operating in the Adriatic Sea and ashore in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania as part of the peace enforcement force, the "implementation force" (IFOR), during Operation Decisive Endeavor.

We were wrapping up our work in the Adriatic in early April, preparing to head to Israel for some exercises, when we received an order to prepare to redeploy to the west coast of Africa for potential operations in embattled Liberia. As we steamed toward the southern end of the Adriatic, we were either going to turn left toward Israel or right toward Liberia. By the time we reached the Mediterranean, it was a right turn. We arrived at "Mamba Station" off the coast of Liberia early in the morning of April 20th.

When we arrived, fighting around the U. S. Embassy was pretty intense as warring factions fought in the street in front of the Embassy and along several blocks nearby, so our first priority was to reinforce the Embassy with Marines. Our next priority was to fly non-combatants out of Liberia. In some cases, we flew them to the Guam; in other cases, we flew them to neighboring Freetown, Sierra Leone where they would catch an international flight out of the area.

As we continued operations in and out of Liberia over the next few months, we took time to train at the airport in Sierra Leone, away from the mayhem in Monrovia, although Sierra Leone had plenty of problems of its own. Armed soldiers were all throughout the airport keeping a menacing eye on the people there.

I remember the first time we landed in Sierra Leone, I had trouble reaching the control tower for permission to land. I had been calling them beginning at 25 miles out, but got no answer on the radio. I flew closer and closer and kept calling until finally on short final to the runway I simply said, "Lungi (the airport's name), this is Wombat 05, flight of two U. S. Marine helicopters. We're on short final and we'll be landing on runway 12. We have passengers and we'll need fuel." Normally, that would have been phrased as a request, but not in that case. Finally, the control tower answered and cleared us to land.

We hoped that the airport would have telephones so we could call home, so we left one Marine in the aircraft so no one would run off with the aircraft or more likely, the 50 caliber machineguns and ammo as we walked into the airport to see if there were phones. It was probably a curious sight for those in the airport because we were still wearing our flight gear and were carrying 9mm Barettas into the airport. There were enough American flags on flight suits that everyone probably figured out who we were pretty quickly. There wasn't going to be any trouble for us there.

What was interesting was that as the soldiers stood over the people in the airport, we walked past them and gave candy and cookies to the kids. I doubt they had seen friendly military people before, but it was good for them and the soldiers to see a little friendliness coming from the Americans.

We dropped off our passengers, made our phone calls, got our fuel, and headed back to the Guam sitting off the coast of Liberia.

On another occasion, I led a flight to the same airport to do some night vision goggle training. As we landed, we saw a Soviet-made Mi-8 "Hip" helicopter sitting there on the flight line. To that point, I had seen photographs and studied aircraft recognition silhouettes, but I hadn't seen one in person before.

Once we shut the aircraft down, we walked over to the Mi-8 to look it over. I tapped on the aircraft skin and it was as solid as an old Buick. Our aircraft had aluminum skin to cut down on weight, so the Hip was quite a bit heavier and likely less maneuverable than our aircraft. A few minutes later, the pilot came out of the airport and walked over to us. He was a South African mercenary hired by the Sierra Leone government.

He asked if we wanted to go up in the aircraft. I was the senior Marine there and this was a situation that we had never discussed before: Would it be okay for us to go up in a Soviet-made helicopter flown by a South African mercenary? There was no one to ask for permission other than me, so I said, "sure." The answer, if I had asked, might have been "no," but if I didn't accept the offer everyone would have said I should have. That's the way that sort of thing works. It was such an opportunity, I couldn't pass it up.

So, we boarded the helicopter and as I prepared to take a seat in the back, the pilot directed me to the cockpit. He was actually going to let me fly that thing!

I climbed into the cockpit and strapped in and put the helmet on that was sitting in my seat. As I did, I looked overhead at the circuit breaker panel and saw that the circuit breaker labels were all written in Cyrillic from when it was Soviet-owned. Some of the labels were replaced by bits of paper with words in English taped to the panel identifying what the circuit breakers and switches were for. I asked the mercenary pilot what they did about the ones still written in the Russian language and he said, "We don't know what those are for so we don't touch them." Good idea.

The pilot started the helicopter and asked me if I wanted to fly it. I was a little surprised that he was going to let me take off since takeoffs and landings are not always sure things, but I took the controls and got ready to lift off.

The Soviet helicopter main rotor systems rotate clockwise whereas American helicopter main rotors spin counter-clockwise. The reason that's important to know is that torque generated by the main rotor makes the fuselage want to spin in the opposite direction, which is part of the reason you have a tail rotor, technically known as a "counter-torque rotor." As you increase power to take off you need to manipulate the pedals which control the tail rotor to keep the helicopter from spinning when you increase or decrease power. After a while, American pilots who fly tail rotor helicopters apply left pedal input when they increase power to take off without even thinking about it. The problem with jumping into a Soviet helicopter is that if you apply left pedal without thinking about it like you would in an American helicopter, you'd make the helicopter spin badly. Fortunately, I didn't fly a tail rotor helicopter, so I didn't have to fight the temptation to put left pedal in. When I added power, I felt the fuselage want to spin left, so I added right pedal to counter it.

The takeoff went fine and I flew around the traffic pattern and set up to land at the helicopter pad on the north side of the runway. As I reduced power and pulled back on the nose to start my decelerating descent, the helicopter barely responded so it mushed right through the normal landing profile. I noticed that the South African sort of leaned forward to get a look at the pad which was getting more difficult to see as we creeped up over it, so I--as cooly as I could--said "I'm going to make a steep approach," as if that was my plan all along, which it wasn't. Doing a steep approach in an unfamiliar aircraft would have been kind of a bold thing to do, so he must have thought I was pretty confident in my ability. Fortunately, that pig slowed down enough that I was able to stay on a steep profile and put it on the pad with no problem. I climbed out of the cockpit to give another pilot a go at it, but I did warn the next guy on my way out that it was pretty mushy.

Still not sure that news that we had flown the Soviet aircraft was going to be well-received when we returned to the squadron, I told my CO about the great opportunity that we couldn't pass up, and he thought it was great and was glad we did it.