I went to college on an Army ROTC scholarship. They paid my out of state tuition in exchange for 4 years in the Army when I got done.
I graduated after 5 years with 156 credit hours (ROTC electives did not count toward my BS degree, so it added up to an extra 28 credit hours above what I needed for my degree).
After a 4 month stint in Washington DC at Ft. Belvoir, I shipped out to Panama. The flight was memorable, because although it was long, it was over the Carribean, which had the most beautiful blue water you'll ever see.
I stepped off the plane in Panama into a very moist and unbelievably hot climate. I remember getting a brief ride from the airfield to the guest house, where I would inprocess from for the next few days. I arrived on December 27th, 1986. I only got a brief look at the city, and the guest house was in the middle of Ft. Clayton, where all I had access to was a remote part of the post, and nothing local or native. After a couple of boring days of filling out paperwork, I finally had a Lieutenant pick me up and take me to his apartment. This was a guy that had arrived a month earlier and had gotten an apartment downtown with 2 other lieutenants, one that had been there a month, and another (one or two) that had been there just a little bit longer.
They had an apartment in a heavily urban area, on the second floor of a streecorner building with a paneria (bakery) below. I was brought to the apartment, and then the inhabitants quickly left the city for New Year's Eve celebrations on some remote beach. I did not have a key, so my nervous forays into the neighborhood were accomplished by putting a block in the door, and hoping that the apartment would not be broken into. Fear of this possibility kept me out for only 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I was amazed that the storefronts of this sweltering tropical city were decorated with fake snow, snowmen, and a Santa Clause in a thick red coat. I don't know what I expected, but in a land where most people barely knew what snow was, and almost none had ever seen it, I figured the Christmas fairy tale would be different.
At some point, I finished reading all the books and magazines I had brought and I started getting very bored. New Year's Eve was a nerve racking experience, as there were fireworks all night long, and some were firecrackers thrown from down on the street level onto the balcony of the apartment I was in. I don't know if I slept at all that night.
Finally, the long weekend was over the other Lieutenants came back. I'm not sure why they did not take me with them, but in my memory, this was the start of the hazing of the newest Lieutenant that I had to endure for around 11 months before the next new Lieutenant arrived. It sucked, and I don't count many of those guys as my friends, to this day. I ended up hanging out with an older Lieutenant Turner, Mike was his first name, and his wife was Staci. They had gone to Berkley and were definitely liberal minded, probably you could say hippies, except Mike was in the military - a strange contradiction. Staci was a very happy, very smart, very non-conventional thinker. If she thought something was bullshit, she pretty much piped up and declared it for anyone to dispute, if they cared to challenge her. I never did, because she rarely said anything that was untrue, just shockingly candid. In the military, you learn that you are working within a caste system, you are relatively powerless, and you can get into a lot more trouble for simple things than you can in the civilian world. So you learn to shut the hell up when you see something that either doesn't make sense, or makes perfect sense because it is stupid. The military way of doing things does not allow for human thought or emotion, only strict adherence to the rules, no matter how obscure or retarded.
The first thing they did was send me out into the field. I was married, and I was supposed to find a house off post - on the local economy, as they said. There used to be plenty of base housing for all the troops, but this had been turned over to the Panamanians in what we continually discovered was this long inevitable course toward turning over the whole Canal Zone to the locals as well as all the bases and abandoning the country in 1999. So you had to get an apartment, and for this, you were given $1000 a month in a housing allowance calculated for the overseas area you were in. But I was not allowed to do this normal procedure, I was shipped to an area of Panama called the Chirique province.
This deployment was called Camino de la Paz (Road of Peace) and was in a coffey growing region of low mountains on the boarder of Costa Rica. The projects consisted of roadbuilding, school construction, and well digging. I was put into a vacant slot in the S3 (Operations), where they sent me out to inspect the projects. I was given two surveyors, Smith and Woldridge.
The fun never ended. For whatever reason, I was housed with the aviation officers. These deployments always had lots of helicopters attached, and they were our air taxis, as they were just there to get air time, and shuttling us around was a good way to get it. We had mostly Hueys, but a couple of Blackhawks. The pilots were all very young, mostly CW2s, which was technically below me in rank, but in this region outside of normal military protocol where I couldn't really order them around if I had wanted to. They drilled all night under the watchful eye of their senior warrant officer, who continually asked them things like "If the relative humidity is high, do you get more or less lift?" as well as the more interesting questions involving how to crash land the helicopter if you ran out of power. I did not learn how to fly a helicopter by listening in to the nighttime training, but I did manage to wrangle a lot of extra flight time by being ready and able to hop random flights when I had nothing better to do.
One day, we went out to this site, and were trying to return when a thick cloud bank rolled in. We were in the air already, and the clouds were up high, at the peaks and ridges of the mountain range we were in. Unfortunately, we were about 40 minutes out from base camp, and already in the air when the clouds boxed us into this long valley. The base camp was in a field that was at the end of the next valley over. The valley we were in just kept us to the east of the base camp with no way to cross over without going over a mountain ridge.
The problem was that we couldn't see the top of the ridge, it was in thick clouds. We were in our own little triangular space defined by the cloud cover and the canyon walls. While cruising south down the valley, we searched for a low point in the ridge to our west that we could go through. You couldn't just plow through the clouds. Although there was no mechanical constraint from doing this, there was a huge safety concern. When you can't see the ground, you're likely to smack into the side of a mountain. While the copilot on the right was looking for a way out by scanning the horizon and reading a map, the pilot on the left was also looking for a way out of the valley. That's when the high tension power lines suddenly appeared in our front. We were on a direct collision course with the wires, and the pilot and co-pilot spotted them at the same time, about 40' in front of us, with us cruising along at about 30 or 40 mph. The first time I saw the wires, was when I was reacting to the sudden drop in the helicopter and watching my weightless legs kick in the air in front of me as I was thrust against my harness.
The wires were not on the map, a fact that was already being woven into that evening's lessons learned review by the pilots. I think the lesson's title was going to be, "Don't trust the damn outdated maps".
We saw a tiny clear triangle at the back of a small valley coming into the main valley to our right. The pilot turned up the valley, and measured the small opening against the helicopter, and found it to fit with a little bit of room to spare. The question was, does this valley end in a ridge/saddle line, or does it go up higher into the clouds just out of sight from the opening we could see. We had to know before we could commit ourselves. So the copilot's job was to look through the hole to see if it was clear, and the pilot's job was to pick the last possible point that he could ascend to before he would have to wheel around in the branch valley and head back down to the main valley.
You see, Huey's like ours could not just hover, we had to maintain some forward momentum in order to manuever and keep aloft. It was sort of like a frisbee, the spinning surface of the rotor blades acted like a big wing that gave us lift. Without the forward motion, you could still control the craft, and sometimes you could maintain some altitude, but usually, you would slowly descend under the weight of the craft.
We took our first run at the gap, trading speed for altitude until we hit the point of no return. At the last possible moment, the co-pilot shouted that he could see the other side and we were clear to go through, but the pilot had already used all his forward momentum and was already executing the abort maneuver when the co-pilot figured all that out.
The helicopter turned on its side and cut close to the valley walls as it dropped and gained speed back into the center of the big valley. We turned on our side again, lined up the saddle, and gunned it up the valley, pointed at the little helicopter sized opening in the end. We shot through the opening with our rotors touching the bottom of the cloud and dropped down into the new valley below, gaining speed and losing altitude. The rest of the flight was uneventful, and I felt as if I had just enjoyed an exciting roller coaster ride.
Only later did I discover that this was a pretty desperate and unique flight maneuver they had put me through. I was the only passenger, and they begged me not to tell their leader what we did. Which I was more than happy to do.
To be continued....
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