Puente de La Paz II part 1

Here's story 3 in the continuing saga of my Panamanian experience. I'm skipping over a portion of the story, fast forwarding to the next deployment.

We had a mission to go to Costa Rica and help develop a region on the northern, or Caribbean coast. We were going to build roads and bridges, among other things. They had to have fancy Spanish names for the deployments, and they had gone to Costa Rica the previous year and called it Puente de la Paz (Bridge of Peace) and so they reached back deep in their imagination and called this one Puente de la Paz II.

We loaded all our equipment up in a ship and it went through the Panama Canal to the port of Limon, Costa Rica. There it was unloaded by the "advance party" whose job it was to move it from the port to the base camp, about 3 hours away. The fun began immediately. One of my "Concrete Mobiles" which is a fancy concrete truck, went off the road and rolled over. The rainy season was supposed to have finished before we deployed, but it had one last series of rainstorms that flooded the area. Our initial deployment became a disaster relief effort. We deployed with lots of helicopters and began by using them to rescue people that were stranded by the rising flood waters.

We came into Limon, the nearest big city, about an hour's drive away, north and west of our camp, a port city on the coast. You drove down the coast until you got to an area of beautiful black sand beaches. This is an area that a lot of Americans, hippies from the 60s mostly, came down here to settle. We turned inland and went through a banana plantation. This used to be a Dole banana plantation, but I don't think Dole owned it anymore by the time we got there. It took 10 to 15 minutes to fly over the plantation and about 30 or 40 minutes to drive through it. This place was huge. It had little cities with schools and soccer fields sprinkled throughout it. There was a series of overhead rails through the plantation, with swing bridges across the roads. People would walk out, pick big bunches of bananas, and hook them up on an upside down tree of hooks, that were supported by a big pulley at top. They pulled the big bunch of bunches along the overhead rails to central processing systems where the bunches were boxed and loaded on rail cars that shipped to the coast and loaded on boats. Bananas on a massive scale.

One day, I was taking a helicopter ride with about 12 to 15 other guys, and the pilot wanted to practice "nap of the earth" flying maneuvers. The aviation guys were attached to us in order to get training time anyway, so how they flew from point a to point b didn't matter as long as they got us there. Nap of the Earth flying was a combat maneuver where a helicopter can sneak up on an enemy and avoid surface to air missiles by flying fast and low and hugging the terrain. It's exhilarating. In this flight, we skirted the banana plantation and went to the coast. The pilot then used the beach line as a guide, trying to mirror the coastline at about 30' in the air (it was probably actually 60' or 80', but it felt like we would get our feet wet). I was on the right side of the helicopter, facing the ocean. When a helicopter turns, it tilts to the side. When you do extreme maneuvers, if you are sitting on the side you are looking up and down. So my flight was surf-sky, surf, sky-surf-sky, surf.... As we buzzed along at about 40 or 50 mph, we passed by a nudist beach. Of course, listening to the chatter on the radio did no good. I missed seeing the fly-by all the naked people.

Our base camp had some serious luxuries, we thought. It was right next to a river, and it was a small city. We had a water purification plant, showers, a store, sidewalks, and a "restaurant" (we called it the Mess Hall). We had some fairly nice latrines and something I had never seen before called "piss tubes". Imagine an 8" PVC pipe stuck into a pit full of gravel, surrounded by a chest high screen of white cloth. You stand there, taking a leak, and you can see everyone walking all around you. From a guy's standpoint, this is fantastic. I still remember watching SSG Gates one morning, with an apple in his mouth while he used the facilities. It was hilarious. I had a little Filipino Sergeant named SGT Corpuz that was about 5' 4" or so, and smart as a whip. They guy could do whatever he wanted with a large piece of equipment and did not lack in courage or initiative. He had this Filipino accent and a sarcastic and funny streak, so occasionally I would get an ear full of why everything was completely FU, and even though the news was bad, by then end of the story, I'd be laughing my ass off.

Our Company Commander was a Puerto Rican called CPT Font. The guy really did not belong in the Army, and certainly not in the Engineers. He didn't know what he was doing, and his idea of leadership was yelling louder. He had all these euphemisms, which, when translated literally to English made no sense whatsoever. I remember him saying something like "You gots to reach down, and grab your balls for this one." On March 15th, 1988, I was in a staff meeting on this deployment. We went around the table and everyone got to have their say. When my turn came, I said "Beware the Ides of March." The other Lieutenants and Chief laughed, just a little. CPT Font held me after the meeting and was just furious with me. I think he thought I was being disrespectful and making some kind veiled insult to him. I kept saying "It's from Shakespeare, it's the 15th of March." This didn't mean anything to him, and I couldn't figure out how to explain it. Had he really not ever heard that phrase before?

I remember my first trip over to the field Motor Pool, some half mile away, I saw a Coral Snake in the road. You can't miss something like that. I remembered the information on him, deadly venomous, but with chewing teeth, not piercing fangs. If you let him get a hold of you, he'd try to get between the webbing of your fingers and chew some poison into your skin. Over the course of the mission, we became very familiar with snakes.

The motor pool had a tiny road going out the back of it down to a nice stream. The soldiers would drive their vehicles into the stream and scrub all the mud off in it. We had a 20 ton crane in the platoon that was the biggest thing in the company. One day it rained really hard and we told everyone to stay in the motor pool and do maintenance on their vehicles. We had a guy named Greenwald that was one of the crane operators, and he decided to take the crane down to the river and wash it. He claimed that he thought that the river crossing was in the motor pool and all we told him to do was to stay in the motor pool. The reason for the restriction to the motor pool was that the rain had made the roads like axle grease -too slippery to drive on. After our concrete truck slid off the road on the way from the port to the base camp, I assumed that everyone knew the hazards of the wet clay. We were "grounded" because it was too dangerous to move any equipment anywhere. The 20 ton crane was cool. It had normal driving mode, and "crab" mode, and "circle" mode. Crab was when all wheels turned the same way and the crane would move sideways. Circle was when all the wheels turned to make the crane go in a tight circle. When Greenwald took the massive crane down the grease-slick tiny steep road, he didn't take long to lose control. As the crane started to slide, in a panic, Greenwald slapped the crane into Crab and it went straight for the side of the road, for the big drop-off down the side of the hill. The crane did indeed roll sideways down the hill, and the little glass operator's cab was crushed flat. For some reason, in the investigation afterwards, Greenwald insisted that he was inside of the cab. He insisted that he did not "abandon ship", but stayed with the crane in a valiant attempt to recover it from the slide. It was obvious this was not the case, and was not even possible. Anyone that had stayed in that cab would be a human pancake. The fact that he disobeyed orders and did something incredibly stupid weren't what Greenwald was embarrassed about, it was the thought that he was a chicken and jumped out of the cab before the crane rolled over that he could not confess. And that was the only smart thing he did that day.