Puente de La Paz II part 2

Continuing with the story of my Costa Rican deployment. If you haven't read the previous posts, this is the 4th in a series of recollections of my time in the Army when I was stationed in Panama from 1987 to 1990. Our Unit, the 536th Engineer Battalion, deployed all over Central and South America doing engineering missions called Nation Building. We built roads and bridges, schools and churches, and dug water wells with our engineering assets.

We always had National Guard troops attached to us, part of their annual 2 week rotations. Mostly these were a hodgepodge of Engineering units, such as the Georgia National Guard that I distinctly remember being in this deployment. Their thick accents and non-stop horseshoes tournaments marked the territory they inhabited. You always knew when the good old boys from Georgia were tossing shoes because there was a constant ringing sound as they racked up the points. Besides engineering units, we always had medical, dental, and veterinarian units attached.

The medical assets were part of the "winning the hearts and minds" strategy. You have to remember, this was at the tail end of the Cold War and we were in a constant battle to exert a stronger influence on the impoverished people of Latin America. With Nicaragua as a recent example, we knew that poverty and a lack of help or hope were making the entire region ripe for revolution. So we had a Gate Clinic, where anyone could come and see a doctor for free. Each day when the clinic opened, a long line formed. One day, a small child was brought to the gate in dire condition. He was immediately medevaced to Limon, the nearest hospital, where he died. His guts were completely overwhelmed with a parasite.

Our Batallion Commander decided that part of our education as officers would be to go out and see the remote clinics, so one day we flew over to a small town that a medic, a veterinarian, and a dental tech were sent to. The vet showed us a donkey with worms and talked about how foul their water supply was. Then we were ushered into the dentist's office. They brought a dentist chair and a bag of tools, and that's it. We stood to the side and watched silently as a native woman came in, sat down, and opened her mouth. The dental tech talked cheerfully to us as he leaned in with a pair of dentist's pliers and quickly yanked out three of her teeth. He smiled and turned around to show us the bloody tooth in his pliers. Someone asked how he could do this without anesthesia or even any painkillers or deadeners. He replied, "These people are tough." They walked around with rotten teeth for a long time, then felt nothing but relief when they were pulled. The guy remarked further that while Americans would sit on a couch with a bottle of painkillers for a few days, these people would be out working in their fields by the end of the day.

I walked the road route one day, and found a large tree next to a little soccer field in the middle of the route, nowhere near any roads. The route had been marked by LT Condon, an older Lietenant that took himself way too seriously. The large tree had a colony of Crested Oropendolas. These beautiful birds made teardrop shaped nests that hung under the branch and sang with a flutelike melody. There were hundreds of them in this enormous tree, and it was marked for removal by LT Condon. I decided this was stupid and removed the mark, putting it a good 50' away so the road would go around the tree.

I walked on to a spot where they were building a small culvert style creek crossing. SFC Malloy was at the controls of a big trackhoe, doing the excavation. He wasn't normally supposed to work equipment. Older NCOs were supposed to train and supervise the younger soldiers who were supposed to do the actualy work. We did not have a trackhoe in our TOE (Table of Organization and Equipment - our equipment did not include this). We rented the trackhoe and maybe no one was familiar with it, or maybe he just wanted to play. I watched him move this enormous excavator right up to the pit, expertly and quickly scoop out the hole, and lower culvert pieces into place. They said that good equipment operators could push a dime around on the ground with a grater, and seeing the skill he had with the trackhoe, I could believe it. As I talked with SFC Malloy afterwards, I told him about the colony tree and what I did, hoping that he would back me up as the man in charge on the ground when they reached that spot. "Fuck LT Condon" was his comment on the situation. He never planned on knocking the tree down. "Too much work. Easier to go around. If he can get the Colonel to tell me to do it, I'll tell him the same thing. We haven't got time to waste on such foolishness."

My tentmates were all the junior officers in the 15th Engineer Company. They were mostly Lieutenants, but there was one CW4, Chief Young. Chief Young was almost 60. He had served a full career in the British Army and then started from scratch again in the U.S. Army. He was grumpy and hilarious. Each night he "played cards" with the CO (there may have been rum involved) and then would stumble in long after the lights were out in the tent and go to bed, making hilarious comments in a thick British accent. One night, we caught one of the enormous Rhinocerous Beetles that you found everywhere in the camp. These things were the size of half a tennis ball, with a huge horn like a rhinocerous out the front of their face. They could fly, but you mostly noticed them crawling. We caught one that day and tied a string to it's horn and tethered it to the empty cot next to Chief Young's cot. He stumbled in as usual and fell into his cot, settling in. Soon, the beetle started to strain as the end of his tether, making a horrid scratching sound on the tight cot fabric. "BLOODY HELL! WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?" Chief Young yelled, startling the beetle and setting it into flight at the end of it's tether. Imagine a bumblebee the size of a rabbit and you'll get the idea of what it sounded like. "GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT!" He started shouting. We were all awake and laughing like hell as we moved to release the poor beetle. Chief was sour about that incident for a week.

My other tentmates included LT Damore, who was an enthusiastic runner and the only one in the whole camp that I was aware of that kept up his PT (Physical Training) while on the deployment. The only problem with this is that he had only one jogging outfit and hung it out to dry on the tent cords next to his cot each day. As we did not have easy access to laundry, you can imagine how this smelled after only a few days. It was a constant source of tension. The lower enlisted tent next to us had a guy with a boom box that played "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" by U2 every morning. It became our theme song. LT Wilson, who worked the bulldozers that were tearing into the leading edge of the road, became the focus of an interesting daily ritual. The first day they reached the 4 to 5 story tall trees they had to knock down, they got a surprise. The bulldozer ran into the first tree, and as the operator reached down to put it in reverse, the rain of snakes that were dislodged from the tree hit the bulldozer. Imagine an operator running like hell as dozens of already freaked out snakes slithered like mad after contacting the hot engine cover of the bulldozer. It was quite unnerving, so they worked out a procedure. The first tree strike was followed by people moving in with long forked sticks and flicking all the snakes out of the way. A piece of plywood was set over the operator's open cage so he wouldn't have to pick one out of the back of his shirt. LT Wilson wanted to know which and how many of the snakes were poisonous, so he would cut their heads off and bring them back to the tent each evening. What I remember is that all of the snakes were poisonous.

We had a lot of equipment problems. A couple of times we had bulldozers get bogged down stuck in the mud. One time there was a spring-fed bog that a bulldozer went into and got mired up to a point over it's tracks. It was stuck so badly that we had to get two other bulldozers attach their winches and pull together to get it out. The danger in pushing the winches to their limits was that the cables could snap. Apparently, a snapped cable of this size under this much load would could cut a man in half faster than a hot knife through butter. We did not get to test this theory. We did however, manage to roll a scraper (you may have seen these vehicles, whose pans were big enough to put a pickup truck in) as well as break the fuel truck, and a dump truck.

The dump truck rolled backwards, went off the road, and then rolled side over side down a hill. The guy inside was not buckled in, as we had no seat belts in the dump trucks. I was about 300 yards away and ran over when I heard about it. Another driver ran to the dump truck and pulled the driver out just as the spilled diesel coming out of the fuel tank started to catch on fire. I was in the ambulance with the soldier before he was medevaced out. His leg was broken and he knew he was going to be taken straight from the accident out of the country. He told another soldier to get his things taken care of, "You know what I'm talking about, right?" I'm pretty sure he was asking the other guy to hide his stash, but I didn't worry about it. His pants were cut where they hit something sharp in the dump truck. I asked the medic what the white jelly on his pants leg was, and he explained that this was body fat that squirted out when his leg split open under impact.

In the end, my work as the Platoon leader of Equipment Support Platoon wasn't the only thing I did in the deployment. I also was tagged to be in charge of the "trail party" which were the people that drove all the equipment to the port and loaded it onto the ship. Aside from someone driving one of the wreckers into the ocean and a soldier stealing his buddy's pay, it was pretty uneventful.

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.