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Bad DayThis story may contain adult content. |
| Written by C.D.Walker | |
| Wednesday, 25 June 2008 | |
I happened to have the pleasure of being a lucky young man personally picked by Uncle Sam himself to attend his tropical paradise in Southeast Asia around 1966 to 1969. My personal role in Uncle Sam’s tropical theme park was to rescue downed passengers on some of his more dangerous rides. I’m the guy they send in to save a life and work some demolition mayhem on Uncle Sam’s flying big bang toy. The technology onboard couldn’t fall into enemy hands, if it did; it went to either the Russians or the Chinese. I’m on standby when the call comes in over the radio. The pilot’s voice is calm only because of training. I don’t think I could be so collected knowing I’m going to crash into the green canopy of the jungle going 300 plus miles an hour. The poor bastard’s ejection system was malfunctioning. My helicopter team and I were already moving when he radioed in his coordinates. Snoopy One was going through preflight checks when he reported skimming over the canopy like a rock on green water. We were lifting off when his radio went silent. Truth be told I wasn’t really expecting to rescue the pilot; odds of surviving a crash through the top of the jungle were slim to none. My mission had three rules I was going to follow. Rule one, keep my ass alive. Rule two, confirm pilot status. Rule three, obliterate the plane. Uncle Sam’s order of priorities might have been different, but after being at his tropical retreat for almost two years with no end in sight, his order of how things should be and mine differed. After finding a safe LZ, (landing zone), I headed where the tracker was pointing double time. The tracker wasn’t sexy like on T.V., but it worked. I love the night. I am the night. My work, my survival, all depend on the night and what is hidden. Let me explain my situation. I am behind enemy lines, rescuing a downed pilot who is not supposed to be on this side of the DMZ, (demilitarized zone). Everything I’ve been trained to do involves the black arts, yet I use them to save my brother in arms, go figure. Others are also searching for my brother, and they would welcome him with arms much harder than mine, maybe. Three hours I followed the beacon through brush. Surprisingly the jungle’s ground isn’t all vines and vegetation. Thanks to towering trees, very little light reaches the bottom. In the brightest days, most of the jungle floor is in shadows. Out of the shadows I stepped to view the crashed plane. And I’ll be damned if the pilot didn’t land that million dollar toy. It wasn’t pretty, she wouldn’t fly again, but he might be alive. He was not moving when I approached, and I wasn’t holding my breath either. You can only get your hopes up so many times in these situations before you get numb, for your own good mind you. Nothing about the situation is good, but one of the worst parts of missions like mine come about from showing up. With my capture, it’s a “two for one deal day”, if you know what I mean, so I have to recon the perimeter just to follow rule number one. Everything looks safe, and more importantly, everything feels safe. Over the months I learned to obey instinct above all else. Instinct is the only reason I’m still alive. I wasn’t surprised when the pilot had a pulse. I looked at him in his seat with the instrument panel crushing his broken legs. I knew at that moment, it was going to be a bad day for both of us. I had to revive him quick, so I pulled my medic pack off my back, opened a side pouch containing smelling salts, and some morphine packs. I grabed up two packets each. The morphine cards I snaped in the middle to expose the small needle, stick the pilot, then squeeze the bladder full of liquid heaven to help him with pain when I woke him. Next I opened the salts, move them under the pilots nose while shaking him hard. Our lives depended on speed. When he came to he was groggy and disorientated, what else would you expect? When I got him conscious enough I explained the situation. “Sir, I’m hear to get you out of here, but we have a problem.” “What kinda problem?” murmured the injured, doped up pilot, who just survived a crash he shouldn’t have. “Well sir, I can’t get you out of here because your legs are broken and pinned underneath the instrument panel. And we can’t lift it.” I said with a hollow voice. “What are my options?” he said with a voice I can’t describe “To get you out," I paused, "I have to saw off your legs.” I said as he went pale, “Stay with me!” I said shaking him. He stayed conscious, but barely. “Or there is this option sir.”, and I handed him my service issue .45. “I’m going to take a five minute perimeter check. You understand me?” He took the pistol with a weak “yes.” I walked off to let a brother decide what his life would be. In my heart I was glad the jungle noise wasn’t punctured by a folly of man’s pride. He was a strong man; I don’t know what I would have done in the same situation. I walked back to do some civil war era battlefield medicine with the tools one hundred years of civilization gave me. Sawbones, what a name to have. The best things in the world were those morphine cards. The pilot’s pain was eased away while I called the jungle penetrater in on my location. I did another grizzly deed, the work of the devil, to save a spark of the divine. I have to look at it that way to keep my sanity, to give reason to some of the horrors I’ve seen. If a couple of those cards fell up my sleeve, I feel it was fate and I deserved them. I hooked the legless but alive pilot, who happened to be a husband, into the Snoopy's metal lifeline. I assumed he was a new father as well from the pictures in the cockpit of his million dollar miracle. After placing the pilot in the rescue device attached to a steel cable and hooked into Snoopy himself, I signaled to lift the pilot to safety while I went back to keep the communists in the technological Stone Age. After secureing the wounded pilot, my crew lowered my steel strand back to safety. I watched my lifeline slowly approach. Catching the line, I hooked my self in and signaled to be lifted. Once on Snoopy’s skid and flying away to safety, I hit the detonator setting millions of pieces of tax payers paper on fire. The reasons for war are predictable after the fact, but on that day, I saved a father, a husband, a son, and a brother. The how and why are insignificant to his daughter and wife. The pilots Mother and Father didn’t feel the pangs of loss so many had to feel. Life for the pilot would forever be tough, but then, that’s the nature of life, and he still had his. Copyright 2008 C.D.Walker |
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 25 June 2008 ) |
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