Our Project Manager - Dominic Waldron - in Bamiyan. Behind him in the hillside is the hole where the Big Bhuddha statue used to be |
An Hazara Tribesman on his donkey. The Hazara are Shia and are descended from Ghengis Kahn's Golden Horde |
The tapwater in Dushanbe came from snowmelt in the mountains, down the river, and out of your tap with no filtration or disinfection. We drank bottled water of course. |
Ex Belgian Air Force Herc driver Poly Stevens (center) with his Tajik helicoper crew in Mazar-i-Sharif. |
A British Diplomat (Jack Straw?) arrives in Mazar-i-Sharif aboard an RAF Hercules |
A USAF C-17 Globemaster II in Mazar-i-Sharif |
Antonov - 32 in Fighting Watermelon camouflage brings a VIP to Mazar-i-Sharif |
Local military leaders in Herat. Their first words to me: "We are so glad you Americans have come. For 20 years we have war. America comes and in one month: Peace." |
Like many of you reading this I flipped on the TV on the morning of 9/11 in time to see the second airplane crash into the side of New York’s World Trade Center. And, like most people who saw the buildings collapse, I spent the next week glued to the small screen of the talking light-bulb in my living room trying to make sense out of what I'd seen on that horrible morning.
I’d not heard of al Qaeda though, oddly enough, I was acquainted with the name Osama bin Laden from my days flying out of Khartoum, when Osama based his operation in Sudan. And, of course, I knew about Afghanistan having seen the stories on the nightly news when the Mujahedin were kicking the beejeezus out of the Russians in the early 80s using the Stinger Anti-Aircraft Missiles we gave them. I thought they were our friends.
A few days after the Twin Towers fell, I heard President Bush say that our dispute was not with the Afghan people, only their Taliban government, and that the US would sponsor a humanitarian relief effort to run in tandem with our military operations. My ears pricked up at that remark. A relief operation in the dead of winter, to feed people up in the mountains, would mean airdrops, and that was a job for Lockheed’s venerable Hercules Airlifter. And though my former employer, Southern Air Transport, was no longer in business, I knew where their old airplanes were. In fact, in the past, I had worked for both of the foreign air carriers that had bought the Hercs after SAT’s bankruptcy. So I fired off an e-mail to both companies asking, if they got a contract in Afghanistan, to let me go. A few weeks later I got a message from my friend Fernando Brito at Transafrik offering me a job. But the job was not in Afghanistan, it was in Sudan. No one knew if it was safe to send an American into Afghanistan under the present circumstances so they were sending an all Filipino crew first to test the waters. I took the job with the understanding that if we could resolve the security problems, then I could go. In the mean I resigned myself to working in the Sudan, getting re-acquainted with the Hercules and polishing my airdrop skills.
In November of 2001 the UN’s World Food Programme requested a second airplane for the Afghanistan theatre and I arrived in-country during the first week of December. And thus began the adventure of a lifetime.
