A young Girl in Bamiyan - I wish I could have taken her home with me.

Caught in a snowstorm in Dushanbe - The Filipinos on the crew had never seen snow over their shoetops before

A local Afghani Bakery re-opens thanks to the UN World Food Programme

Fresh-baked bread,hot from the oven, speaks a universal language

UN Helicopters based at Mazar-i-Sharif bring relief to mountain villages cut off by winter snows

The Hercules can handle the big stuff - Loading a Sea Container in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Class is in session - The first schoolbooks arrive in Faisabad, Afghanistan after 25 years of war.

Let's Roll - USAF Nose Art Commemorating 9/11

 

The Book the Big Publishers Didn't Want You To Read...

Over the years I’ve come to fancy myself as something of a connoisseur of sour grapes.  But I would be less than honest if I told you the big publishers are suppressing my book out of malice, in fact – according to my agent in New York, anyway – some were quite complimentary about the writing, even if they weren’t interested in taking on the expense of publishing and promoting the book.  And the reason most often given for taking a pass on the manuscript was, “Who is this guy?  Nobody’s ever heard of hm.  We’re in business to sell books and we can’t make money on a book written by a nobody.”  Well, that certainly stung.

OK, maybe we’ve not been formally introduced, but I’m not completely unknown to you.  If you’ve watched the news over the last 20 years and seen coverage of the famine relief efforts in places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda or watched the departure of a former military coup-leader and ex-President of Haiti, chances are you’ve seen the back of my head, or my elbow, or even the whole of me slouching against the side of the airplane waiting for the loading gang to come.  I’m willing to bet, if nothing else, you’ve at least seen me taxi past the camera.  So, I’m not a complete stranger.  And I’d like to think that I have something to say that you might find interesting.

Like many Americans I watched the terrorists crash the airliners into the World Trade Center on live television and stared in horrified disbelief as the Twin Towers collapsed.  Later that week when President Bush announced that the United States would fund a humanitarian relief effort to run in parallel with the military expedition to Afghanistan, I knew that would involve the one aircraft best suited for that kind of work: the Lockheed Hercules.  And, with the demise of the US-Based Southern Air Transport, that meant either a South African company – Safair Freighters of Johannesburg, or an Angolan company – Transafrik International of Luanda - would get the job.  In the past I had worked for both companies, so I fired off an e-mail to each of them saying that if they got a contract, I wanted to go.  A few weeks later I got a call from my friend Fernando Brito at Transafrik offering me the job.  From that beginning I spent that first winter of the War On Terror flying through the snowy mountains of the Hindu Kush in support of the United Nations World Food Programme humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan.

There were a few times when I thought I might have gotten in over my head and a couple of times when I wasn’t sure I would make it home again.  I had been involved in a number of relief efforts but this time it was personal, and I was on a mission.

I kept of journal of my time in country and on days when I wasn’t flying I’d head over to the local Internet Café in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where we were based, to transcribe my notes and e-mail the news home.  Today I guess you’d call that a Blog. Back then it was just telling flying stories by writing electronic letters home.  E-missions, as it were.

I began writing to a few friends, who passed my reports on to their friends, and before long I had a mailing list of a few dozen readers.  Some were people who knew me; some were people like me with an interest in aviation or current affairs.  All enjoyed the first-hand account. So, when I got home I spent some months trying to arrange my notes into a form for a wider audience.  That’s the genesis of the book.  You can decide if it was worth writing.

If you’re like me, reading anything more than an e-mail on a computer screen is annoying.  So I’ve converted the chapters to .pdf files that can be opened with Adobe Acrobat, printed out, and read at your leisure.  I hope you find reading the manuscript enjoyable.