Syd’s Journal

This is at the park where I walk the puppies, my second home. It’s about 5 in the afternoon. The temperature is in the high forties.

It was a beautiful day, not yet spring, but the promise is there. I’m told that a novelist is only allowed to use the word “beautiful” once in their career. Thankful I’m not a novelist.

 

The barrenness of winter always speaks to me, not sure why.

This is the creek. When it gets hot, I’ll let the dogs get into the water to cool off, but it’s not hot yet. They don’t give it a second glance.

HOLLISTER, Calif. – The man who opened fire in front of the Pentagon had a history of mental illness and had become so erratic that his parents reached out to local authorities weeks ago with a warning that he was unstable and might have a gun, authorities said Friday.

It’s still unclear why John Patrick Bedell opened fire Thursday at the Pentagon entrance, wounding two police officers before he was fatally shot. The two officers were hospitalized briefly with minor injuries.

Bedell was diagnosed as bipolar, or manic depressive, and had been in and out of treatment programs for years. His psychiatrist, J. Michael Nelson, said Bedell tried to self-medicate with marijuana, inadvertently making his symptoms more pronounced.

“Without the stabilizing medication, the symptoms of his disinhibition, agitation and fearfullness complicated the lack of treatment,” Nelson said.

So how’d he get the guns and ammo? I thought these kinds of folks were “prohibited persons.”

His parents reported him missing Jan. 4, a day after a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped him for speeding in Texarkana. Bedell told the highway patrolman he was heading to the East Coast, and began acting strangely — sitting on his knees by the side of the highway and turning off his cell phone when it would ring.

Bedell said it was his mother calling, prompting the patrolman to answer the phone and talk briefly with her. Family friend Reb Monaco said Kaye Bedell asked the officer to take him to a mental health facility, but that the son refused.

The patrolman let Bedell go after issuing a speeding ticket and a citation for possession of drug paraphernalia, including a pipe and a green plastic box with marijuana residue.

Are you kidding me?

The next day, Kaye told deputies in California that her son had no reason to travel to the East Coast because he had no friends or family there and she and her husband were worried about his mental state, San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill said.

Hill also said Bedell’s parents found an e-mail from their son that indicated he had made a $600 purchase from a shooting range in the Sacramento area that could have been a gun or ammunition.

And what gave you the first clue, Holmes?

The 36-year-old Bedell returned to his parent’s home Jan. 18, telling them “not to ask any questions” about where he had been. But he left after that, and his parents didn’t know where he went.

I’ll ask questions in my own house of my own kids whenever I damned well please; thank you very much.

Little is known about his trip east, but authorities know he spent time in Reno, where Washoe County Sheriff Mike Haley said he was arrested on Feb. 1 with two ounces of marijuana in his car but no weapons.

The Bedell family put out a statement Friday saying they were “devastated as a family by the news.”

“We may never know why he made this terrible decision,” the statement said. “One thing is clear though — his actions were caused by an illness and not a defective character.”

Well, duh. So who sold him the guns and why wasn’t his extensive history of mental illness in the NICS?

Bedell, the officials say, opened fire with a 9 mm handgun just five feet from the nearest officer, Marvin Carraway. Fellow officer Jeffery Amos ran out of a nearby guard booth to confront Bedell, as did a third, unidentified officer. All three officers gave chase and fired at Bedell, who was struck in the head and left arm.

Witness Dan Namisi said he had just emerged from the Metro station, headed for a bus home, when he heard a “pop.” The Uganda native hit the ground, and the next thing he knew, officers swarmed over him and put handcuffs on him.

Yeah, great. Grab the black guy…

The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon — the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 — came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings.

Hatred of the government motivated a man in Texas last month to fly a small plane into a building housing Internal Revenue Service offices, killing an IRS employee and himself.

The shooting resembled one in January in which a gunman walked up to the security entrance of a Las Vegas courthouse and opened fire with a shotgun, killing one officer and wounding another before being gunned down in return fire.

Source: Yahoo News

So, what’s your point? Is there some kind of connection here beyond garden variety insanity?

In my more paranoid moments, I almost suspect that the powers that be want this kind of stuff to happen so they can further restrict gun ownership. With all of these warnings signs, why wasn’t this guy picked up? Why wasn’t his info in the NICS? Just like Cho at Virginia Tech, the signs were clear for anyone to see.

OK, I’ll say it: despite my near-fanatical devotion to the Second Amendment, there are some folks out there who have no business being in possession of any kind of firearm, and this guy is one of them. Democracy and equal rights under the law presupposes rational behavior. Those who are incapable of rational behavior give up some of their rights. There is nothing wrong with that. Epileptics are not allowed to pilot jet airliners because they could have a seizure at a critical moment and kill a lot of people. The same goes with guns. A person who has demonstrated acute mental instability forfeits their right to unrestricted firearms ownership. Life is not always fair. Get used to it.

And as for poor John Patrick Bedell, had the people around him – his parents and local law enforcement – acted like adults and done the hard work of reeling him in, he might be alive today and two Capitol City police officers wouldn’t be in the hospital.

I experience sacred as a feeling. It’s how I feel when I am open to life. Or am opened by life. Sacred is not a special place, or a ritual, or a particular group of people. It’s more normal than that. There are many places and rituals that do feel sacred… (but) the ritual isn’t sacred, it just opens the door to the experience. It isn’t only the place that is sacred, we are. — Margaret Wheatley h/t to Fausta for finding this

This is one of my all-time favorite photos. It was a grab shot on the street at Gunnison, Colorado. It was shot in 1982 on color slide film. I made a Cibachrome print of it and then scanned the print. The look of it seemed to escape the time and reach back to a much earlier era. The photo really seemed to have everything in that it captured the relationship between the the old man and the child, the old guy obviously teaching the youngster about crossing the street, and the little guy trying to figure it all out. I love the old bicycle and the handbills on the wall. I wish the old guy would have held his cane differently, but it is what it is.

Joe Stack flew his very nice Piper Cherokee into an office complex in Austin, Texas which housed some offices for the Infernal Revenue Service. He had recently gotten a tax bill on unpaid income for $13,000. Have you priced a Piper Cherokee lately? (hint: it’s a lot more than $13K). Before he did that, he set on fire his lovely home, which he shared with his wife and step daughter. (Houses in north Austin are a bit more than $13K, too. I’ve been there.) And, he obviously planned this out really well because he had his whole IRS kamikaze manifesto posted on the web so that all of the news services could find it quickly and they did. Tragically, he also killed Vern Hunter, a Nam vet and IRS worker, injured several others and demolished a very nice airplane.

OK, let’s review. You have your own business, moderately successful with some ups and downs. You live in a lovely house with your wife and step-daughter in one of the most interesting cities in the country. You play bass in a rock band with your friends just for fun, and privately own your own aircraft. You get a bill from the revenuers for $13K and the best you can think to do with yourself is to burn down your house and fly this great plane into a cheap black glass office complex and kill yourself and some other people. Great. Way to go, Joe.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present to you Joseph Stack III, stone cold bug nuts crazy.

Joe, you probably can’t hear me very well right now since you’re dead and probably scattered around in a bunch of little pieces, but I’m superstitious enough not to take anything for granted, so I’ll say it anyway. Joe, there are people in Haiti right now with their arms and legs torn off drinking from sewers because they have no fresh water, and they still cling to life because something in their souls tells them that this life is worth living and what they do with it counts. There are soldiers walking the dusty streets of Afghanistan knowing any minute they can be hideously maimed, but they do it anyway because they believe that what they’re doing matters and the world will be a better place if they do their job well. There are old ladies sitting in dark and cold apartments trying to decide if they should buy food or the heart medication to keep them alive, and they buy the meds because they believe that their lives matter.

And you, Joe? You’re just insane. That’s all. You’re not a hero or a martyr. All you really managed to do was to raise questions about the security of civil aviation. Nothing changed, except for Vern and his wife, and your friends and your wife. They are all really hurt because you let them down in a big way. Everyone trusted you and you proved yourself completely unworthy. The news media is all a-twitter about if you are a “domestic terrorist” or not. But, we know the truth, don’t we? You’re not a terrorist; you’re just plain old crazy.

Before we sweep the scattered little bits of you into history’s garbage compacter, I want to be clear on this. Were we supposed to be inspired, to rush into the streets and lynch all the IRS agents? Were we supposed to speak in hushed tones of your “heroic sacrifice”? Were we supposed to memorize your narcissistic tome as if it were some kind of gospel? Sorry. I didn’t get the memo. What you did manage to do, however, was to accomplish the impossible: you caused me to feel sympathy for an IRS agent. Ain’t that a bite in the ass?

No one likes it and no one wants it. Few are even willing to acknowledge its existence, but in 1927 Werner Heisenberg unleashed the principle of uncertainty upon a world that really didn’t want to hear about it. Very few had the mathematical chops to understand what he was saying, and the few who did, didn’t like what they heard. In its most rudimentary form, it goes like this:

“The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.” — Werner Heisenberg, 1927

It doesn’t sound like much on the face of it, but the implications were cataclysmic. At that moment in time, the smart guys were struggling with an interesting problem: sometimes subatomic particles looked like little chunks of stuff and sometimes they looked like waves, and the form they took seemed to be determined by the way they were observed. It dawned on Heisenberg that the very act of observing a system in nature was an interaction with that system which changed it. This just wasn’t what the shaky world of 1927 wanted to hear. It was in critique of the uncertainty principle that Albert Einstein issued his famous dictum: “The Old One [God] does not play dice with the universe.” Nevertheless, Heisenberg’s argument was compelling and rebuttals by folks like Einstein and Schrödinger, rather than restoring certainty, seemed to confirm the uncertainty; they just used different language to talk about it. In 1933 Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize for his “Matrix Mechanics.”

I’m not enough of a mathematician to tell you if Heisenberg’s physics were good or bad. They certainly made a splash at the time and a lot of very smart people seemed to take him seriously. I do know that the principle of uncertainty continues to be highly instructive to me. In 1955, he stated it this way: “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

One thing of which I am certain is that most of us who aren’t physicists utterly hate uncertainty. I should acknowledge that I can only be certain about my observation that we hate uncertainty and not of our hatred of uncertainty in itself, but I won’t because I’m not comfortable with that level of uncertainty. I wish I had a nickel for every time I have heard that old cliché, “The financial markets hate uncertainty.” One of the underlying conceptual problems for the Obama administration is that change induces uncertainty. The Obama administration is calling upon people to embrace huge uncertainties, and even for those who believe that things need to change, an unknown and uncertain future is a frightful thing. It usually requires a lot of pain to motivate us to trade the known for the unknown.

Uncertainty gets really interesting and unsettling when we bring it down to the personal level. If we see “not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” can we really be sure about anything? Are we really trapped in an echo chamber of our own biases and expectations? Is “objectivity” a myth? You can get crazy with this stuff, and it’s not my intention to go off the deep end with it. Yet, in the practical world, we see this in operation all the time. The Saints fan sees a different game than the Colts fan in the same Super Bowl. A beautiful young woman looks very different to a man than to his wife standing next to him, mortified by his ogling.

Heisenberg did not say we could not have reliable knowledge; what he said is that we have to interact with a system to learn about it, and in doing so we change it. We have to be aware of this. Perhaps true objectivity (whatever that is) is unattainable. Perhaps we will never know a lot about a thing or person in itself, but we can learn quite a bit when we interact and ask good questions. And also, do we really care a lot about a person or thing in themselves? Think about a friend or lover. Do you really need to know which synapses are firing in their brains when they smile at you? Not really. What you need to know is that they are smiling at you, and not glaring in anger. We don’t need a realm of pure ideas; we need an interactive environment that is nurturing to us.

The principle of uncertainty does carry a stark warning to us, and it is that we do not achieve absolute certainty in an objective way. When we deny the uncertainty that is inherent in our experience of life, we do so at the risk of living a life based on totally false assumptions and understandings. I imagine that the average suicide bomber believes that he has achieved certainty about his relationship with God and his understanding of the world around him. I would say that his “certainty” is illusory. He has found only what he was predisposed to seek. He looked only for a way to hate life and he found it. His observation of life was transformational because of the questions he brought to it, but it was transformational in a tragic way. Mother Theresa interacted with the divine with a different set of questions and came away with a very different set of observations.

Most of us aren’t suicide bombers or god-mad saints. We’re just people trying to muddle our way through this often confusing human experience. Uncertainty can teach us that the only good knowledge comes through interaction. Interaction is transformational, and a certain level of reality remains unknowable to us. Recognition of the unknowable keeps us humble and honest. It keeps us searching.

Further reading

• Brief biography at the official Nobel prize site
• Brief biography at the MacTutor archive (University of St Andrews, Scotland)
• About Werner Heisenberg
• Heisenberg – his life & work – The American Institute of Physics History Center
• Critical Resources: Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
• UncertaintyPrinciple
• The Nobel Prize in Physics 1932
• Niels Bohr Archive’s 2002 release of Bohr-Heisenberg letters

It was always the same dream: the wheels of the C-123 touch down on the dusty strip at Lao Trinh. A mortar round punches through the wing and the right side of the plane dissolves in flame… I awoke. I was sweating. It was 5:30 in the morning. There would be no more sleep tonight. I got up, lit a cigarette and opened the doors onto the balcony. Out across the sea, the first fingers of dawn stretched up across the sky. The hotel coffee shop wouldn’t even be open yet, but there’s always coffee at the airport. I dressed and headed down to the street.

The streets of Fort de France were empty. The cabbies were somewhere conked out in their rigs. It was a mile and a half to the airport so I walked. Girard, the mechanic was crashed on the couch in the office when I got there. I put on a pot of coffee, but I didn’t wake him. He had been at Claudet’s last night too and I knew how much he had to drink. I would do my own pre-flight – less to worry about that way.

I had just finished bleeding up the brakes when a woman walked into the hangar. The light still wasn’t very good and all I could see was a silhouette, but the creaky cogs of memory began to turn. Then she spoke, “Who do I see about getting a plane to Barbados?”

Time is cruel to us all, but there are some things you don’t forget about a woman: her walk, the curve of her neck, her voice. I stood up slowly and said, “Hello, Barb.”

She paused a moment, shocked, I guess, “I’m sorry, but do I know you?”

“You knew someone I used to be. In those days, I went by the name of Bryan Travis.”

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

“I don’t know who you are, but this isn’t funny.” She thought a minute. “What did you write in spray paint under the train trestle on homecoming night?”

“Forever.”

“What color was the paint?”

“Pink.”

“You bastard! They said you were dead. Why didn’t you come home?” she demanded fiercely, and stepped forward to look into my face. “You look like hell, by the way.”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I have nothing but time.” She jabbed her finger toward the gleaming Duke, “Do you think this rattle trap can make it to Barbados?”

Even though I found the characterization painful, I said, “Blindfolded.” I filed my flight plan with the wireless laptop and we got the lady and her baggage loaded onto the plane. “It’s really a very nice plane, high maintenance, but a luxury ride, a lot like you, if memory serves.”

“Whatever,” she said.

Out on the tarmac with the lady belted into the co-pilot’s seat, it was time to start up: battery on, fuel valves open, #1 mixture full, fuel pump on, magneto switch to start. The rapid hammer of the pistons roaring to life always gives me just a little thrill. Turn on the generator. Repeat for #2. Let the engines warm up and normalize; then switch off the pumps. I keyed the mic, “Clearance, November 172 Echo Golf to Adams.” Receiving ground clearance, I taxied the Duke out to the runway. You steer the Duke with engine power and brakes. It doesn’t have steer-able landing gear. Most of the classic twin engine planes of the golden age handle this way on the ground. It’s easy and natural once you get used to it. Finally out on the runway, I opened up the supercharged piston engines, and the Duke sliced its way into the sky.

I don’t like to talk while I’m in traffic, but once we got the hand-off to Piarco Center, I said, “Ok, what do you want to know?”

“You can start with telling me why you let me think you were dead for forty years,” she said, looking straight into my eyes for the first time.

“When our plane went down, there was a forward air controller orbiting the area. He saw the fire and reported us all KIA. The fact was that the plane broke up and the flight deck rolled clear of the fire. Buzzy and I were banged up but OK. We waited at the crash site until we could hear the Patet Lao closing in and then we limped off into the jungle. It’s a long walk home from Laos. We hid out with some Hmong tribal people until a Green Beret team located us and called in a dust-off. I lost track of time, but I know we were out there for weeks. By the time we got back to Da Nang, we had already been listed as KIA. It’s weird to be officially dead, but we were. We hadn’t been back in country for more than a couple of days when some guys from the company showed up and offered us a job. There are some interesting vocational opportunities for someone who is officially dead but can fly an airplane. The only problem is that your old identity goes away.” As the Duke broke through the clouds to 7,000 feet, it hit me that I had never told another living soul what had happened.

“But what about me?” she was struggling here. A lot of old emotions had boiled up that she wasn’t expecting.

“The way I figure it, I did us both a favor. When I came out of that jungle, I just wasn’t right. I shot my own cat one night. It knocked over a trash can when I was asleep. I put two rounds into it before I even woke up. I couldn’t come home, not like that. By the time I got myself squared away, too much time had passed.”

“I would have waited.”

“That’s a sweet thing to say, but I hope you didn’t.”

“No, no really,” she said, looking away out over the ocean so I couldn’t see her face.

It was my turn to ask questions, “So what’s in Barbados?”

“I’m picking up something for my former employer.”

“Sounds like someone else’s money.” My “uh-oh” alarm activated.

“I can’t talk about that,” she said.

“So now we’re keeping secrets?” I said and laughed a bit at my own joke.

“The bastard screwed me big time. I’m just getting what’s mine. Can I smoke?”

“Sure.” She pulled a cigarette out of her purse and lit it. I noticed her hands were shaking. “You’re right. I don’t want to know any more.”

We were thirty five miles out from Barbados when I took the hand-off from Piarco Center to Adams Approach. I set the autopilot for 2200 feet at an 800 foot per minute rate of descent. This flight was ending too soon. My own thoughts were a sudden rush of images and words I thought I had forgotten a long time ago. I had to make myself focus again on the present, fly the plane, check the gauges and shake off the dreams. The Duke almost seemed to land itself, as if it were riding on rails. I drove to the general aviation parking so she wouldn’t have to go through customs. As I turned off the engines, she asked, “Will this bucket of bolts make it to Rio?”

“Blindfolded, and I really wish you’d stop talking about my airplane like that.”

“Then wait for me here,” she said, taking only a backpack and leaving the rest of her luggage on the plane.

“Find a cabby named Jamison. He wears dreadlocks and sings too much, but he won’t rob you. Tell him you’re a friend of mine.” She walked away toward the terminal and I never saw her again. I waited. The hours ticked by and I got worried. I went into town and found Jamison at the Trocadero. He was scared.

“I didn’t do nothing, Boss. There was nothing I could do.”

“Just tell me what happened.”

“I took her to the bank. She said she was your friend so I watched and waited. In about a half hour she come out, but she was with these big dudes in suits. They looked like Americans, federales, you know? They got into a black SUV. There was nothing I could do.”

“You did what you could.” I put a twenty in his shirt pocket and walked out. It was early evening and the wind was whipping up from the sea. I zipped up my jacket and started walking.

I know that I read Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger a long time ago in that lengthy parade of books I had to read to get through high school. Unlike a lot of folks, it wasn’t a life-changing experience for me. In fact, I scarcely remember the book. I liked Hemingway much better. I liked Tolkien and Heinlein. I read Plato and Kierkegaard in those days too (yeah, I know – my dad gave them to me). Poor Salinger hardly made a dent in my consciousness at sixteen. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but that’s the way it was. I may go and buy the book, and read it again just to see if I missed something important the first time around.

I often find that the lives of writers are more interesting to me than their writings. Often, I would rather read about their exploits than read their books. Their lives say more to me about their vision than any individual tome. Salinger may be the ultimate example. The statement of his life and the way he lived it illustrate the courses taken in a tortured and alienated life far better than any work of fiction. I’m glad I wasn’t born J. D. Salinger.

Salinger published his writing between 1951 and 1965, fourteen short years. Then, he did everything he could to make himself disappear. He quit publishing and retreated permanently to his hermitage in New Hampshire. He liked to write, but he didn’t like to publish. Publishing and coping with the outside world was a violation of his privacy. Instead of craving fame’s spotlight, he ran from it. In doing so, he achieved the status of a counter-cultural icon, even more alluring to the hungry world than before. The ironies are rich. It must have been hard for Salinger to take when his story of an alienated adolescent misfit received such universal acceptance, especially from the education community, a group he never got along with very well. My hunch is that he would have been happier if the nation’s teachers would have conducted book burnings with Catcher.

“Hey, Sally,  . . . Did you ever get fed up? I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something? I mean do you like school, and all that stuff? . . . Well, I hate it. Boy, do I hate it. . . . But it isn’t just that. It’s everything.”
– Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye

I live in a world where I can know the intimate thoughts of Barak Obama, Lady Gaga or Derek Jeter within seconds of their having them via Twitter. J. D. Salinger didn’t Twitter. My world is one in which fame, instant wealth and celebrity are worshipped as the new religion. Success means fame and adulation. If you have a hundred thousand followers on your Twitter account, you’ve arrived. You’re on your way to apotheosis. If you can get past the judges on American Idol, you can count on instant fame and recording contracts for the foreseeable future. A few minutes worth of surfing on the web will reveal to you just about everything there is to know about me. Today, privacy seems more like a memory from another time than a present reality.

Against our culture of instantaneous knowledge of everyone all the time and our idolatry of celebrity and “success,” Salinger stands like a dark blob of anti-matter drawing everything to himself with the vacuum of his renunciation. He did practice Zen Buddhism, I’m told, so maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe he achieved satori. I don’t know; I never had the patience to sit still that long.

The tragedy of Salinger is that we don’t know if it made any difference. Was his life better or worse than ours? Is there an earth-shaking masterpiece born in solitude secreted in his safe? Unless some more manuscripts appear, we’ll never know, and in that way he cheated us. We gave him a life of leisure and ultimate freedom, a clean canvas on which to paint anything. He appears to have given us nothing in return except litigation and whiny complaints about his privacy being violated.

As I said at the top, I’m not a fan. Still, I am fascinated by how someone who seemed to “have it all” could turn his back on it all in such a radical way. Was it the ultimate expression of genius, or just the coping mechanism of a badly flawed personality? It would have been nice if he could have twittered just a couple of times, something like, “This Rocks!” or “This Really Sux,” or “The Great American Novel is hidden in the trunk of the car,” but he didn’t. We’re left with our questions and the dark, empty space that was J. D. Salinger.

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
– Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye

I was sitting in the coffee shop at San Juan looking at my Twitter feed on the iPhone. Haiti is Charlie Foxtrot. Not good. The phone rings and it’s Esmeralda, the second shift dispatcher at King, “Captain Weedon, there is some hombre who says he is su amigo wants to talk real bad to you.”

“What’s his name?”

“Su nombre es ‘Bob’.”

Oh, great. “Cuál es el número?” I jotted the number down on a napkin. “Thanks, love,” and hung up. “Bob” and I go a long way back, to the company and Air America. He’s gotten me into more crap than a box car full of X-Lax. I dialed the number. This should be interesting.

“Caribbean Novelties, how can I help you?”

“That’s rich. Do you want to talk to me or not?”

“Is that you, Syd?”

“No, it’s Lady Gaga. I want to book a gig.”

“Do you guys still have that old unmarked 727?”

“Yeah.”

“How soon can you get it to Gitmo?”

“A couple of hours. Why?”

“We have a package we need delivered to Port-Au-Prince before the airport shuts down.”

When these guys talk about “a package,” they’re not referring to your most recent order from Amazon. It’s usually a black ops team, and it’s never easy. “Oh, damn, that reminds me. I was going to kill you in Manila.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yeah. Tell the tower I’m coming in. If any of the jarheads take a shot at me, I’m gone.”

“You got it. See you there.”

I spent the next forty five minutes getting the three-holer ready to roll. In a lot of ways, it’s easier to get the old girl ready to go than the newer planes with all of their computer gadgetry. Once airborne, I climbed her to 29K and put the hammer down. Before you could say, “How do I manage to get myself into these things” I was settling into the approach to Guantanamo Naval Air Station. The 727 was designed for these short, nasty airstrips, and she sat down on terra firma like she was born there. Before I completely came to a stop in front of the hangar, the door slowly rolled open and a column of guys in blue helmets and European cammo began filing out to the plane. I opened the doors and lowered the air stairs. A guy who appeared to be in charge jogged up the stairs and handed me a bullshit manifest.

“I kind of thought I would be picking up Marines,” I said.

My words jolted him and he suddenly straightened up and saluted, “Roger that, sir. United States Marines… in camouflage, I guess. We’re supposed to blend in.”

“Marines don’t blend in to anything.”

“Orders, sir.”

“Roger.”

In addition to the hundred or so Marines in drag, about fifty guys in civvies got on the plane. None of their clothes seemed to fit very well with a lot of odd bulges in places one might expect to find Uzis concealed. Finally, one guy in aviator shades ambled across the tarmac just before I pulled up the air stairs. He took his time climbing the stairs. “Bob. It’s just wonderful to see you again. Homesick for Hell?”

He grinned, “Yeah, something like that.”

I keyed the mic, “Tower, N172EG clearance to Port-Au-Prince.”

“N172EG, cleared to Port-Au-Prince. Taxi to runway 27.”

I switched on the intercom. “Ladies, this is Captain Weedon. I’ll be your tour guide for today. Please plant your butt in a seat and buckle up or you will find your worthless hide plastered to the bulkhead when we take off.” I taxied out to the runway and lined up. The runway at Gitmo looks really short. Not to worry; the 727 takes about half that much asphalt. I pushed the throttles all the way forward and the 727 issued its legendary thunder. Even loaded like this we climbed at 3000 feet per minute. I love this old bird. Once we leveled off at 26K, Bob came forward and stood behind my seat. “Are you going on this soirée?” I asked.

“Yeah. This is my last. I’m going to retire after this one.”

“From what I hear, it’s is pretty bad.”

“It’s beyond bad. I wouldn’t even get off the plane if I were you.”

“Don’t worry. Do you want to me to wait?”

“No, just go on. I don’t know how long we’ll be there.”

It was only about thirty minutes before I was easing down and lining up for a landing at Port-Au-Prince. I used the GPS to vector in on the airport. Coming in, it was easy to see the devastation. On the best of days, Port-Au-Prince looks like hell, but this was different. Buildings were flattened as far as the eye could see. Columns of smoke rose from fires burning out of control. And yes, if you looked close, you could see the bodies down on the street. To make sure everything was done decently and in order, I tuned to the tower frequency and requested a landing, but no one answered. “Do you guys have eyes on the runway?” I asked Bob.

“It’s supposed to be OK,” he said.

“I don’t like ‘supposed to be’. You better go and buckle up. Make sure the rest of the campers are in their seats. This could be rough.” I settled down to 2500 ft and lined up on the runway. Surprisingly, it looked pretty good. I turned on the intercom, “Secure for landing.” As we glided in to the city, I watched the horror show on the ground below. I’ve been in some stuff, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.

The runway wasn’t broken up and the landing was easier than I expected. We rolled up to the terminal. It was still standing but in pretty bad shape. There was already a throng of people there, both locals and foreigners and they began to swarm toward the plane. I didn’t have to tell the Marines what to do: I put down both air stairs and they double-timed it out and set up a perimeter around the plane. People were hysterical, pushing at the Marines and waving their passports. Bob had gone out with the Marines and I could see him talking to some people. I thought, This is getting complicated really fast. Pretty soon, Bob climbed the stairs and came up to the flight deck.

“We have some people I’d like you to take with you.”

“OK, I can take the first 150, Western passports only and pat them down before you let them on the plane. Then tell your guys to push the rest of the crowd away. It’s going to get very unpleasant down there when I start the push back.”

“I owe you, buddy,” he said.

“Stop the presses… get moving or I’m not going to be able to get out of here.” Soon the Marines began allowing their lucky few through the perimeter and they all seemed to sprint to the plane. There was a lot of shouting and cursing from those who were held back and the crowd was growing. Finally, Bob bounded up the stairs and into the flight deck.

“That’s all. Good luck. Where are you going?” he asked.

“Las Americas makes the most sense. I’ll wait there as long as I can.”

He grinned, “See you in Hell.” For just an instant it was like the old days, but whatever nostalgia I had for launching a plane through artillery fire faded pretty quick.

“Promises, promises. Now get off my airplane.” People were milling around in the cabin so I had to go back and get them seated. I started barking at them, “Sit down. Siente se. Buckle your seat belt. Do it now.” I could see through the windows that the Marines were having trouble with the crowd. I couldn’t wait any longer. I got back to my seat and started the push back. A couple of rocks flew toward the plane but fell short. After what seemed like an eternity, we were taxiing out to the runway.

We were almost there when a voice came over the radio on the tower frequency, “Boeing aircraft, you are not cleared to take off. Return your plane immediately to gate 4.” Uh-oh…

“That’s a negative, Tower. Proceeding with departure for Piarco.”

“Boeing aircraft, you are in violation of international civil aviation code. You are not permitted to take off.”

I’m really not liking the sound of this and I watch for vehicles driving toward the runway, “Tower, unable to comply. I guess you’ll have to call the cops.” I would find out much later that a couple of government officials were hoping to commandeer the plane to get themselves and their families out of Haiti. I turned onto the runway, went to 25 degrees of flaps and full power. Slowly at first, the big bird responded to the 42,000 pounds of thrust from the three huge engines, and I felt the reassuring force pressing me back into my seat. The IAS needle began to climb – 30… 60… 90… 120 knots. It was then that I saw the two battered old Land Rovers racing to the end of the runway. You cannot be serious. They stop on the runway and a guy in a civilian police uniform jumps out of one and begins waving frantically at us. Guys, this is a 50 ton aircraft moving at 140 knots and I’m supposed to stop it to have a chat with you? I guess you slept through physics. I rotated and the big old bird leaped into the sky. I wished I had a hand free for the one finger salute, but this was no time for stunts.

I keyed the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. I have turned off the “no smoking” and “fasten seatbelts” signs. You are free to move about the cabin. You will find a lavatory at each end of the cabin area and there should be some sandwiches in the warmers in the galley. Help yourself. The flight attendants are off today. We will be arriving in Santo Domingo in approximately thirty five minutes, and thanks for flying Eagle Valley Air.”