Congo bound

After dealing with the base security, the contract bus company, the crazy ATOC people, we finally make it to the actual Enduring ramp on base. There sits the most beautiful piece of machinery: a C-130 Hercules; our "Herk". But what is that next to her? A f'ing C-17 Globemaster III! We call it Barney. The taxpayers white elephant. The showcase of the Air Force. It's being unloaded and fueled.


The night we arrived in Djibouti we had finished out a 16 hour crew duty day. We'd been up probably another three or four hours before we were alerted for the mission. It takes four hours to get to Souda Bay, Crete for a gas stop and then seven hours from Souda Bay to get to the Horn. Maps are decieving. Anyhow, we'd had a long day and so the aircraft commander and I decided that the crewchiefs should fuel the morning we went to the Congo. Well, well if Mr. Murphy didn't rear his ugly head again. We didn't know it at the time, but Barney stole our gas truck. I guess it is karma as my wife says. I was in the desert during Afghanistan and stole a fuel truck from a C-17, which made them late I'm certain.

While at ATOC I heard the controller call for the fuel truck and told them we'd be out immediately. When we arrived at the aircraft we kept asking for the fuel truck every ten minutes and nothing. No load either. This was becoming a bad day. When we show at the aircraft we have two hours and fifteen minutes to get loaded, fueled, calculate data, input the flight plan in the computer, sit in our seats to run checklists and finally taxi and takeoff. We can takeoff up to 14 minutes past scheduled takeoff and it counts as on time. No one cares down on the HOA, but our crew does as a point of pride. This entire deployment we had one late take off and made up time and landed back at DJ on time!!

The load finally shows up and won't take long and so does the fuel. Normally we concurrently service fuel while loading operations are in progress, but our crewchief mentioned that he wouldn't put fuel on as long as the milk stool was under the ramp. The milk stool is a big yellow, rectangular wooden object that the loadmasters slide under the ramp to support the initial force that's placed directly over the end of the ramp when a pallet first slides onto it. It takes the force off the giant actuators that open and close the ramp and just saves a lot of stress on the airframe. Now I'm faced with additional issues. My friend Shawn wants to load...scratch that NEEDS to load and the crewchief wants to fuel. Since he got started just before the load was ready to push onto the aircraft I let him keep going. Shawn was not happy to say the least.

When you load an aircraft it never goes as easy as it looks like it should. There is always something wrong. In this case the load plan didn't look the same as the one we'd looked at when we first arrived at ATOC that morning. We made a note at that moment to start asking them for a copy of the damn thing before we go out to the aircraft. Finally a break in the fueling as we needed about 30,000 lbs of fuel and the truck was empty. We made a compromise to get loaded before finishing the last of the refueling. Everything slid on like butter and Shawn was happy. Then the fuel truck came back and that was taken care of. I already had data done and the officers showed up. We jumped in the seats as soon as the O's changed from their civies into their tans and we ran checklists, taxiied and took off....ON TIME! Team Varsity strikes again in spite of Team Djibouti. Who needs terrorists disrupting operations when you have contractors to do it for them?

The DROC is located in the center of the continent. It's a long way down for a C-130. About four and a half hours later we arrived. On the approach you could see it's beauty. The lush jungles where at one time a thriving population of Silverback Gorillas had lived. Now you could see the clear cutting and burning of the jungle as the locals try to eek out a living after gaining independence. The few Silverbacks left are located in a preserve north of the airfield where they still are poached by man. There are a few villages surrounding the international airport. These villages have thatched roofs and the streets were are of red clay. The airport was fairly modern, which suprised even me and I've been a lot of places in the world. They parked us on a corner of the ramp that had seen better days. The major issue with the ramp is that the UN considers this airport to be hazardous to crews as there is unexploded ordinance, or UXO, in the grass surrounding the runway, taxiways and ramp space. Nothing like stepping on a land mine and ruining your day. As soon as we shut down some street vendors came under the number three and four engines and started opening their bags. Our security detail quickly ran over there and kicked them out. They seemed harmless, that's a loaded term given the bombings in Kampala, Uganda, but I agreed with the Raven as he doesn't tell me how to do my job. They had some really cool hand carved statues and I would have liked to look at them. It didn't give me a warm feeling that they could waltz right up to the aircraft though. Nothing against Bush 43, but it's not due to our superior intelligence gathering or military might that we don't get struck by a terrorist attack. It's sheer luck!!

We were greeted by our users enthusiastically as they had not seen a plane in over four months. The last time they saw a herk it delivered them Christmas cards...in March; that's snail mail! We quickly offloaded the pallets and the guy in charge had a power cart they wanted taken back. At first it was, "sure we can do it" but then it turned to "how the hell are we going to do that?" The problem was the front wheels had a shorter wheel base then the rear. In order to winch it up the ramp they would have to be close enough in spread so that both the front and rear wheels would ride up the ramp extensions without hanging off the side. After a quick measurement determined this was not our day, the powwow ensued. What was absolutely hysterical was the Congolese ramp guy that stepped over the measuring tape as Shawn and Mike were making an accurate measurement to see if it would fit on a pallet instead. He steps over the measuring tape, which was stretched along the length of the cart and he uses his feet to judge the distance. I have determined that what was six and a half Congolese feet is actually five feet two inches!!! Shawn felt it wouldn't fit securely on the pallet enough to put it on one and load it. Trust your loadmaster! The ramp guy asked why we couldn't put it on the little loader and then roll it on. That's what we thought he was advocating. It turns out he put it on a pallet anyway. When they tried to push the pallet on, all the weight of the cart was in the forward, left hand corner of the pallet and they had to have people stand on the aft, right corner to get it to roll somewhat. It went on and the wheels were barely on the pallet. Shawn just said the hell with it and they chained the sucker down. I'd name a book about loading with foreigners, "Lost in Translation" but it's already been taken!!

While we were deciding exactly how to load the power cart the fuel truck driver pulled right in front of the ramp and got out to fuel. We were trying to tell him to pull under the aircraft tail to get out of the way and he gave us the equivelant of ,fuck you in Congolese. Least you think I'm joking he did. Either that or you are insinuating that he's just an ignorant bushman, which I can confirm is not the case. He grabbed the fuel hose like he was going to war and started dragging it to the plane with a determination that said, "get the f out of my way" so we all just let him go. The funny thing was that they had fire guards standing by 20 feet from the fuel receptacle in case of a fire when there is a fire truck 50 feet away. Nothing wrong with it, it's just different. We felt sorry for the firemen because they are baking in the sun in these black firefighting uniforms with full gear on so we gave them the African currency for a thank you: orange Fanta. The fuel truck emptied a few thousand shy of what we needed so we sent him back for more but returned the f you he gave us. We decided that if his smiling ass didn't show back up by the time we were loaded, which was about five minutes, we were going to press on without it. Sure enough we were in the seats ready to start checklists and he just pulled up. We told him no thanks and I'm sure he was pissed.

We started engines and backed out of the spot, whipping around like a car in the Fast and the Furious and taxiied out of Kinsangani International Airport parking!!! A short taxi and we made it to the runway. When we landed at Kinsangani a UN herk pulled out on the runway as we rolled out. There's a little cutout on the runway threshold so that departing planes can pull out in front of arriving ones and the arrivals can skirt by into the ramp. On the way out we did the same thing for an arriving aircraft. It works.

We took off and flew another 4.5 hours to get home. We arrived home 13 hours after we left, but it wasn't an easy way home. Afternoon thundershowers again. We picked our way home and it seemed that as we chose our deviation angle, mother nature shifted her cumulonibus clouds our way as if Zeus were throwing lightening bolts. I think I mentioned before the fact that a mature thunderstorm can belt out lightening as far as 20 nautical miles. We tried to steer clear of these big guys by a wide margin but it just so happened that they were directly in our route of flight and as we scooted to the east we were fast approaching Ethiopian restricted airspace. Being a prepared individual I had us all check out night vision goggles, or Nogs, before we left homestation. Some crews don't take them on the HOA because all the airfields are restricted to day visual flight rules, VFR, only. Well maybe the fields are day VFR, but suppose your stuck there and you are taxiing in low light conditions. Nogs collect an amazing amount of light. If I put them on in a closet with no door space it would still be pitch black. But if I put them on in a closet with a door space and the only available light was outside the bedroom in another room, and it still looked pitch black without them, I'd see everything in the closet. The same with thunderstorms after sunset. At night just after the sunset we couldn't see where these guys were exactly. But with nogs you can see every towering cumulonimbus for a hundred miles. That really helps because you can determine the edges of these guys so you don't clip one with your wing.

After battling mother nature and her graciously letting us win, we got to the DJ and went to the chow hall. This time no dinner, just sandwiches. They have a do it yourself Subway of sorts in the dining facility. I make a mean roast beef and provolone sandwich on an awesome hoagie!!! My mouth is watering just thinking about it. I washed it down with a diet coke and had a Galaxy triple chocolate bar to end the evening. Another beautiful end to a successful mission on the HOA. It doesn't get any better than this when your deployed!