Eden Bound

by Darrell Maloney

  He climbed the ladder on the side of the beast and crawled into the driver’s seat.

  This was totally unfamiliar to him. He’d never driven anything more complicated than a four by four jeep. But he’d once seen this thing pull a deuce and a half out of the loose sand and he knew what it was capable of.

  And he considered himself equal to anyone else in the camp at anything. If a C-17 loadmaster could use this thing to unload an airplane, he could damn sure use it to build some bunkers.

  He started it up and familiarized himself with the controls: Which lever lifted the forks up and down. Which one tilted the forks back or forward. Which one spread the forks open and closed, and which one shifted the forks a few inches to the right or the left.

  Once he knew which control did what he said to himself, “Piece of cake.”

  He put the big machine in gear and went to pick up a stack of 463L pallets.

  The steering took a little getting used to because the beast pivoted in the center.

  An automobile has four wheels attached to a solid frame.

  A 10K all terrain forklift has a split frame. Two huge wheels are attached to the back half. Two more wheels are attached to the front half.

  The two halves are connected by a pin just behind the driver’s seat.

  It allows for much better maneuverability, in that the big machine has a much tighter turn radius. But a new driver feels a bit disoriented at first at the way the machine feels as though it’s coming apart directly beneath him.

  It’s a short adjustment period, though, and in no time at all the chief was easing his forks beneath his load.

  The 463L pallet requires a bit of explanation as well. It’s made of heavy duty aluminum with a waffle center to provide strength. It’s roughly two inches thick, 88 inches long and 108 inches wide.

  Each side is affixed with several “D-Rings,” which load crews use to hook cargo nets.

  The system has been used for decades by the United States Air Force as a means of quickly loading and unloading its cargo planes. Once a pallet is loaded with cargo and netted down, it can be rolled on and off airplanes in very little time.

  And time is critical in wartime.

  At forward operating bases like Camp Momentum, it was standard practice for a C-17 or C-130 cargo plane to fly in, drop its cargo on several 463L pallets, then pick up the empty pallets from its last delivery and take off again.

  If the crew hasn’t flown so many hours that it’s required to take a mandatory break (called “crew rest,”) they’re anxious to get back up in the air again.

  Ground crews brag about how fast they can unload an airplane and turn it around.

  They’re notorious liars, and their claims to turn around a C-17 in twenty minutes is a gross exaggeration.

  But forty minutes is doable and has been done many times.

  The pallets Chief Jeffers was picking up held cargo during the camp’s last delivery three days before. They were stacked on the side of the runway, where they were supposed to be put on the next plane in, four days hence.

  But the chief had other plans.

  He picked up the stack of twenty pallets and carried them over the loose sand to the place where some of his men were finishing up one of the holes they were digging.

  “Slide one of these over the hole and dig out an entrance and exit.”

  They followed instructions to the letter. Air Force enlisted people are very good at that.

  Jeffers gave them more instructions.

  “Now toss those sandbags onto the pallet. Two layers thick.”

  While his troops were doing that, Jeffers drove off to the next group of airmen digging another hole.

  Camp Momentum, to that point, had never had any bunkers. They’d never come under enemy mortar fire, so there wasn’t any need for them.

  But thanks to the ingenuity of CMSgt Thomas and the capability of the big Cat he was driving, everyone’s hard work paid off.

  That evening, when insurgents began lobbing mortar rounds into the camp, every member had a safe place to take cover.

  The shelling lasted more than three hours before a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter crew got a bead on the bad guys and, as Army helicopter crews like to say, “smoked ‘em.”

  -10-

  The Camp Momentum mortar attack was long in the past now, but it was time for Chief Jeffers to step up once again.

  While the rest of the commanders at Lackland’s main gate were scratching their heads and trying to come up with a solution to reopen the gate, Jeffers quietly stole away.

  He drove to the base motor pool, where he found a couple of airmen doing an oil change on a security forces pickup truck.

  “Hey fellas. How y’all doing?”

  “Fine, Chief. How can we help you?”

  “That big front end loader over there in the corner. Is it operational?”

  “Yes, sir. Do you need it?”

  “I do. But I don’t need the bucket. I need to use it as a forklift. How soon can you take the bucket off the front and put the tines on?”

  “Twenty minutes too long?”

  “Twenty minutes is just right.”

  Jeffers walked over to the beast with a sense of deja vu.

  His mind went back to Afghanistan. He was back in the war zone again.

  It didn’t last long. He forced himself to snap back to the present. He needed his full capacities to operate the beast safely, as the last thing he wanted to do was to hurt somebody.

  This big Cat looked remarkably like the one he’d driven before, though a newer model.

  Caterpillar machines are not only tough, they’re versatile as well.

  This machine was being used as an earth mover. A huge steel bucket on the front of the machine was capable of scooping up a ton of earth from one place and carrying it to wherever it needed to be.

  In twenty minutes, though, it could be turned into a forklift merely by changing the attachments on the front of the vehicle.

  While the airmen were doing their thing, the chief was back in the cab, becoming familiar once again with the four levers and what each one of them did.

  When the senior of the two airmen gave him a thumbs up, Jeffers waved his appreciation.

  Then he decided that wasn’t enough.

  He called out the window and said, “What time you fellas get off today?”

  “Sixteen hundred hours.”

  “Meet me at the club at seventeen hundred. It’s barbequed rib night. My treat.”

  “Gee, thanks, Chief.”

  There’s an ages-old axiom in the United States military: Take good care of the troops and they’ll take good care of you.

  And it goes both ways

  These men could have claimed they were busy and couldn’t help him. They could have asked him to come back the following day.

  But they saw he had a need to fill and got the sense it couldn’t wait.

  So they did what needed to be done. It’s the Air Force way.

  Now, a Caterpillar 10K adverse terrain forklift doesn’t travel discretely.

  It rumbles along, emitting a mighty roar not unlike an ancient dinosaur. A roar which says, “Get out of my way, I’ve got a job to do.”

  The group of officers was still at the gate, still debating and sometimes arguing their best course of action, but became silent and turned almost as one.

  They heard the big machine rolling down the street toward them, but didn’t have a clue who was driving or what they were up to.

  Jeffers pulled up to the crowd and leaned out the window.

  “Colonel Andrews, if you’re willing to pay damage claims to the owners of four of these vehicles, I’ll have us open in ten minutes.”

  Colonel Andrews, who’d known Chief Jeffers for years and knew him as a man who got things done, smiled.

  He looked over to the captain who ran the base legal office, and who also processed damage claims against the Air Force.

  “You got any problem with
that, Jason?”

  The young captain snapped to attention and said, “Not at all, sir.”

  The colonel yelled back at Jeffers, over the roar of the big diesel engine, “Go for it, Chief.”

  Jeffers made quick work of the four cars parked directly in front of the gate.

  The first was a 1963 Chevy Impala. It was made in Detroit in the days when a car was made mostly of steel with a little bit of plastic, instead of the other way around.

  As Jeffers maneuvered the big Cat and ran the forklift tines underneath it, one of the commanders asked another, “Do you think it’ll pick up that heavy thing?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we’re getting ready to find out.”

  The off-the-assembly line weight of the basic 1963 Impala was 4,050 pounds. That’s totally empty of soda pops, snacks and anything else it would accumulate once it started ferrying families here, there and everywhere.

  And the fuel tank was empty except for the 1.5 gallons the Chevrolet plant put in all its new cars. They figured that was plenty to get it loaded onto a car carrier and to the showroom floor in Orlando or San Francisco or Salt Lake City, or wherever it was destined.

  After that it was the dealer’s problem.

  That gallon and a half of fuel added roughly eleven pounds to the weight of the car, which made the total 4,061 pounds.

  Give or take a few.

  Whether the Caterpillar could lift it wasn’t in doubt.

  The big machine laughed at the car.

  Called it “puny.”

  Yawned when it picked it up.

  Chief Jeffers lifted the car two feet off the ground, tilted the forks back so it wouldn’t slide off, and backed up with it.

  He placed it gently on the grassy area between the fence and the roadway and went back for the next car.

  All over Wilford Hall Regional Medical Center people were watching from the windows. It was the tallest building on the base and they all had a ringside view to the activity at the gate.

  And they were cheering.

  The blockade was over. They were being set free.

  -11-

  Hannah wasted no time in sharing the great news.

  She left Debbie, Al and Marty standing at the window in Al’s hospital room.

  “I’ll be right back,” she announced and practically danced out of the room.

  No one bothered to ask where she was going.

  The twinkle in her eye and the music in her voice made it quite plain, she was on her way downstairs to call Mark and Markie to tell them they’d be home soon.

  Wilford Hall, like all Air Force hospitals, has what is officially called the “Medical Operations and Control Center,” or MOCC.

  The main purpose of the MOCC is to coordinate hospital activities during real world emergencies or readiness exercises. For example, during quarterly or semi-annual exercises, inspectors will create simulated wartime scenarios to make sure everyone knows what to do.

  They might decide that a building on the far side of the base has been hit by a bomb.

  They might walk around the “bombed” building and hand everyone a card.

  Half the cards might say, “You have been killed. Lie on the floor and play dead.”

  The other half of the cards might say various things:

  “You have been wounded by shrapnel. Lie down and moan.”

  “You have a broken femur. Lie down and cry for help.”

  “You have been blinded. Walk around and bump into stuff.”

  “You have a bleeding abdominal wound. Lie down and bleed.”

  The purpose of the simulated casualties is to assess the response of the co-workers at the bombed building first. They are expected to read each card to assess the victim’s wounds and take appropriate actions.

  For the shrapnel wound they are to stop the bleeding as best they can by applying direct pressure or pressure at various pressure points in the groin or other parts of the body. Then they apply dressings, treat for shock and call for transport.

  The other wounded are treated as well in appropriate ways, and the unit is evaluated on how well and how quickly they do so.

  The hospital is evaluated on how quickly they respond to the call for help, how well they triage and treat the wounded upon arrival, and how they manage infection mitigation procedures.

  The MOCC isn’t used often, except for those quarterly exercises or higher headquarters inspections.

  Most of the time it’s locked up and gathering dust inside.

  But on the day Saris 7 struck years before, the hospital commander decreed it would be left open twenty four hours a day for personal use by hospital staff.

  Because the MOCC not only contained the two way radio base station it used to communicate with its ambulance drivers and medics in the field. It also had not one, but two working ham radios, each in a different room for privacy’s sake.

  Before the world went cold it had the ham radios to communicate with the Pentagon in the event telecom ever went out.

  Now granted, it only takes one radio to communicate with the Pentagon’s War Room.

  But this was the military, and the military is big on redundancy. We can’t just roll over and surrender because a five cent fuse blows on a radio and we can no longer receive orders from higher HQ, now can we?

  Russia or China would like that, sure. But it wouldn’t be the American way.

  We never surrender under any circumstances.

  No, what we do when that five cent fuse blows is pull out our backup radio and use it instead. That’s why the military has backups for darned near everything.

  Sometimes it has backups to its backups to its backups.

  Since Saris 7 made communications very difficult for everyone, the hospital made its ham radios available to anyone for chatting with brother Bob in New York City and checking on Aunt Edna at the Griswold house in Ohio.

  And today, Hannah was dancing her way toward one of them so she could tell her husband Mark she was coming home.

  “Uh, oh.”

  Hannah had a habit of talking to herself sometimes that her husband Mark found charming and her friends found humorous.

  “Maybe this isn’t a good time to be making a radio call.”

  She said it when she rounded a corner and entered the hallway where the MOCC occupied the far end.

  Lined up in the hallway, waiting patiently to use the radios, were at least thirty others.

  They were mostly hospital staff, on break or on their lunch hour, or just taking advantage of a slow day in their wards and departments to slip away.

  It seems everybody wanted to call home with the good news they were no longer unwilling prisoners at the base. That Colonel Medley had been released and the blockade had been broken.

  Few people had ham radios at home.

  But practically every block had either a ham radio enthusiast or a prepper who owned one. And by and large they’d stepped up at this critical time to send messages back and forth to and from their neighbors.

  As each person in line got his or her chance to call, they sat down in the chair and had more or less the same conversation.

  “Hi, Joe. It’s Trish from Wilford Hall.”

  “Hi, Trish. Got any good news today?”

  “Yes, I sure do. They finally broke the blockade, and at least one of the gates is open.”

  “Hallelujah! It’s about time!”

  “Can you get a message to my family that Mommy’s finally coming home, just as soon as my shift is over?”

  “Sure. That’s the kind of news I don’t mind sharing. I’ll put on my coat and boots and go tell them right away.”

  Of course the names were different for each conversation, but the content was more or less the same.

  There was much joy on the southwest side of San Antonio on this particular day, because Mommy and Daddy were coming home.

  -12-

  Of course, everyone else was ready to go home as well.

  Mayor Al Petrie was
fully recovered, and had been cleared by the doctor three days before.

  The only reason he was still there was because he had nowhere else to go. The base billeting office had no more rooms available.

  And besides, the charge nurse was an angel and broke a hospital rule for him.

  “Normally we boot people out the door as soon as the doc says they’re ready. But we’re short on patients and long on beds right now, so I guess we can make an exception for you. Just don’t spread it around. I wouldn’t want the word to get out we’re running a bed and breakfast.”

  “So, Marty,” Al asked, “what’s the game plan?”

  “I think it would be prudent to leave tomorrow morning instead of today. The day’s half over and we don’t know what the road conditions are going to be like. If it’s slow going, I’d rather not have to drive through the night when we’re all exhausted or stop for the night and use all our fuel running the engine to stay warm.

  “If we get everything ready and pack it all up, we can leave at first light tomorrow and make it in one day.”

  Debbie said, “So what are you, a funny man?”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “You say ‘first light’ like the sun’s gonna come shining through in the morning. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen the sun since the day the world got cold again.”

  “Okay, okay… Tomorrow morning when the sky is dark gray instead of pitch black we’ll hit the road. Happy?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She poked him in the arm so he’d know she was kidding.

  Debbie didn’t know Marty well when they began this adventure, but they’d gotten to know one another and became good friends.

  They had a lot of things in common and shared a lot of interests. Including a love for the game of spades. Almost every day found them in the nurse’s break room, teamed up and playing a pair of doctors or nurses.

  They didn’t win all the time, for some of their competitors were fierce and experienced players.

  But they won far more than they lost.

  “My bags are already packed,” Al said. “I want to go home. I miss my people in Eden.”