Missing in Action by Ralph Riegel Read Free Book Online

– distressed by constant vomiting and the turbulence – ignored the directions from the USAF loadmaster, unstrapped himself and insisted on walking up and down the central aisle of the plane. One sergeant acidly queried whether the young man ‘was going to fucking walk all the way to Africa?’ For others, the experience was clouded by a fog of ignorance and innocence. One trooper was shocked to realise that the Belgian Congo was actually in Africa and not in Europe.
    The Globemaster rumbled on southwards over the African continent, the brown sprawl of the Sahara Desert spread out below it like a vast mosaic. The giant Douglas military transport was a good aircraft with an enviable safety record. Her four giant Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major piston engines could drive the aircraft, and up to 200 troops, at almost 250 miles per hour over a range of 4,000 miles. Since immediately after the Second World War, the Globemaster had been the US military’s transport aircraft of choice.
    The California-built plane could carry light tanks, armoured cars, artillery and even disassembled aircraft. But, unlike her newer jet-powered rivals, she had a substantially lower maximum altitude. This meant that she had to cruise through turbulence rather than climb over it like the newer jet counterparts from Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed. But, in terms of reliability and rugged build, the Globemaster still dominated the skies.
    The aircraft occasionally shuddered and dropped like a stone as it hit a pocket of turbulence caused by the hot air currents sweeping up from the desert below. This added to the discomfort of the soldiers, several of whom were now gripping Rosary beads as sweat poured from their foreheads. Their wool uniforms didn’t help matters either. A few soldiers would pause between bouts of vomiting to mouth silent prayers for deliverance. No one had said it would be like this back in Dublin or Cork – and they weren’t even in the Congo yet. Flying had seemed such a great adventure back at Baldonnel Air Base that no one had anticipated this kind of agony.
    The USAF sergeant would have smiled even more broadly had he realised that, but for a handful of soldiers, this was the first time the Irish troops in front of him had ever been on an aeroplane. Almost none of them had left Ireland before – and the few who could claim to be global travellers had merely taken the ferry across the Irish Sea to visit relatives in the UK. What was a routine delivery mission to the Congo for the veteran USAF personnel was akin to a journey on the Starship Enterprise for the inexperienced Irish troops.
    A few hardy souls who managed to ignore the sound of sickness and pervading smell of vomit around them suddenly realised that they were hungry. They tentatively began to inspect the standard US army ration packs that had been handed to them back at the giant USAF base in Tripoli before the final leg of their journey to the Congo.
    ‘It was the closest thing to Babes in the Wood that I have ever seen,’ John O’Mahony recalled. ‘One soldier turned to Cmdt Pat Quinlan and pointed out that there was meat in the sandwiches and, as this was a Friday, should they be allowed to eat them given the Catholic Church regulations? Cmdt Quinlan turned to him and smiled: “You’re in the field now, lad, and you eat whatever you like.” For most of us, it was our first experience of such staples of US military life as Hershey chocolate, rye bread and doughnuts.
    ‘I struck out because my sandwich had this kind of sticky purple jam in it. I’d never seen anything like it before let alone tasted it and thought it was a strange kind of blackcurrant. I asked the American sergeant what it was and he grinned at me and said it was beetroot jelly. I was so hungry I ate it up without question but, in the next bout of turbulence, I threw it all back up again. That was June 1961 and I’ve never eaten beetroot jam since then,’ John smiled.
    The journey for the