Word: biafra
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...Finding the airstrip (in Biafra), that's a problem sometimes," McGuire says. Biafra's sole airstrip is a hard-top road slightly widened by cutting away at the jungle on both sides. It is lit by two rows of lights, none of them very strong. The outboard engines of the four-engine Constellations hang out over the brush, which, if it fouls the engines, means an abrupt end to the flight...
McGuire does not mind talking about his closest call while flying to Biafra and one might even suspect that he takes a certain delight in it. Scheduled as a crew member on one flight, he transferred to an earlier one partly because of a quarrel with the other flight engineer, but mostly because of "a certain feeling; you get to be like a cat or some kind of an animal sometimes." The flight to which McGuire transferred was supposed to be a dangerous one. Its pilot, since given other duties, carried the sobriquet of "Mr. Magoo." It landed safely...
...only thing you can see, sticking up in the jungle." Aboard were Augie Martin, a black American pilot earning a little extra money while on vacation from Seaboard World Airlines; Martin's wife Gladys, whom McGuire thinks had come along to gather material for an article on Biafra; Jess Meade, also an American; and a Rhodesian with the pseudonym of "Bill Brown." Mr. Martin's head was never found, McGuire says, so "the missionaries buried what they could find of him." "Bill Brown" reportedly had a wife and family in Rhodesia, who are vainly attempting to collect the money...
...plight of the Biafran people is a topic on which McGuire spends relatively little time, because he feels the subject has been adequately covered by American reporters, and also because the airlift crews seldom stay in Biafra longer than four hours -- the time it takes to unload 30 tons of baby food, or Mausers, or whatever from the Constellations. He does, however, venture to add a few vignettes to the picture of the people. Pilots on flights into Biafra carry canned hams and salt to give to the unloaders as an incentive for faster work. On one of his flight...
...simple, he feels: "the Ibos were right to secede. They're smart, the smartest in Africa, they have all the doctors and lawyers." Though the origin of the war is tribal, its continuation may be due to intervention, he says, noting that "there's a lot of oil under Biafra," and that the oil might have something to do with English support for the Nigerians, and the French money and mercenaries aiding Biafra...