Word: biafra
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...beer in a Long Island bar on a hot afternoon last week. Like them, he was relaxing from work, but his line of business was perhaps slightly more demanding than theirs. McGuire had just returned from two months of flying arms and food into the beleaguered African state of Biafra...
...company which flies food into Biafra under contract to the Red Cross, and guns in under contract to the Biafran government (cash in advance), is called North American airlines, and is run by an American named Hank Wharton: nicknamed "Hanky-Panky, cause that's the only kind of business he'd want," McGuire says. Unofficial headquarters of the outfit is the Hotel Tivoli in Lisbon, where "Hanky-Panky" lives in Room 228--a room registered in the name of "a little mini-skirt with red hair"--and his chief assistant resides...
...take off, McGuire notes, though the air-crews often suspect a flight is in the offing when the maintenance on a plane is finished and night approaches. Once the crews in their respective bars are alerted and "poured out into their planes," they take off on their flights to Biafra, juggling flight plans so as to fly always at night, when the Egyptians piloting Nigeria's MIG's refuse...
...complete round trip from Lisbon to Biafra takes 30 hours, so two pilots and two flight engineers sleeping in shifts are on every flight, he says. The planes generally fly straight from Lisbon to Biafra, unload and then fly to Bisau. Portuguese Guinea, or St. Isabel or St. Tome, Fernando Po (also Portuguese). Once there, they sometimes fly a short triangle, carrying only food, between Biafra, Bisau, and Fernando Po before returning to Lisbon...
...felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? He was so heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments, so depressed with Black inhumanity to Black in Biafra, so weary of being sounded in the subways by black eyes, so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in bloodshot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon, that he must have become in some secret part of his flesh a closet Republican-how else account...