Word: hanley
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Last June, apparently on a wild impulse, David J. Hanley, 30, dashed out of a cocktail lounge near St. Louis' Lambert Airport. He got into his 1972 Cadillac convertible and crashed it into an American Airlines 727 jet airliner in a foolhardy attempt to stop a skyjacking then in progress. The skyjacker and his hostage crew merely switched to another plane and took off with $502,500 in ransom (he parachuted safely, but was later arrested). Even so, Hanley was seen by some as a courageous citizen acting boldly to stop a crime...
...turns out that Hanley would have been much better off had he sat tight and let the proper officials worry about the skyjacking. As a result of his derring-do, he was charged by the Federal Government with interfering with an aircraft. He sustained severe injuries and is accumulating medical bills for which he has not yet been fully compensated by his medical insurance...
Serving in the Shag, as Hanley calls the vast oven of interior Somaliland, one found the usual physical torments: heat, flies, the lack of fresh food and cold beer. Drinking from bitter desert water holes led to "Wajir clap," an excruciating urinary-tract disorder caused by sharp crystals of undissolvable mica and gypsum. Prickly heat could make a man rub himself raw against a wall, al though some relief could be had by spraying from head to toe with...
...most merciless enemies, how ever, were loneliness and isolation. For months Hanley's reading matter was a book entitled Engineering Problems in Paraguay. The pressure of making decisions concerning the volatile Somalis drove many British officers into depression and even suicide. Yet solitude seems to have thrown Hanley backon his best resource: a fine, inquisitive mind whose essential romanticism was balanced by experience...
Although his admiration for the Somalis is genuine, he nevertheless sees primitivism as a vastly overrated way of life. On the other hand, the European's contribution in Africa has too often been merely a more efficient method of killing. Hanley's solitary reflections have taught him that there is really no satisfying man's greed, lust and appetite for novelty. In independent Kenya, where he returns to observe, only the Tusker beer seems to be the same. Many of his friends are gone, the game is scarcer and, as Hanley had noticed in much of East...