Word: transportable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three C-130 Hercules transport planes roared low across the Florida panhandle last week, two flying tightly as a pair, one trailing without its partner. This is the traditional "missing buddy" formation of the U.S. Air Force, a symbol of mourning for lost fliers. On the ground, in a green park just inside the gates of Hurlburt Field, some of the toughest men in the armed services could not suppress their tears...
...fact, the innocent White House aides were protesting the wrong plans ?and by accident helping the mission's cover story. At that very moment some of the rescue unit's pilots and crews were already in Egypt, ostensibly to take part in joint air transport training exercises with Egypt and Saudi Arabia?a handy disguise for what was to come...
...transport planes carried about 90 commandos in camouflage garb and another 90 crew members. Following an undisclosed route, the small air fleet droned along as low as 150 ft. to foil Iranian radar as it approached its first staging site in the desert near the isolated village of Posht-e Badam. Other planes are reported to have helped by jamming Iranian detection systems...
...refueled on the ground from a C130. When the large plane's tank ran dry, the chopper lifted slightly to move toward another C-130 to pick up more fuel. But in doing so, the pilot turned his RH-53 too abruptly; its rotary blade ripped into the transport's fuselage. Instantly, flames roared through the two aircraft. Ammunition began exploding, striking other aircraft. Three Americans in the Hercules were killed. Five died in the Sea Stallion. Four others sustained severe burns, one of them hauled to safety out of the blazing C-130 by heroic efforts...
...twelve, not disease, that cost Wilson his sight. Resolutely, he went on to take a degree in law and sociology at Oxford, then to aid the British war effort by placing the blind at work alongside sighted people in factories-"making shell cases and bits and pieces of transport vehicles and aircraft." After the war, at 26, Wilson was sent on a Commonwealth tour to make a survey of people blinded during the conflict. Everywhere he encountered the sightless. But it soon became evident that malnutrition and disease, not bullets and shrapnel, had cost most of them their vision...