23
BROKEN ON A MOROCCAN BEACH
EAST OF TANGIER ■ JANUARY 1988
One thing about being a Marine is that you can never let someone else be in charge if you are senior. Officers never ever stop being who they are no matter what role they may be in at any given moment, and Marine officers like it that way because it makes things black and white, no ambiguity. So while for training purposes we pretend, otherwise, pretension stops when reality intrudes. This is not a bad thing; it is just the way it must be.
W hen our helicopter had an engine that wouldn’t start, I could not just sit back to see what the helicopter aircraft commander, the “HAC,” would do. I was the major and he was the lieutenant and with the engine problem, the section leader’s evaluation I was giving him on this mission was now over. So, there we were, stuck on a beach on the mediterranean coast of Morocco with one engine that wouldn’t start, 70 miles away from our ship, as it got dark.
I arrived in Morocco via Lisbon. As the senior WTI and director of safety, standardization, and NATOPS (DSSN), another officer and I were sent ahead of our ship, the USS Nassau, via Marine Corps C-12 (a Beechcraft King Air) from NAS Sigonella, Sicily, to Lisbon, Portugal, to liaise with the Portuguese Marine Corps for an upcoming NATO exercise we were going to execute down south of Lisbon. It was to be our final exercise of this six month deployment and we wanted it to be as nearly perfect as possible, a sort of graduation exercise. When we arrived at Lisbon’s International Airport, there was a brand new Mercedes SUV with a Portuguese Marine officer and driver there to meet us.
As life sometimes works out, I was, unknown to me, a friend of the commandant of the Portuguese Marine Corps. A few years before, I had been deployed with my British Royal Navy (RN) squadron onboard HMS Illustrious for a small bi-lateral exercise between the RN and Portuguese Navy. Two Portuguese Marine Corps (PMC) officers were also onboard, but for some reason, perhaps because they were Marines and not Navy, the RN officers were ignoring them. Seeing this and being a Marine myself, I introduced myself to them and in short order, we were the best of comrades, swapping stories about wars lost: theirs—Angola, and mine—Vietnam. We exchanged names and addresses and as men often do, never communicated afterwards; however, the senior officer remembered my name when he saw it on the list of inbound officers. It was golden.
The mercedes took me to the four-star hotel my friend had booked me into, at the “military rate” of $10 (US) a day. The PMC driver/body guard was stationed outside my door anytime I was in residence. When I came out the door he came to attention and drove me wherever I wanted to go. The first place was to HQPMC to discuss the mission and to thank my friend for his hospitality. Over the next three days, we completed the liaison, driving to the south coast to pick out the site for our squadron base camp and doing reconnaissance on the LZs we would use in the exercise. When we were finished with our work in Portugal, another C-12 flown by two Marine officers from Rota Spain flew into Lisbon to pick us up and take us to Tangier, Morocco, to meet the USS Nassau. In Morocco, we would complete a minor bi-lateral exercise a few miles down the coast from Tangiers with their military before moving to Portugal for the last exercise of this six-month LF6F.
The C-12 dropped us at Tangier’s airport, about 20 miles south of the city, where US embassy people were supposed to meet us, take us through customs and get us to Tangier’s harbor where our ship was to anchor. No embassy folks were there when we climbed out of the C-12. There was not a sign of a Moroccan Customs and Immigration Station either, so we went into the terminal building to wait. While the terminal building was full of exotic people coming and going, after an hour and two coffees, we were tired of waiting. We went out to the taxi rank in front of terminal and climbed into the old Mercedes that was first in line.
We were expecting to get ripped off as often happens in out-of-theway airports but instead, found the driver reasonable in his rates, friendly in his fluent English conversation, and a willing tour guide as he took us into the city. As we headed toward the city at a leisurely pace, he pointed out objects of interest along the road, ruins, colonial buildings, etc. We told him we were waiting on a ship but did not know exactly when it would arrive. He told us he knew just the place for us to wait and dropped us at a slightly seedy but lovely bar overlooking the harbor. An hour later we were on our second beer when we heard the “whop-whop-whop” of a UH-1N out over the water. As the Huey headed further on down the coast, the bow of the Nassau appeared around the headland as the ship headed for its anchorage. An hour later, we were at the dock waiting for the first ship’s launch to arrive. The Moroccans were more than a bit surprised that we had not cleared customs at the airport, but after a few signatures and stamps on our orders, things were cleared up and we were on the launch headed toward the ship.
Five days later I was on a mission in support of our Moroccan hosts, joint training with our SEALs and the Moroccan Special Operations troops, at a beach about 40 miles to the east, down the coast from Tangier and the Nassau. The mission required a flight of two CH-46E (a “section” in Marine Corps aviation terms), with my aircraft in the lead. Using the mission as a target of opportunity for training the junior pilots, I was acting as copilot while giving the real copilot a section leader check that would let him command a flight of two helicopters. The aviator taking the section lead evaluation was doing fine. He had hit all marks from the start of the brief to the navigation to the LZ and leading the second helicopter. Our flying was fun, too, just the two helicopters headed out east, down the Moroccan coast on a beautiful North African January day.
The SEALs we were supporting were already there when we arrived at the training site on the coast, having driven down with the Moroccans a few days before. After a short briefing, they had us doing interesting flying instead of just the usual landing and taking off, ferrying them from one LZ to another. Instead, we were flying low and slow over the water while they jumped off the ramp into the blue sea. Sometimes we would fly low over the water and they would put inflatable boats out the back and then jump into the sea after them. It was all supposed to be training for the Moroccans for their Moroccan counterparts, but the US SEALs were enjoying it greatly, too, after the routine of deployed LF6F life.
At the end of the day, both aircraft shut down on the beach above the high tide line for a final debrief before we flew back to the ship. Everyone was well pleased with the day’s work. Brief complete, the SEALs and Moroccan commandos left by truck to continue their training at other locations. We too were finished for the day and had only to return to Tangier and rejoin the Nassau after a very satisfying day of flying. We expected to be back before dinner time and certainly before the movie in the ward room. The mission had been fun and the section leader check went very well indeed, but when we tried to fire up our 46, the Number 2 engine would not start.
The engine motored over like it should. Through the helmets you could hear the turbines spinning up and the igniters firing like they should, but it would not light. The crew chief tried various things, magic things, routine things. The crew chief from our wingman came over and he too tried various things, all the magic they knew between them. Nothing.
The helicopter was on the beach, but close to a Moroccan village that was not far removed from stone-age construction, at least to our eyes. There were no power lines or telephone wires going in or out, meaning, of course, no electricity, and in the pre-cell phone days, no telephone communications. We were well beyond UHF radio range with the Nassau and so had no way to tell them we were broken. It was getting dark on this January evening and we were soon to be overdue for our return. Rather than have the ship launch a search for us when we did not return before dark, I told our wingman to fly back to Tangier and tell the squadron our problem. We would spend the night in the bird and they could come fix us in the daylight tomorrow, rather than go through the whole complicated dance of flying a maintenance crew down in the dark and quite possibly working all night.
I watched my wingman disappear off up the coast to the west. Before long, he would have to turn north to continue to follow the coast to Tangier. It is always easier to follow a coast, a road, railroad, than just cut cross country, at least it was before GPS.
As I watched him fly away, I contemplated how many times I had broken down in helicopters and how it was usually in some very inconvenient place. Bermuda was one, not usually a bad place to get stuck, but the timing was off. We were on our way back from a six-month deployment, not on our way over to the Mediterranean. The ship’s captain was very angry with me because he had to turn his ship around and come back so that maintenance people could come ashore and fix my aircraft. Istanbul was another, an exotic place that would have been worth exploring except we had to stay with our aircraft until maintenance could get to us. Farmer’s fields from Alabama to Kentucky, very nice places I’m sure, but why did they always have dogs that came charging at you as soon as you stepped foot out of the helicopter? Now I could add Morocco to my list.
In the fading light, I thought about how it was going to be a cold night. Because we had not planned on spending the night on a beach 40 miles from our ship, we had no sleeping bags, nothing beyond our normal flight equipment. It would be another cold night in the “Boeing Hilton,” not an unusual event given the normal rate at which helicopters break down. One good point was that at least the Mediterranean has a very small tidal range here so I did not have to worry about trying to move the aircraft, on one engine, up higher on the beach and away from an advancing tide.
As I stood there smoking my pipe and looking out across the darkening Moroccan semi-desert, I noticed two men in uniform walking down the dirt track from the village, headed toward my aircraft. As they got closer, I could see that they were moroccan policemen, the local beat cops. I wondered if they were from here or sent here as a form of punishment. The older one greeted me in Arabic but of course, I do not speak Arabic except the phrase phonetically rendered, “tatti tacalum swayee swayee, min fudluck”—please speak slowly. Not helpful if you don’t speak Arabic at all, since incomprehensible words are just as incomprehensible when spoken at any speed. I tried English, but neither of them spoke English. As a last resort, I tried my French, picked up from a “NATO French for Officers Assigned to Brussels” tape set I studied for a while on my last med cruise. Bingo.
In my terrible French, “Le Helicopter et on pain. Nuh marsh pas.” the helicopter is broken. It will not run.
“Merde,” they replied.
Between us we established the fact that we were not going anywhere tonight and that my comrades would come in the morning and fix the aircraft. The senior policeman communicated that we should “dormay” and they would stand guard; given the circumstances not necessarily a reassuring thought, but one that we had to accept given that we were on a beach in nowhere Morocco and they were the local authorities.
No sleeping bags, no blankets, January on a Mediterranean beach in Morocco and trying to sleep on an aircraft bench seat—it cannot be done, at least for more than a few minutes at a time. The red nylon seats normally seat three passengers in each section. They have two metal bars that connect from the back of the seat to the front longitudinal bar to support the passenger’s weight. Whenever you try to lie down on one of the seats, the nylon sags just enough that the bars dig into your back. Think of it as a very cheap pullout couch, only worse, since there is no way ever to get comfortable.
The crew chief, being a good Marine and knowing what could happen, had a stretcher stashed in the back underneath some of the troop seats. When we did external loads, he would lie on it when looking down through the hell hole, instead of lying directly on the metal deck as directed. Sometimes he slept in his aircraft on the flight deck, so that he would not have to put up with the constant noise and motion of the troop berthing area below decks on the ship. He would be comfortable, if not warm, tonight.
After a few hours of fitful sleep, I gave up trying to sleep on the troop seats while staying warm with only my leather flight jacket, and climbed into the cockpit and tried to sleep in the pilot’s seat. That didn’t work very well either, so just before sunrise, I gave up altogether. I climbed out of the aircraft, walked 50 feet or so, and lit my pipe. I was jumping up and down doing a modified jumping jack in the wind, trying to warm up, when I saw the two policemen returning down the rocky trail from the village. As they got closer I could see one policeman held a large metal kettle in his hand, the other policeman had something wrapped up in towels held out before him.
The kettle held hot, sweet tea and the towels held local cornbread straight from the village’s ovens and still hot. The policemen also had a small container of butter and another with some homemade jam. Their hospitality took me back to the Kentucky of my childhood and the way the mountain people, my relatives, always greeted strangers with food and drink. I don’t think I ever had a better breakfast than that one, that morning on the beach in Morocco. We sat in the back of the 46 out of the wind and ate the cornbread and drank the hot tea with our new friends. We took all the MREs we had and after removing all the pork items that are forbidden to Muslims, gave them to the two policemen to thank them.
Later the villagers came over to see the helicopter stuck on their beach. We greeted them and gave them tours of the aircraft. Some of the less shy children loved sitting in the cockpit and pretending to fly. In due course, the repair aircraft arrived and the mechanics fixed the problem. As I took the aircraft off, I kept it away from the small watching crowd but then circled back, and descending to 200 feet, waggled the rotors as I went past to their excited waves.
An hour later we were back onboard the Nassau.