One of the more disturbing aspects of world travel is watching the news and seeing familiar lodgings later destroyed by bombs, set on fire or the scenes of bloody terrorist attacks, not to mention near air disasters.
On a mission to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, for example, Nick stayed on the backside of the Khobar Towers, the living quarters for coalition forces supporting the Iraqi no-fly zone, a few months before a massive Al-Qaeda truck bomb destroyed it on June 25, 1996, killing 19 US Air Force personnel. He remembers gazing from his room at the fence line running through the desert along the back of the complex, wondering what the security measures were in such a place. The fence line was precisely where Al-Qaeda triggered the tanker bomb equivalent to 20,000 lbs of TNT. Osama bin Laden was later quoted in al Quds al Arabi, saying, “The crusader army was shattered when we bombed Khobar.”
He traveled often to West Africa, remaining in Abidjan a week at a time, servicing numerous missions across the region. During the civil unrest in Cote d’Ivoire in November 2004 the Hotel Ivoire, where he’d spent months of his life, was set afire, its lagoon facing façade where there was always a breeze and sweeping views from its balconies, engulfed in flame on the news. The fire gutted the hotel.
He used to service Islamabad from Bangkok and often spent a long weekend in the capital of Pakistan due to limited flight schedules. The staff always gave him a room on the street side of the Marriott, just above the main entrance, most likely because of his “special rate”. On September 20, 2008 a dump-truck bomb completely destroyed the entrance and façade of the Islamabad Marriott, killing 54, many sitting in the lobby café where he used to have a coffee awaiting his driver. Two American soldiers were killed in this attack during the height of the Afghan war. The crater left by the explosion was 60’ across and 20’ deep.
He used to also service Mumbai from Bangkok, where Pakistani terrorists attacked and burned the stunning Taj Mahal Hotel on November 26, 2008, killing 31 over four brutal days. Many were killed in one of the most beautiful lobbies in the world. He loved staying next to the Gateway of India and riding the ferry to visit the exquisite cave temple carvings on Elephanta Island. A total of 166 died across the city in the attack on five different Mumbai landmarks.
Although he never overnighted in the Kabul Inter-Continental, Nick visited the abandoned structure in the spring of 2003 after the Taliban had been driven from the city. Taking an alternate route back into the city after touring what was left of the palace south of town, his driver Faisal stopped atop the pass beside the hotel for tremendous views over downtown Kabul and its airport. The quiet civility of the hotel lobby was in direct contrast to its surroundings. Just below the hotel was a deserted swimming pool resort, called Bag-e-Bala. According to Faisal it once housed Al- Qaeda troops and was visited often by Osama bin Laden. They drove through its decrepit ruins once encircled by a vineyard; most of the grapes were gone, the roots and branches used for firewood by Al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts.
Before departing the Inter-Continental grounds they scrambled up a rocky trail to a hilltop shrine of fallen martyrs, black flags snapping in the brisk breeze. As they circled the tombs, several young Afghani males in shawal qamiz dashed up the opposite side of the hill from the main road, wildly waving their arms. They spoke broken English, shouting and asking what the hell they were doing insulting their religious martyrs. Faisal quickly tried to take charge of the situation, speaking to them sternly in Urdu while retreating down the trail. The Afghanis, however, continued verbally abusing them and throwing rocks as they descended to the car. Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers attacked the hotel in June 2011, killing 21.
Departing Colombo, Sri Lanka in June 1995, Nick’s colleagues dropped him at the tiny, decrepit terminal hours early to await the midnight flight back to Bangkok. All went smoothly, the Thai flight departed and landed on time. A few days later he read in the Bangkok Post that Tamil rebels had parked a massive truck bomb next to the old terminal the night of his departure, but it failed to detonate.
On a midnight Thai 747 flight from Delhi to Bangkok a huge explosion rocked the inboard port engine out his window just as the plane lifted off. As the aircraft began losing altitude, the flight attendants leapt from their jump seats and ran screaming through the cabin. Fortunately the pilot reacted quickly, powering up the remaining three engines so they barely cleared the rooftops of the slum at the end of the runway. They were so close to crashing Nick could see their TVs through open doors and windows. As they climbed he held his breath waiting for the flaming engine out the window to blow the wing off, thus ending everything.
Yet, thanks to an expert pilot, there was enough power to climb and make a gentle turn back over the airport and attempt an emergency landing, passengers and crew freaking out with the engine still ablaze. He was transfixed by the flaming engine out the window as the pilot circled back over the outskirts of Delhi and then landed the massive bird, bringing it to a quick stop on a runway lined with emergency vehicles. The engine was still aflame, but fire crews soon brought it under control with foam retardant and everyone applauded.
Later that night in a Delhi hotel the airline booked for passengers, he spoke with a guy in the elevator who was ironically a Boeing employee. He had been sitting in the back of the plane behind the engine that exploded. As the elevator doors opened his parting words to Nick were, “We almost bought the farm tonight.”
Flying to Monrovia, Liberia aboard an Air Ivoire Fokker-28 from Abidjan the aircraft began its descent into Spriggs Payne Airport, located behind the sand dunes on the coast three miles east of downtown. He had flown there several times previously so prepared to catch a glimpse of the decomposing corpse in military garb left to rot at the swamp end of its runway. The region was covered in thick fog and from the first row, directly behind the open cockpit door, he overheard the animated conversation between pilots in a tribal language as they came in for a blind landing.
His heart raced as branches of swamp trees appeared through the fog and he knew they were going to land short of the runway. But the pilots saw them too, their banter increasing maniacally as they gunned the engines and pulled up the nose to abort the landing. They popped out of the low fog into clear blue sky and headed over Atlantic surf where the cloud quickly dissipated and the increasing visibility brought immediate relief.
They flew offshore at a low altitude before making a sweeping turn back towards the breakers and airport shrouded in mist. As the aircraft approached the beach the ramshackle terminal buildings at the top of the runway appeared and he relaxed as the conversation from the cockpit became calm and controlled. When they touched down in misty fog and came to a halt at the northern end of the runway, he caught a glimpse of his buddy, a casualty of the Liberian Civil War, still decomposing where the tarmac met the swamp. As they taxied to the terminal Nick asked himself why he was in such a profession with a young family in DC.
Flying into Abidjan multiple times over two years, he would contemplate the numerous crash sites littering the jungle approach to Felix-Houphouet-Boigny Airport. Wreckage from previous disasters dotted the landscape landing to the south, and who knew what carnage lay on the sea bottom past the breakers. One for sure was a Kenya Air A-310 that crashed in the Atlantic just after takeoff in 2000, killing 169.
On final approach into Douala, Cameroon from Abidjan, aboard “Benue”, one of two 737-200s of Cameroon Airlines, the aircraft approached the airport runway skimming the tops of intertidal trees lining the Wouri River. It was then, gazing into its brackish tidewater, Nick had a premonition the plane would crash in the near future.
Six months later, on December 4th, 1995, he read in the Bangkok Post that one of the two 737-200s operated by the airline had crashed outside Douala on approach the day before, killing 71. Apparently the pilots were having a problem with the landing gear, had to go around a few times and lost control of the aircraft.
A year or so earlier, on his first trip to Cameroon, Nick met a mission truck outside the terminal, tipped baggage handlers to load the numerous pouches into the back, and then jumped in the cab with the driver/expeditor for the five hour drive through dense jungle to the capital, Yaounde, deep in the country’s mountainous interior.
Driving the dilapidated road alongside a beautiful river in the heart of Africa was eye-opening: scruffy villages filled with colorful markets lined the N3 as it climbed through thick jungle, while every ten miles or so they had to negotiate roadblocks of ragtag militiamen. Each time the driver would stop and carry on long conversations in a local language with gangs of youth wielding AK-47s and machetes, half of them stoned. They were sitting ducks, but somehow the expeditor insured their safe passage through more than a dozen intimidating roadblocks. When they reached the red dirt roads of the capital, it might as well have been Paris.
After returning to Abidjan, Nick spent the weekend on the beach with colleagues where he met an American woman who had just kayaked the upper reaches of the Wouri with her partner. He was in an Abidjan hospital after being knifed in the gut crossing the General de Gaulle Bridge returning from the Treichville market.
On a special mission to Mauritania, they were on final approach to the capital Nouackchot, surrounded by stark desert filled with Bedouin tents, when a herd of camels strolled across the runway. They had to abort the landing at the last minute and circle over the refugee camp “suburbs” until the camels moved on. When they finally landed and began taxiing, the plane came to a complete halt short of the terminal. There were palm trees on either side of the ramp and the wingspan of the aircraft was such they couldn’t proceed. Airport authorities rushed out and cut down the trees so they could taxi to the terminal building.
During weekends in Islamabad Nick always hiked the Margalla Hills. Groves of wild marijuana covered the path at the trailhead as he set off to the teahouse two miles away atop the ridge. Once on a late afternoon hike, halfway up the mountain, he glimpsed four armed men in black turbans and shawal qamiz across a dry ravine descending fast on the same trail. He froze and then ducked into a fortuitous gap in the shrubs lining the trail, crawling in as far as possible. Hiding quietly he heard their footsteps approach, his heart racing as they might have seen him. He saw legs march past, their shawal qamiz pants buffeted by the breeze, then sat still for five minutes before edging back out, peering up and down the trail to see if all was clear. The trail was empty, so he continued cautiously up to the teahouse. After taking in the expansive view of the contrived capital and its mighty Faisal Mosque, Rawalpindi and distant Kashmir foothills over a coffee, he asked a tea drinking taxi driver for a lift back into town. A few months later the security officer and his family were robbed at gunpoint on the same trail.
Nick spent a weekend in the vacation destination of Peshawar, staying at a boutique Mughal themed guesthouse. He wandered all over town, visiting the market and the British era museum housing a magnificent collection of Gandhara Buddha carvings. He took breakfast on the street with donkeys and horses pulling carts of various goods to market and the famous colorful trucks of Pakistan driving past. One day he went to the Khyber Pass. He hailed a cab, the driver more than happy to take him on the full day journey, but insisted they hire an armed Pakistani soldier to join them for security. They pulled up in front of the local garrison where the taxi driver spoke with a guard. It would cost fifteen dollars for the day.
An armed soldier in uniform appeared with an old wooden rifle and joined Nick in the back seat. As they left town through the Bab-e-Khyber Gateway into the Northwest Frontier Province he had to pee, so asked the driver to pull over. “See these crenellated fortifications we are passing,” the driver said, “they are owned by drug barons and gun runners, if you step out of the car they will use you as target practice. There is a tea house just a little further, we will stop there.”
It was then he knew they were in a lawless land. After the precarious drive up the Khyber, with old British fortifications perched atop pinnacles looming over train tracks winding through the Kabul River gorge, they arrived in Landi Kotal, the Afghanistan border town. As they crawled through the decrepit town, stuck in a traffic jam, an old man with hennaed beard seated on a charpai (woven bed) looked Nick dead in the eye and drew his index finger across his throat, slitting it. The message was clear. Turns out he needed that soldier.
With a full day before departure he decided to ignore the travel restrictions and visit Taxila, home of an old British museum full of Gandharan Greco-Buddhist statuary near the weathered stupas of the ancient silk-road city thirty minutes outside town. Due to the security situation, he had the hotel organize a taxi. He was the only visitor to the museum in what seemed like years, as it was dusty and few lights worked, the schist carvings of the Buddha in Hellenistic robes breathtaking. Alexander conquered the city in 327 BC and it became a major Buddhist center under the Mauryans, thus embodying a syncretic motif that had always intrigued him.
After the museum, the driver Yasir steered into the hills so he could study the exquisite carved reliefs circling the stupas. Down a narrow, rutted dirt track they came upon a temple complex with two, three-tiered stupas. After stepping out of the cab to wander the site, a bearded figure wearing the black turban of the Taliban, rifle slung over one shoulder, appeared from behind a stupa to the left, and then quickly hid behind the other temple. He just as quickly reconsidered this adventure and returned to the back seat of the taxi. Yasir didn’t waste any time returning to Islamabad.
Boarding an evening flight to Mexico City from Dulles, Nick sat in an aisle seat. An older gentleman occupied the window seat, but he didn’t pay much attention to him as there was paperwork to attend to. His curiosity was piqued when the purser stopped and asked the passenger beside him, “Mr. McNamara, Sir, may I bring you something before we take off?” Nick continued working, stealing a quick glance after the gentleman returned to reading the Post. Sure enough, it was the former President of Ford (1960, first from outside the Ford family) and former “Whiz Kid” Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-68 during the height of the Vietnam War.
Mealtime on flights used to be the best time to strike up conversations, because passengers typically put down whatever they were reading. After dinner was served he took advantage.
“I think you knew my grandfather at the University of Michigan,” Nick said, mentioning his name.
He replied nonchalantly, “Yes, I believe he was a Psychology Professor?”
“Sociology Professor,” Nick corrected him. “I believe you were both members of the same book club in Ann Arbor?”
“Oh yes, I have fond memories of those days in Ann Arbor.”
Nick left it at that, returning to his dinner. McNamara did the same. Nick didn’t harangue him about the Vietnam War and the 58,000+ American dead, or the 2 million dead Vietnamese. Perhaps McNamara recalled his grandfather was an anti-war activist on campus, eventually securing FOIA records proving he’d been spied on for years despite serving honorably in both World Wars, and decided to end the conversation.
In David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest, his grandfather is cited lauding the choice of his book club friend as the next Secretary of Defense to one of his UM classes; he and his liberal circle spoke of what a humane person McNamara was, a renaissance man of great intellect. When the Bay of Pigs occurred, they couldn’t quite believe he was involved, rationalizing he’d been forced to support the botched invasion. When the Vietnam War began in earnest and McNamara spoke with certainty of ultimate success in press conferences using a pointer to crisply report overly optimistic kill ratios, Nick’s grandfather joined the first teach-in held on a campus in 1965. In fact the McNamara Fallacy is now a military term: the rationale a war of attrition can be won through superior kill ratios.
Nick had read Neil Sheehan’s book about John Paul Vann, Bright Shining Lie, and wanted to discuss with the SecDef the Lt. Colonel’s prescience following the defeat of the South Vietnamese Army at Ap Bac in 1964, when a much smaller and poorly equipped North Vietnamese force defeated them: “A miserable fucking performance, just like it always is”, John Paul Vann had famously quipped. Yet despite such clear thinking soldiers on the ground, McNamara pressed on for years with an optimism based on metrics that lead to countless unnecessary deaths. Even after admitting decades later to having private doubts during the war about the prospects for an American victory, admitting to “grief and failure”, you have to ask yourself how do such people sleep at night?
At an off-site in West Virginia, Nick was co-mentor for a new foreign affairs class with one of the architects of the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” hoax to invade Iraq. He is included in the infamous photo of Colin Powell holding up the faux vile of an Iraqi bio-weapon to convince the UN to vote in support of the US invasion. He was an absolutely charming fellow, an unpretentious, engaging conversationalist, genuinely curious about Nick’s low-level work and career. Again, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans and coalition troops dead based on a lie, how do such people carry on?
Nick routinely flew Pakistan Air (PK) from Bangkok to Lahore and Islamabad. Often times the pilots would invite him into the cockpit for takeoffs and landings, sitting in the jump seat behind them. As soon as the cockpit door swung open a cloud of cigarette smoke would pour out. He always wanted to sit up front for the thrill and a chat with the friendly crew, but the thick smoke almost made it not worth it.
On one flight during a transit hop to Rangoon, the plane hit bad weather, thunderheads with lightning and hail buffeted the aircraft, forcing it to plummet hundreds of feet before recovering. No wonder they smoked. When they successfully landed in the heat of Rangoon, Nick exited to safeguard his material plane side. The pilots followed to inspect the aircraft for damage. He remembers the crew on the tarmac gazing up at a huge dent in the nose of the fuselage caused by a hailstone. Good thing it missed the cockpit window. They flew on to Lahore without incident.
On PK flights in the 1990s the smoking section was one side of the cabin (not fore & aft), so passengers inhaled smoke despite the “restrictions”. When it was time to go to the bathroom, the urinal cakes were neatly placed in the sink. At mealtime, the cart would come slowly down the aisle laden with delicious curries, spicy chicken and crispy naan. There was always a plate of whole hot peppers as well, which Nick requested much to the surprise of the flight attendants. He figured the peppers would kill the bacteria that had sickened many of his colleagues on previous flights. He loved the PK food and when, just before each landing, the pilot would come over the intercom and bolster the confidence of passengers by saying, “Inshallah, we will be landing soon.”
There was a colleague in Johannesburg, South Africa called Norman Bates, same as the infamous character in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Nick eventually met him and they went to lunch when he was on a business trip to South Africa. Norman was an interesting guy, a “communicator” who especially enjoyed the beauty of the Highveld and Cape Town. Years later, he read in an obituary that Norman Bates had been killed by a prostitute in his apartment, knifed to death.
© 2021 James B. Angell All Rights Reserved
Very neat but scary vignettes.
if any prospective diplomatic courriers read this, they might quickly change their mind! 😄 I think Nick is really Jim.