June 1994, Page 56

Special Report

Two Visits to Sarajevo: Total Elapsed Time 17 Minutes

By Richard H. Curtiss

As the plane bringing me from the Middle East landed at dusk, I counted eight camouflaged U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules transport aircraft with their propellers spinning on the U.S. military air base runway that parallels the civilian runway of sprawling Frankfurt International Airport. They were taking off for one of the airdrops of food and medicines into beleaguered Bosnian enclaves that had taken place almost nightly since Feb. 28, 1993.

In the half-dozen visits to Frankfurt I had made since the U.S. Air Force began what it calls "airland" relief flights into besieged Sarajevo on July 3, 1992, the massed military aircraft always intrigued me. I knew they were a major factor in the survival of the largely Muslim-led Bosnian government despite 22 months of relentless shelling by the heavy guns of the former Yugoslav army, now in the hands of Serbian "volunteers" and Bosnian Serb militiamen of the "Srpska Republic," which has broken away from the multicultural Republic of Bosnia.

Bosnia's ordeal, since it seceded from the former Yugoslavia following a March 1992 plebiscite of its 4.5 million citizens, has included Serb seizure of 70 percent of its territory, "ethnic cleansing" of Slavic Muslims and Croats from that territory resulting in 200,000 deaths, most of them Muslim civilians, and displacement of 2 million Muslims and Croats.

Indifference by many European governments and betrayal by the neighboring Republic of Croatia had ignited indignation among Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, and appalled public opinion in Europe and the United States. Public pressure finally resulted in the threat of U.S.-led NATO airstrikes that had ended the shelling of civilians in Sarajevo only days before my arrival in Frankfurt.

The "airland" relief flights I had come to observe started under the administration of President George Bush. The "airdrops" were initiated under President Bill Clinton. Together they have buttressed defense of its remaining territory by Bosnia's Muslim-led government and have blunted attacks by the Islamist critics who preach unremitting hostility to the West in general and the U.S. in particular. That's why, on the morning after my arrival, I called the U.S. Air Force joint information bureau at the Rhein-Main airbase to ask if I could accompany the humanitarian airlifts.

"When could you go?" asked Senior Airman Stuart Camp, who answered the telephone.

"Well, I was thinking of the airdrop tonight, the Sarajevo trip tomorrow and, unless I could stay for a couple of days in Sarajevo, I could catch up on sleep on the plane back to the U.S. the following day I said with forced casualness.

"That would be impossible," he said flatly. "We couldn't have your request processed in less than a day or two."

"Well, please do the best you can," I said, relieved that I was dealing with a seven-day-a-week operation, since he hadn't mentioned the fact that my request spanned a weekend. I hung up and the phone rang immediately. It was Airman Camp verifying my number, a good start.

The next call was from his commander to ask, "Who are you again?" This time I dropped two names of Pentagon personnel with whom I had spoken two weeks earlier before leaving for the Middle East.

"Never heard of him," he said of one in the Pentagon information chain. He didn't challenge the other, however, in the office of the secretary of defense.

I didn't mention that both had warned me that the Air Force "isn't running a taxi service," and that if I rode into Sarajevo on a military aircraft, I would have to fly right back out again on the same plane.

The next call was from Senior Airman Chris Thomas, one of Airman Camp's colleagues. He asked for my preference between a nighttime airdrop of up to six hours' duration or a 15-hours-or-more "airland" operation, which would involve three separate landings in Sarajevo before the aircraft returned to Frankfurt. He politely ignored my request to stay in Sarajevo, as predicted.

I said I would extend my stay in Frankfurt to do both flights. The final call, about six hours after my first contact, was an invitation to the base the following afternoon for a briefing, parachute instruction, and a fitting for a helmet and oxygen mask. The day after that I would fly to Sarajevo. The following evening, Easter Sunday, I could accompany a night drop.

On Good Friday, April 1, I was met at the base by Airman Thomas. When I asked where he is from, he said that he lived as a child in both Iran and the Soviet Union, where his father was a U.S. government employee, but grew up in the Washington, DC area. His present duty station, for the third year of a four-year enlistment, is Spangdahlen Air Force Base in Germany. He volunteered for temporary duty in Frankfurt with the relief flights of "Operation Provide Promise" because "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in something both historic and meaningful in terms of helping people," he explained. It also provides an unparalleled learning experience in terms of his Air Force duties as a public affairs specialist.

He introduced me to Airman Camp, who had just completed a slide presentation on "Operation Provide Promise" for members of U.S. and European relief groups who have helped assemble some of the food, medicines, blankets and even mattresses that have been delivered to Bosnia. Camp was one month into a 90-day tour with Provide Promise. Already he's spent a lot of time conducting "distinguished visitors" (DVs) and helping journalists. Thomas, whose tour had begun only a few days earlier, conducted another slide presentation for me and presented me with a press kit on the relief operations. As of that day, April 1, Provide Promise had completed 1,591 "missions," meaning actual aircraft landings in Sarajevo, in the 21 months since it began, and had delivered 42,928.7 tons of supplies.

The operation already exceeded the airlift portions of such recent humanitarian delivers supplies to the Kurds of northern Iraq, "Provide Hope," which delivered supplies to republics of the former Soviet Union, and "Restore Hope," which provided relief shipments for Somalia.

However, it comes nowhere near the massive airlift which, beginning in June 1948, delivered from Rhein-Main and seven other bases 2,325,000 tons of food, medicine and even coal over a 15-month period to three airfields in the Allied administered sectors of Berlin, isolated deep inside the Soviet zone of military occupation. Monuments to that mother of airlifts stand at the U.S. base in Frankfurt from which supplies originated, and at Berlin's Templehof airfield where relief flights touched down.

Next I was greeted by Brig. Gen. Donald Loranger Jr., a youthful-looking 50-year-old Montanan. His 27 years of Air Force experience were made to order for his present role as commander of the 435th Airlift Wing, which utilizes the services of 900 U.S. military personnel voluntarily gathered in Frankfurt expressly for the relief operation.

He has reinforced years of tactical airlift experience with assignments to the Air War College, the International Affairs Division of Air Force headquarters in Washington, DC, and to the staff of the Supreme Allied Commander in Brussels.

With German and French aircraft supplementing his own command, which in turn takes its orders on what to drop and where to drop it from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, he briefs visitors from all over the world. Guests earlier in the week had included Mrs. Sadako Ogata, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, who is responsible for 18 million refugees and another 20 million persons displaced in their own lands like Iraq's Kurds, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright. Both proceeded to Sarajevo where Ambassador Albright, in an echo of President John Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" statement in walled-in West Berlin, proclaimed in Serbo-Croatian, "I am a Sarajevan" in surrounded Sarajevo.

In Frankfurt, General Loranger is not only in command, but in his element. He politely countered implications in my questions that only the United States could have provided the logistical backbone for such a massive and sustained effort by paying tribute to the selfless dedication of the French and German aircrews flying their own aircraft as part of the Frankfurt-based effort. He also cited the self-discipline exhibited by the four UNPROFOR monitors stationed in Frankfurt by the warring Bosnian parties.

To check out any suspicions that somehow the aircraft are smuggling arms to Bosnia, two Serbs, a Croat and a Bosnian Muslim are authorized to make personal inspections of outgoing cargoes at any time they choose. Despite the unspeakable atrocities in their homeland, the four representatives of the three warring parties have maintained cooperative relations with the squadron, and correct relations with each other.

The general's personal feelings slipped past his professionalism only once, after I commented that many European powers had seemed unable to organize effective measures to help the Bosnians until the U.S. belatedly assumed a leadership role. Without acknowledging my premise, he exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be terrible to be from a country that didn't care?"

My last pre-flight interview was with Col. Rick Ash, who was assigning places to the pilots for the evening's airdrop when we arrived. An American Airlines pilot based in Chicago, he did a 30-day tour of Air Force reserve duty with Provide Promise in the summer of 1993 and had returned in the spring of 1994 for a 90-day tour as commander of the 37th Airlift Squadron, which actually carries out both the airland and airdrop operations.

Asked to assess the unprecedented night drops of 1,000-pound pallets fitted with parachutes aimed at open spaces just outside the besieged towns, but within the defense perimeters of the Muslim-led government forces, he said cheerfully:

"At the beginning, we didn't know just how good we were. " Because of the danger of hostile fire, the planes drop their bundles from 10,000 feet. To date, although some planes landing in Sarajevo have sustained bullet or shrapnel damage, and one Italian plane was shot down in 1992, none of those engaged in the airdrops have been hit.

Thanks to highly sophisticated navigational devices that not only pinpoint the aircraft's location within a few feet, but also calculate airspeed, windspeed and other factors relevant to the long descent, the accuracy of the airdrops is about the same as that expected from drops at more normal 500-to-1,500-foot altitudes.

With the decline in U.N. requests for drops since the just-concluded Croat-Muslim cease-fire, squadron commander Ash had been able to give 10-day vacations to some personnel who had been working for months on 12-hour shifts, four days on and two days off, and aircraft crewmembers who had been working 15-hour shifts every other day on air-ground missions into Sarajevo.

Asked to assess the motivations of his all volunteer command, made up of Air Force regulars, reservists, and members of Air National Guard units, Colonel Ash at first seemed to play down altruism with a nonchalance that increasingly seems a part of U.S. military culture. For some reservists, he said, it's a job that pays better than what they would be doing at home. Others want the valuable professional experience, and still others are attracted by the opportunity to help people who badly need it.

Hanging over his desk was a framed letter in broken English handed by a child at Sarajevo airport to an aircraft loadmaster thanking all participants in Provide Promise for their sacrifices on behalf of the people of Sarajevo. Beaming with pride by this time, the young professional pilot said he previously had ferried supplies to victims of natural disasters, whom he compared to victims of the current political disaster in the former Yugoslavia. "It's nice to be involved with a very positive result, as in this case," he explained.

Last stops were along the flight line. First a diminutive female airman fitted me for a helmet and oxygen mask. Because there is less cargo to carry now and the pace is more relaxed, she and other newly arrived ground crew members had just made their first airdrop trips as observers. There also are women in the U.S. aircrews, as well as aircrews of some of the other participating countries. Next, a tall and cheerful African-American airman instructed me in the intricacies of parachutes. He explained that if I pulled the red ring on my parachute too soon, it would foul up everyone else's escape. On the other hand, if I pulled the emergency ring too late, I would be fouled up. As one who has trouble with the common can opener, I prayed that whoever was behind me in an emergency would be charitable enough to pull the right ring at the right moment before shoving me out the door.

The last visit was to the vast hangars where the cargos are assembled. Starting with acres of flour, cooking oil, blankets, sleeping bags and packets of medicines to be dropped near hospitals, the individual pallets are made up on assembly lines. Gleaming through their plastic wrappings were labels revealing that their contents had been supplied to UNHCR by Germany, Japan, Austria, Turkey, Denmark, Norway, Great Britain, Italy, Pakistan, Canada, France, New Zealand, Switzerland, the U.S., the European Community and the World Health Organization, among others.

There also were pallets of vegetable seeds to be dropped on besieged areas. Where a pallet of seeds landed undetected last spring and was dispersed over a wide area, according to Airman Thomas, a field of beans, peas and squash later was discovered by foraging inhabitants.

Most amazing is a technique developed for the first time during Operation Provide Promise to scatter individual meals over a wide area. The purpose is to prevent any one faction from getting them all and selling them, and also to avoid danger to persons and buildings below. A cardboard container is filled with a variety of meals and then slit part-way down on all four sides. As the containers are kicked out of the plane over the target area, they open and 6,000 separate packets begin their individual descent to earth.

The airmen like this technique especially because the pallet on which the meals are packed remains on the plane, and only the cardboard boxes have to be replaced. Other innovations of Provide Promise are special menus which, although they are packaged like the "meals ready to eat" (MREs) of Desert Storm fame, are adapted to the needs of a population that does not eat pork, is accustomed to a mix of more vegetables and less meat in general, and has been undernourished over a long period. The resulting Humanitarian Daily Rations (HDRs) contain six different menus. They emphasize beans and lentils, and contain 1,900 to 2,000 calories each. They also are better for U.S. taxpayers. An MRE costs $4.60 and is only one meal. The HDRs prepared for Operation Provide Promise feed one person for an entire day at a total cost of $3.95.

Airborne With Groundair

Airman Camp, a 26-year-old public affairs specialist with six years' of Air Force service, met me at the base gate early the next morning. He was cheerful about the all-day-Saturday assignment. It would be only his third journey to Sarajevo, and it would give him a chance to interview crew members for articles for their hometown papers.

His father had been in the Air Force and he had grown up near bases in Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois. He had spent his first four-year enlistment in Arkansas, and then had volunteered for a public affairs assignment at the Royal Air Force Station in Alconbury, England. From there he had volunteered for 90 days of temporary duty with Operation Provide Promise.

One of the papers he had me sign was an agreement not to reveal exact times or altitudes of the flights, to be judicious in photographing cockpit equipment, and, of course, to absolve the U.S. Air Force of responsibility for any mishaps that might occur. That done, we climbed into a bus for a drive down the flightline where aircraft were warming up.

At one point the bus halted at a plane marked "Tennessee Air National Guard," which apparently already was too full to take on a party of Bosnians to be ferried back to Sarajevo. We all headed for another plane labeled "Kentucky Air National Guard."

The Bosnians included an elderly man who had been medically evacuated four months earlier, and his daughter and granddaughter. All of them were glowing at the prospect of returning home to a city emerging into the sunlight after 22 months of shelling.

"I would go back even if it were not peaceful, " the daughter said. She declined to give her name, however, because "you never know what might happen."

Other passengers were a Bosnian U.N. employee who had left Sarajevo only five days earlier for dealings with German manufacturers of water pumps, and another man who smiled cheerfully as he greeted me in English. I never learned his occupation, however, because he fell asleep almost the moment we were strapped into folding hammocks along the sides of the C-130 Hercules aircraft, just in front of four massive one-ton pallets of flour and cooking oil that filled all of the rest of the cargo hold.

Once we were underway, conversation was impossible because of the noise. The crew wore headsets for electronic communication and passengers were issued earplugs to make the noise bearable. There was a foldaway bathroom at the very back, which could be reached via a seemingly perilous squeeze along the side of the cargo pallets, or by scampering across the top of them.

I was seated across from radioman Michael A. Levy, of National City, CA, a 30-year-old with 11 years of regular Air Force duty as a radio repairman. He was only a week from the end of 90 days of temporary duty with Provide Promise. A veteran already of 80 "missions," he explained that this did not mean that he had flown virtually every day. An airdrop was one mission, but each of the Sarajevo landings scheduled today also would be counted as a mission.

Asked how he felt about his volunteer tour, he confessed that he had enjoyed the high-pressure atmosphere, the opportunity to serve in the air instead of in his normal ground assignments, and the challenge of helping to keep the flights on a tight schedule through crowded and nearly perpetually overcast skies. As for his role in history, he said there would be "time to think about that later," when he returned to his wife and two children in California and repairing Air Force radio equipment at March Air Force Base near Riverside.

Most active scamperer during the flight was the loadmaster, Master Sergeant Chris Shuman, a 33-year-old reservist with 16 years of Air Force duty from Euless, TX. Like most of the crew, he was from a Dallas Air National Guard unit and to date had had only four previous Provide Promise missions. The most exciting thing for him so far, he said, was being entrusted with the return of Bosnian evacuees to Sarajevo. He was as solicitous of his charges as if they were generals, diplomats or other DVs. "

Another newcomer to Provide Promise but a veteran member of the 181st Airlift Wing from Dallas was 54-year-old Technical Sergeant Homer L. Bennett of Wichita Falls, TX. With only four missions to Sarajevo, he was frankly pleased with the role of delivering supplies to victims of war and aggression. His last major operation had been during Desert Storm, when the wing had been stationed at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates and had worked night and day to transport to the front equipment, supplies and personnel, "including the entire 82nd Airborne division. "

Working on the aptly named "deck," reached by a flight of stairs at the front of the plane, were the pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer and navigator, all from the Dallas-based airlift unit. Since they were too busy to talk during the flight, we spoke during brief intervals on the ground.

The first such interval began three hours after departure from Frankfurt, after a delay when a relief flight from Ancona, Italy, missed its first pass through the clouds into Sarajevo, and had to return for a second try. When our plane broke though the clouds, the high-rise buildings of downtown Sarajevo were partially wreathed in mist, but the damage to the houses and apartment buildings ringing the airport was unnerving, with many roofless or burned out, and the windows in all of them broken.

The view from the C-130's tiny port-holes we taxied to the battered terminal building was exactly what every American has seen on television. Blue-helmeted U.N. forces manned white painted armored personnel carriers scattered among zigzagging slit trenches and dugouts under heavily sandbagged roofs. Forklifts raced between other aircraft toward us as we rolled to a halt. Our plane's massive tailramp, above which the fold-out toilet was perched, and upon which the baggage of the Bosnian evacuees had been stacked, slid downward and two blue-helmeted rain-soaked French troops leaped aboard.

They halted momentarily at the unaccustomed sight of civilian baggage, but then removed it into a covered vehicle under the solicitous custody of loadmaster Shuman. Then the French cargo handlers went to work, wedging themselves between the giant pallets and manhandling the first down a ramp and onto a forklift. As the loaded forklift backed away it instantly was replaced by another, and the two French troopers wedged themselves behind the second pallet and repeated the performance of bracing their feet against the third pallet while applying pressure from their backs to get the second one moving.

The third pallet was a problem because heavy wear had bowed it just enough to keep it from sliding easily down the rollers lining the floor of the cargo hold. The taller French soldier shouted at the shorter one, though it was impossible to hear anything with one of the motors of the C-130 still running. Loadmaster Shuman attached straps to the pallet to get added leverage and Airman Camp added his broad ac to those of the French troopers.

When no one was looking, Radioman Levy slipped a tin of fruit juice and some containers of applesauce and custard from the box lunches provided crew and passengers to the short soldier who had been shouted at, who nodded his thanks. The gifts, I have no doubt, soon found their way into the hands of the children who could be seen standing in the rain outside the airfield fence.

The third pallet finally slid down the rollers and was followed almost immediately by the fourth. Then a large bundle of empty pallets and canvas pallet covers was loaded aboard, the backdoor slid up and our plane taxied away as another plane broke through the clouds to land. The moment it cleared the runway, we roared off for the 45-minute flight to Split, once an Adriatic vacation spot, and now a major port of entry in Croatia for relief supplies arriving by sea.

At Split, the loadmaster was distraught, because the delays for removing baggage and the stuck pallet had increased the turnaround time from the desired five or six minutes to 11 minutes. Worse, however, the missed pass at the Sarajevo airport by another plane had thrown the entire day's schedule out of kilter. Since there was not enough cargo at Split to engage all of the available aircraft anyway, it was decided that some, including ours, would make only one more trip to Sarajevo that day. Crewmembers counting missions may have been disappointed, but I was delighted at the prospect of talking to other crewmembers as we waited at Split with the engines finally turned off.

The 31-year-old pilot, Capt. John D. Jordan of Arlington, TX, called himself a "reserve bum," whose principal occupation over the past 10 years had been with the Air Force. Now 31 years old with a wife and two daughters, he is on a waiting list for employment as a commercial pilot with Southwest Airlines.

His principal impression from his two previous flights into Sarajevo was of the devastation wrought on the Bosnian capital by the siege. His previous overseas experience had been with another U.S. Air Force wing stationed at Al Khargoasis near Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. He had arrived only days before the night-and-day operations of Desert Storm. Afterward, he had visited Riyadh once, for a day, and then the unit had returned to the U.S.

Capt. Dave Scott Purtle of Austin, TX, the 34-year-old co-pilot, was a nine-year Air Force veteran who had made one previous trip to Sarajevo. Navigator Roy Rathbun was not a Texan, having come from Redkey, IN, but was based n Dallas. This was the 36-year-old veteran of eight years in the Air Force's fourth mission into Sarajevo, and he still was awed by the damage.

Although he was only 29, Staff Sergeant Kenneth P. Day of Carrollton, TX, the flight engineer, was another veteran of Provide Promise, having completed -55 or more missions. " He was married with eight years of Air Force service.

After watching the landing of a British military aircraft and the arrivals and departures of civilian aircraft from Croatian Airlines and Provence Airlines, we walked over to a Swedish military transport which had followed us into Sarajevo and now into Split. While I photographed the fuselage stenciled with depictions of sacks of flour, signifying relief missions, two red crosses signifying medical evacuation flights, and a blue sack midway in the array signifying completion of the first 50 missions, Airman Camp and the Swedish pilot exchanged unit patches. This involved slipping extra patches out of the many pockets in Air Force flight suits, each slapping the velcroed patch on the other's arm, and a brotherly handshake. I reflected that, except for the velcro, not much had changed in the nearly 50 years since I had exchanged military souvenirs with British, French and Russian soldiers in Germany.

For the next brief flight back to Sarajevo we were joined by Democratic Congressman Frank McCloskey of Indiana, who had spent the night in Croatia and now was scheduled for a day or two in the city he personally had helped save with his persistent prodding of the Clinton administration over many months to take a more assertive role. His activism, which involved writing many articles (including one in this magazine) and participating in radio and television talk shows, even had extended to providing a job in his office for one of the five State Department officials who had resigned to protest U.S. and U.N. inertia in the face of Serbian genocide.

While I reflected that the Air Force does provide taxi service after all, if you're a Congressman, Radioman Levy finished a pocket book he had been reading and gave it to Airman Camp. I gave the newspaper I had finished to Airman Levy, and we all rummaged through our box lunches for anything remaining.

The landing this time was in driving rain, but the French Loaders worked rapidly and Airman Levy barely had time to slip some more box lunch goodies to one of them for the kids before the cargo door snapped shut again in less than six minutes.

As our empty plane took off for what turned out be less than two and a half hours back to Frankfurt, those in the cargo hold fell into a deep sleep, despite bumping and shaking through the apparently ever-present clouds over the former Yugoslavia. I under stood then why loadmasters and radiomen can work longer hours and more frequently than the crew "on the deck," who were charged with getting us through overcast skies crowded with returning "airland" and outgoing "airdrop" aircraft.

Exactly 12 hours after I had arrived at the base we touched down again, preceded and followed by a parade of returning cargo planes. Only as we drove to the terminal did I realize that we had been joined by another passenger, a tall clean-cut Bosnian wearing a U.N. badge who had come to replace the Muslim UNPROFOR cargo inspector, who had not been home to Sarajevo since the airlift had begun.

At midday on Sunday, the phone rang and Airman Thomas, who was to accompany me on that night's airdrop, told me he had bad news. "All airdrops for tonight have been cancelled," he said. "I don't know why. Probably the U. N. hasn't assigned us any targets for tonight." He would be happy to see, however, that I got aboard an airdrop as soon as they resumed.

I thanked him but said I thought it was time to go home. I was disappointed, but hoped the cancellation meant that soon such flights would no longer be necessary. Meanwhile, there would be no new impressions crowding out the memory of the final conversation with the Bosnian Muslim inspector as we took him to the base hotel. Despite the devastation, he said, life was "beautiful" in Sarajevo now that the shelling had stopped.

"Thank God for America," he said, with tears in his eyes.

"It's not just America," Airman Camp had admonished. "There are many countries involved."

"No," the young Bosnian insisted. "We thought no one cared. Then you Americans saved us."

"But President Bush or President Clinton should have done it earlier, " I demurred. "One word from President Clinton a year ago might have ended your suffering."

"Maybe you don't like Bill Clinton," the young man persisted. "But in Bosnia we love him. He saved Sarajevo."

I hope so.

Richard H. Curtiss is the Executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.