I was forty feet in the air, tangled in vines that were slowly giving way. Slowly is the operative term, and I sank into the tree slowly enough that my muddled wits could figure out what was happening and grab onto a branch. After that, it was just climbing down a tree.

We’d just finished dinner, when about a dozen Land Rovers came roaring down the dirt road, all with yellow flashing lights on top. They all stopped at a campsite within easy walking distance of ours. A couple of the guys went over to see what was going on.

They came running back, and said a dingo had taken a baby. The Land Rovers were full of rangers, and they wanted volunteers to help in the search.

So I grabbed a torch (flashlight), and since I didn’t want to face a dingo without some sort of weapon, I grabbed the souvenir I’d bought earlier that day from the local Aborigines – a hunting boomerang. Of course, I had no idea how to throw the thing, and probably couldn’t have hit the broad side of Uluru if I’d tried. But at least I had a weapon.

Okay, so I had a stick.

I don’t know how long we searched. I do know the batteries in my torch started dying. I do know the two young ladies who were with me were unarmed. And none of us were too eager to meet a wild animal in the dark. But we kept going. Because a baby’s life was at stake.

Unfortunately, you know how this story ended.

I didn’t even attend roll call, which in the military is almost unheard of during peacetime. What was happening? The base had an unexpected emergency landing, a foreign visitor: “the” Russian Antonov An-225 Mriya was on American soil and their primary air-to-air/air-to-ground radio was inoperative – because of the plane’s weight it doesn’t have the luxury of multiple system redundancies that US planes boast. A single radio failure was a serious problem for them.

Necessary minutia for sense of scale and scope of problem: Weighing in at 1,411,000 lbs (or 640 metric tons) the Mriya is a one-of -a-kind strategic airlifter capable of carrying a 105 ton Russian space shuttle on its back or carry oversized payloads in its vast cargo bay (6 Greyhound busses, 2 abreast, anyone?). At a height of 59.3 ft (18.1 m) it’s easy to feel dwarfed standing in its imposing shadow. It is larger and heavier than the US’s version, the C-5 Galaxy (at 550,000 lbs gross – counting the 2600 lbs of interior and exterior paint!). The Mriya has 6 wing mounted engines to a C-5′s 4, she also has an impressive landing gear train to support the massive weight.
Mriya
C-5 Fun Facts

On with the story: Rather than feel my head spin with all the abrupt pressure from the higher-ups and worried international visitors around me, I experienced that world-going-into-slow-motion sensation as my brain shifted into high gear. Once they briefed me on the situation I tried to alleviate their concerns with the confidence that the job will be done with time to spare. After you’ve done a number of jobs of troubleshooting, routine and preventative maintenance, time compliance upgrades, and the hands-on training of others you get a pretty good idea of how long certain jobs take to do. These folks also knew they could count on me to tell them if there might be any bad news, the why of it, and what options we had available to correct it – in this business withholding or watering down the truth only gets people killed. So, out of 3 other airmen on shift before me, each trained to do the same job I did, I had built up a strong level of trust, know-how, and ability that they selected me as the go-to person for such a job. But they still felt the need to panic until they saw the plane taxi out and be on its way.

The job was done in 10 minutes and we watched that big white bird taxi immediately toward the runway. Besides a lot of smiles, back pats, and shoulder squeezes my reward for a job well done under pressure was a verbal thanks from the DCM (Deputy Commander for Maintenance) and a brief paragraph highlighting the situation and events on my annual airman’s performance report (APR one year, EPR the next, go fig). Later, I also enjoyed dibs on other unique job requests.

It is a uniquely gratifying feeling that I, a 27 yr old female “Buck” Sergeant (“3-srtiper”), had averted a diplomatic incident between the US and the (then) Soviet Union.

Note: I had no idea at the time that the An-225 Mryia was the only working model of her kind.

Craziest was probably riding a horse at 75 years old (and I have the photos to prove it) because my husband wanted me to go riding with him as part of a cruise package. My only time on a horse was at the age of 17 and that was for about five minutes. I even rode that gentle animal in the surf and loved every minute of it.

The Most Over the Top experience was breaking into a house with my two girlfriends — we were 12 years old. We were acting as “spies” for our country during WWII and seriously believed we had to find out what the humming noise that emanated from the house was all about. We found a very expensive ham radio set, but we were too frightened to tell anyone. P.S. As a bunch of crazy girls we took time to jump on the beds.