Free Afterburners by William Robert Stanek Page B

contents oozed into your leg. You did this first with the atropine then followed it with the 2-pam chloride. If symptoms persisted, you were supposed to do this again after ten minutes.
        It could have been worse. The older auto-injectors required you to inject the antidote manually into your leg by squeezing and rolling the tube down the way you would a tube of toothpaste. I lay there in the quasi-darkness thinking about all of this. This was, indeed, war; and nowhere was truly safe.
        The Alarm Red was followed ominously by Alarm Black, which meant imminent arrival or possible presence of nuclear, biological, or chemical contamination. This was a period of uncertainty. I was no longer just frightened but terrified by the very real possibility that there were weapons of mass destruction enroute to our location.
        Seconds ticked by. The air outside was balmy and still. It became so hot inside the protective suit that sweat poured down my face and into my eyes. The suit clung to my body. All I wanted to do was close my eyes, thinking that maybe if I did, when I opened my eyes again I’d find it was all a bad dream.
        As tends to happen in a bad dream, things got worse before they got better. One of the crewers started freaking out and running around the room. He was screaming something as he ran around the room. I don’t know what he was saying, but I really didn’t have to. He had let panic set it. Any thoughts running through his mind were surely worse than reality—at least that was my hope.
        I couldn’t help trying to remember if he were one of the newbies. Had he put on his suit and mask too late to prevent onset of chemical or biological agents that might be present in the air? Did he need to be injected with antidote? Was this just what it appeared to be—a panic attack?
        I nodded to PBJ next to me and together we tackled the crewer to the ground. As I turned him around, I realized it was Big John. His eyes were wild and unfixed as we turned him about to face us.
        It was then that the attack ended. The sirens stopped wailing. We couldn’t be sure that NBC contaminants were not present. We knew it was a necessary safety precaution. Still, I couldn’t help wondering and praying for the All Clear announcement.
        The All Clear was long in the coming. I slapped Big John’s shoulder reassuringly as I removed my mask.
        Shouts of joy erupted from the silent and mostly dark chamber. We’d find out later that Scud missiles had been launched at Israel. The alarms had been safety precautions and nothing more. If the attack had been real this day, some of us would have been dead or worse, myself most likely included—I didn’t dive for that mask as quickly as I should have.
        No one spoke of what Big John had done. We all went back to what we were doing before the alarms sounded. The inevitable preflight alert came at 20:30. I never got back to sleep after the Alarm Red and I still hadn’t eaten anything but an MRE the day before. I stuck my head in the faucet and turned on the cold water. The water was extremely cold due to the cool Turkish nights, but I needed it to wake me up and to clean the grime of a trying day.
        In the first days of the war there was so much uncertainty, so very much uncertainty, and even more confusion. We never knew when we were going to fly next. We never knew what was going to happen next. It was sleep when you got time if you got time.
        As the new day came, we were still sitting in intel getting the daily preflight intelligence briefing. The confusion we felt yesterday was gone, leaving a feeling of disorientation. We weren’t at all accustomed to sitting in a war room with an intelligence planner telling us about real-world packages we were going to support.
        Today the packages would be hitting enemy early warning radar sites, airfields, and aircraft, as well as chemical and biological storage