ECUADOR

Journal:
Monday, 7/7/08
Manta FOL, Ecuador
Tanker/AWACS/Coast Guard/Navy Maintenance Hangar, Eloy El Faro Airbase
11:11 p.m.
It’s another night at work here at Manta, on a trip which has so far been characterized by an almost totally uneventful, easy-going routine of work, gym and chow hall. Taking those in reverse order:
• I have rated the chow hall here at Manta as Very Good, second only to ‘Excellent’ in the Wes Weaver Rating Scale of Military Dining Facilities. Only the quality of the ice cream (freezer burnt) and lack of Thousand Island dressing are holding it back. The government contractor – ITT – which runs the place – is very responsive to customer feedback, which is probably as much an indication of the size of the tax trough they’re feeding from as a genuine desire to please the camo-clad rabble who are their daily denizens. The Ecuadorians who work at the chow hall are friendly and eager to please, which means that this evening’s question about the ice cream has five gallon buckets of Vanilla and Butter Pecan being Fedexed from Quito right now.
• The gym here is also a monument to incidental DOD largesse, stocked with the latest equipment, air-conditioned comfort, and similarly-friendly Ecuadorian staff. I’ve run on the treadmills while watching the South American satellite feed of ESPN – more soccer, fewer Home Depot commercials, same old SportsCenter – and, curiously, a channel devoted wholly to the NBA. The fitness center’s rental equipment is showing its age, though. We were halfway through a 7-mile mountain-bike trek yesterday when Josh’s left crank fell off his bike. I backtracked and found the nut, which he fingertightened about every 10 minutes the rest of the trip.
• Things are pretty low-key at work. I started typing this while sitting at an aluminum picnic table located near the open end of a large hangar, looking out over the flightline and runway. There are Navy sub-hunting airplanes, an AWACs, but no tanker. It’s flying. Through three days, I’ve done a lot of sitting, because the airplane takes off and comes back without being broken. Behind me in the hangar is a Coast Guard HC-130, the kind that flies around looking for drug boats. Five Coasties have been hard at work on a prop change for much of the shift. The weather’s nice – cool, breezy, very nice night.
I can’t say much about the mission here, except to say that it involves drug interdiction and looking for bad people in aircraft and boats. It also involves the support of ground-based military personnel in places where, officially, there are no ground-based personnel. One of them starts with a ‘C’ and ends with ‘olumbia.’
The group of people with whom I am here is an ‘A-Team’ of sorts, composed of ‘experts’ in several different fields. Our crew chiefs – Don, Jennifer and Kris – are in charge of the general maintenance on the airplane, things like changing tires, wiping windshields, and conducting pre- and post-flight inspections. I take care of electronic and mechanical problems in several different systems, ranging from engine instrumentation to the autopilot to the flight data recorder. Along with me, one other pointy-head type, Dan, takes care of radar and radios. We’ve got an engine guy, Josh, a hydraulics guy, Matt, an electrician, Rick, and a machinist, Josh. There’s a supply girl, whose name I forget because she never speaks, and Matt, our Maintenance Operations Center guru who does…not much, really, since we’ve only got one aircraft and there’s not much coordination to be done. The boss is Larry, my roommate. ‘Laissez-faire’ doesn’t even begin to describe his rather low-key management style, which, as it turns out, is perfect for this operation.
We all get along pretty well. In any group there are those who are high-strung, those who are the butt of jokes, and those who are hard workers. Most of our conversations degenerate pretty quickly into the kind of off-color commentary that is typical in groups like ours. We make fun of everyone: the Navy guys, the Coasties, the Wackers (AWACS crews and maintainers) and generally cut up constantly.
On the operations side is Mark, the big boss. Under him is a crew coordination person, and Jeannie. I’ve known Jeannie for a long time, but I don’t have a clue what she does. Then there’s Linda, the intel operative. We’ve got a couple of flight crews – pilots and boom operators – all good guys who are a whole lot of fun. Today, for example, one of the crews bought huge sombreros over in Montecristi, a nearby town. They all wore them to the chow hall for dinner, then to the flightline to get in the jet, which had to amuse everyone but the uptight active duty people who were watching. The co-pilot, Kurt, made them all don the sombreros for takeoff. It’s hard to imagine their conversation with the Ecuadorian air traffic controllers didn’t include some colorful commentary and wacky hijinks, Speedy Gonzales style. The only Spanish words Kurt knows are ‘Hola’ and ‘Cerveza,’ neither of which would be helpful in that particular situation.
Among the other notable features of my host country of Ecuador is the plethora of smells that one must endure on a daily basis. Let’s see, there’s…raw sewage, coming from the ‘river’ at the end of the runway. There’s burning trash, 24/7. There’s nasty fish smell (a tuna cannery in town). Lovely.
TVOR