Pilots

Stuff from my interviews of the old soldiers that may not make it into the book:

From a CASI(Continental Air Services International) a contract subsidiary of Continental Airlines, working for the CIA and USAID in Southeast Asia during the troubled times) pilot, refutations of rumors about the activities of pilots over Laos:

"You know about airmailing? You don't know what airmailing is? You sit on the drop door and…[take a dump out the door, or in its nastier expression chuck a prisoner out the door as an interrogation method for prisoner #2 who got to stay int he plane.] We didn’t do it. No. No unconventional ordnance. We did not do it."

"I remember we carried some kind of hybrid pig one time. It had a disease, like that one that eats you out, you know the flesh-eating virus, and it was eating at the carcass. We were just carrying it to fix it! It was a special hybrid. We had to take it to the vet. I mean, it was expensive! They brought it all the way from the states, and it caught some kind of disease, a virus. I mean, it was a big goddamn pig. A big white pig."

From an Air America Pilot:

"The people, when they send you down there, there was a radio operation there, and every flight, was monitored by the White House. And when we went out of there, same number on the back of the airplane, another C-123 would take off in Vientiane and cross into Thailand, in case they lost the engine, they’d drop the load in the jungle somewhere."