You called, sire?
After you beat me out of that generator deal I really shouldn't even be speaking to you, so to speak, but...
As to the gunfight at the Chicken Tetrazzini Corral on 10 September 2001:
One of the other two pilots is going to keep his bullet (fragment, I think it is,) since it's embedded in his lower back in a place where it's riskier to try to remove it than to just leave it there. A little to one side and he'd be living life in a wheelchair. Or a little to the other and he might have bled to death instead of just making a real mess in the back of that Ssangyong bus. I gave him some first aid but shock had made him stop bleeding on his own by the time I got his pants down.
The other pilot has recovered from his leg wound, I think. Again, he was lucky not to have been more seriously wounded.
The driver did a great job in that even though he was really scared he stayed at the helm and responded to my shouts of "Go! Go! Go!"
The engineer next to him and the one down the back were both too frightened to be much use to anyone but that is life. I guess no one had ever shot at them before?
In the immediate aftermath one of our managers was brushing the back of my shirt, when I asked him why. He said, "You have something on the back of your shirt, lint or something," when we just thought I had brushed up against something. I didn't think about it any further at the time.
I was in the very same bus on the way to the BRC from the airport, returning from leave following this palaver, when I was sat right behind the seat I had occupied during the shooting incident. I then noticed a tiny hole in the seat back covering and another tiny hole in the seat back facing. Connecting the dots showed that a bullet fragment must have gone slanting across my shoulders as I was bent over keeping my head down.
I knew about the bullet through the headrest, the bullet through the windscreen and the bullet that went just past my ankles but I had missed this other bullet fragment. Once I saw the holes then I knew that the lint on my shirt must have come from seat upholstery blown out by that fragment, definitely "the one with my name on it."
Normally one of my engineer friends would sit next to me but he had decided to have the full English breakfast and come on the 0900 bus that day. Otherwise I expect one or the other of us would have been hit too. So much for fate, eh?
I told this story to a German friend when he just looked at me and asked, "Why are you still working there?" All I could do was shrug. Well, I suppose it had something to do with money... There is a lot more to it than that but money talks. It is just that it probably doesn't talk as loudly as your average manager thinks it does! You need to live to spend it.
I am working in North Africa now, out in the Sahara flying a Twin Otter that is based at a bush strip. The locals are much easier to work with than Nigerians and it's much safer here but it is still Africa. Management, well, it is still aviation with all the problems trying to squeeze a buck out of this business.
On the whole, yes, I am much happier now, not wondering when the next attack might come. That is to say, in Isolo we would go right past the same corner there by Chicken Tetrazzini in the same bus at almost the same time of day, when all that had changed was that now we had the famous Kevlar curtains. That really was pretty lame, yes, given that armoured vehicles are available.
Another thing was that the account of what happened was rearranged so that we were shot up driving away, when the reality was that those clowns were just going to keep shooting until they were out of ammo, I think. I counted about ten shots before I thought, "Well, no sense hanging around any longer, I think." These guys must have failed Armed Robbery 101 and got a "Must Do Better" in Basic Marksmanship, not that I am complaining about that.
Until it happens to you there is some mechanism that lets you think it isn't going to happen to you. Afterwards it becomes much harder to carry on.
Good luck to all of you still carrying on. In fact, if the deal hadn't fallen through I was headed back yet again but then they knocked that one on the head. I found that I really didn't mind all that much. I think you will find that most of the guys who have left find that life outside is better than life inside so that you might want to think about leaving while the leaving is good.