D - Diego Garcia

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Diego Garcia is another place I was sent to work beach detatchment.   I made the mistake of celebrating with a bunch of Marines a bit too much the night before I left Bahrain and staggered out to see this fine specimen of flight apparatus.

I do not know how I made it to Fujairah without tossing my cookies onto the uniform of a high-up Army brass sitting across from me (I was sideways in a jump seat next to the 1 crewmember of this plane).  He did ask me to avoid hitting his shoes!   Once we dropped over the mountains and landed in Fujairah, I transferred onto something a wee big larger.  

It actually looks fairly moderately sized here - but this C-5 was HUGE!!!!  I sat with another guy going to DG in with the crew.  These aren't made for passengers, that's for sure!  The take off was insane!  They had to make a really steep climb to make it over the mountains in the UAE.

So DG is a tiny TINY little atoll in the middle of nowhere, Indian Ocean.  The US Navy has a communications center and an airfield there.  The Lincoln was supposed to have mail routed there when it was in the area, but plans changed.  The Lincoln never went to Australia & New Zealand like it was supposed to and I ended up spending a week on the beach with the people stationed there.

There was a base club there, with a dancefloor on the beach.  I'm not sure why I was wearing my glasses instead of contacts, but I'd taken them off and stuck them in my shoe, and set those on top of a little shed near the bar.  Can you believe someone stole my shoes????

As I was waiting in the airport, waiting to get on the helicopter to fly back to the Lincoln, I looked at a map since I really had no idea where in the world I even was.  As I found it, it slowly sunk in that I had spent the week south of the Equator without being properly initiated - I knew I was going to be in trouble!  But that story is for my "I" post!

#AtoZChallenge