When Secret Mystery Planes Landed At The Air Bases Where I Was Stationed

[DGUtley]

When Secret Mystery Planes Landed At The Air Bases Where I Was Stationed - It may sound like fiction, but on rare occasions, ordinary air bases have extraordinary mystery visitors. It happened to me, twice.

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In the 2004 and 2005 time frame, the Global War On Terrorism was in full swing with a high ops tempo. The United States Air Force’s Air Combat Command made a routine out of keeping a bomber rotation at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and that’s how the author found his way there. B-1s, B-52s, and the occasional B-2 regularly made deployments there to stage for combat missions over Afghanistan.


Actually a United States capable of receiving the Space Shuttle, Diego Garcia is a part of the British Indian Ocean Territories comprising the greater Chagos Archipelago. Its extreme isolation has made it a hotbed for unsubstantiated accusations of classified and even nefarious activity. I never observed anything nefarious, but it was entertaining reading about how the tent I lived in was supposedly part of a CIA “black site” for terrorist detainees. If the Air Force’s rowdy flightline maintainers and their tent city could be considered detainees in the Global War On Terror, then an ounce of truth could be credited towards the metric ton of false information that could be found on the internet about the remote Indian Ocean outpost.


During one week in 2005, we were advised that the Navy was conducting sensitive operations out of a large, red, dilapidated hangar at the Northern end of the airfield near the passenger terminal and base operations building. Air Force personnel were advised to stay away. For the entirety of the week, the hangar appeared unused and empty. One night during that week, the flightline was evacuated. The base was locked down and Air Force personnel were advised to stay inside and away from windows to protect an incoming classified aircraft.


We never heard a thing....



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https://getpocket.com/explore/item/w...-was-stationed

[Standing Wolf]

I spent a couple of months on Diego Garcia ca. 1980 with my squadron, on detachment from Okinawa. At that time the island was still pretty undeveloped, but there were hundreds of Seabees (Navy construction battalion types) building buildings, extending the landing strip, dredging out the harbor to accommodate larger ships, etc. Definitely no frills then, but it was a very cool place in a lot of little ways.



This was - possibly still is - Diego Burger. They served what they called "Donkey Burgers", the idea being that they were using meat from the island's wild donkeys, descended from the donkeys that were used to transport coconuts from the plantations to the coast back in the day. The idea of that being to annoy the British, who were very protective of the donkeys and of their side of the island generally. We did get to visit the plantations once, with their slave quarters still standing. Diego Burger also offered soft serve ice cream cones, which began melting in the intense heat before you had them in your hand, so you had to eat them very quickly.

The other form of indigenous life on the island was the coconut crabs.



These things are the stuff of nightmares. Upon our arrival we were warned not to fall asleep on the beach, lest a crab mistake your head for a coconut. We were used to getting box lunches before a flight, but the galley wasn't set up for that, so we were given the raw ingredients and we had to cook in an electric skillet on the plane. They always gave us a big hunk of very fatty bacon, which no one liked, so one of my collateral duties was to walk around the flightline at zero-dark-thirty tossing chunks of bacon near the bushes for the coconut crabs - which would waddle out, take the bacon in their claws, and go back under the bushes.

There was a movie shown every night - this was back in the big metal film reel days - in a "theatre" that consisted of a concrete slab with a roof and folding chairs, with the movie projected onto a white wall at one end. Refreshments were beer and soda, and the tradition was that when you finished a beer you slammed the can down on the floor by your feet. Occasionally a guy who'd had too many would absent mindedly do the same with a bottle, and then the lights would come on and they'd stop the movie while he swept up the glass.

I can remember standing on the beach looking out at the ocean, thinking that I was literally a thousand miles from anyplace else.

[Omar]

The other form of indigenous life on the island was the coconut crabs.

Wow, that's a creepy looking thing. Looks like a giant spider.

[Common]

This is a horseshoe crab, they get big but not this big, this is a thing of nightmares