The chief jumped from his chair. "Be so kind, Madam, to point out the culprit and I will shoot him on the spot. This instant. He's dead. Then you shall take one of my servants who will serve you loyally and lay down his life for you."
Chuck and I were really concerned. The chief took out a pistol while our servants huddled in a corner, already practically dead from fright. I said, "No, no, chief, I didn't mean 'steal.' He must've been thirsty because he drank an entire pitcher of cream." We got the chief sufficiently calmed down to put away his gun, but it was close.
I was a grouch about servants because I had absolutely nothing to do from sunup to sundown. Chuck was out and busy. Susie was working at the international school and was gone most of the day, and there I was, staring out my bedroom window at the distant Himalayas. Ambassador Farland and his wife were down-home folks and had us over several times a week. Joe and Ginny were West Virginians, and we became good friends. But outside of embassy functions there was nothing to do. At a party one night with the Farlands I was talking to Bob Grant, the head of the population section of our Agency for International Development, and I said, "God, I'm so bored, I'm about to jump out of my skin. I can understand why many of the women who come over here don't last long.' He said, "Why don't you come to work for me? I can use some help." I said, "You must be kidding. I don't know beans about population planning.' He said, "Well, give it a whirl. I'll put you on a contract." I started working four hours a day and ended up working eight to ten hours a day and enjoying every minute of it.
Our job was to help the Pakistanis cut back on their enormous population growth. Birth control was not popular and seldom practiced. I wrote pamphlets that were distributed in villages all over the country and set up a library and catalog system on the subject that could be used by local officials involved in population planning. As for the condoms Chuck was always laughing about, most of the Pakistani men wanted nothing to do with them. We told each other, well, it is just a matter of getting the message across. But one of the male secretaries said to me, "The color makes it too embarrassing." I asked what he meant. "To a Moslem," he said, "white is the color of purity." I asked him, "What if they were orange or red or purple? Would that make a difference?" He thought it would. So, we ordered those darn things in every color of the rainbow.
I remember Chuck stopping by one evening when a bunch of us were packing them up for distribution.
He said, "What the hell are you guys coin'? Is there a party or something?" He thought they were colored balloons. We distributed orange, green, blue, red, and yellow rubbers by the thousands, and they became popular throughout Pakistan. Orange was the favorite color. We couldn't keep any orange condoms in stock.
Shortly after we had returned to Germany to start our tour, we became grandparents. Our son, Mike, who was an enlisted man in the Air Force, sent us a cable telling us that his Linda had delivered a healthy baby boy. We hadn't seen the little guy, and he was now fourteen months old. By then, we were in the middle of an India-Pakistan war, and Mike wired us that little Jason had cancer, that the outlook was uncertain, and the baby was going to be operated on.
I had to get back to be with them, and the ambassador pulled every string in the book to get me on the first plane out of there. By then, the Indians were shooting up the airport, so it wasn't easy. But I got to Denver to be with them, and Mike met me at the hospital and said the baby wasn't going to live. Jason had a huge neuroblastoma (cancer) on his adrenal gland. God, what a shock. I stayed the whole time he was in the hospital, more than a month during which he received radiation treatments, the whole bit. Then I flew back.
One month later, they operated on Jason again. That time, Chuck flew back to be there in case something happened. But they opened up that little dickens, and the tumor was dead. Thev just peeled it off his insides. We called him our miracle baby.
When we arrived in Pakistan in 1971, the political situation between the Pakistanis and Indians was really tense over Bangladesh, or East Pakistan, as it was known in those days, and Russia was backing India with tremendous amounts of new airplanes and tanks. The U.S. and China were backing the Pakistanis. My job was military adviser to the Pakistani air force, headed by Air Marshal Rahim Khan who had been trained in Britain by the Royal Air Force, and was the first Pakistani pilot to exceed the speed of sound. He took me around to their different fighter groups and I met their pilots, who knew of me and were really pleased that I was there. They had about five hundred airplanes- more than half of them Sabres and 104 Starfighters a few B-57 bombers, and about a hundred Chinese MiG 19s. They were really good, aggressive dogfighters and proficient in gunnery and air-combat tactics. I was damned impressed. Those guys just lived and breathed flying.
One of my first jobs there was to help them put U.S. Sidewinders on their Chinese MiGs, which were 1.6 Mach twin-engine airplanes that carried three thirty-millimeter cannons. Our government furnished them with the rails for Sidewinders. They bought the missiles and all the checkout equipment that went with them, and it was one helluva interesting experience watching their electricians wiring up American missiles on a Chinese MiG. I worked with their squadrons and helped them develop combat tactics. The Chinese MiG was one hundred percent Chinese-built and was made for only one hundred hours of flying before it had to be scrapped-a disposable fighter good for one hundred strikes. In fairness, it was an older airplane in their inventory, and I guess they were just getting rid of them. They delivered spare parts, but it was a tough airplane to work on; the Pakistanis kept it flying for about 130 hours.
War broke out only a couple of months after we had arrived, in late November 1971, when India attacked East Pakistan. The battle lasted only three days before East Pakistan fell. India's intention was to annex East Pakistan and claim it for themselves. But the Pakistanis counterattacked. Air Marshal Rahim Khan laid a strike on the four closest Indian air fields in the western part of India, and wiped out a lot of equipment. At that point, Indira Gandhi began moving her forces toward West Pakistan, and President Nixon sent her an ultimatum: An invasion of West Pakistan would bring the U.S. into the conflict. Meanwhile, all the Moslem countries rallied around Pakistanis and began pouring in supplies and manpower. China moved in a lot of equipment, while Russia backed the Indians all the way. So, it really became a kind of surrogate war-the Pakistanis, with U.S. training and equipment, versus the Indians, mostly Russian-trained, flying Soviet airplanes.
The Pakistanis whipped their asses in the sky, but it was the other way around in the ground war. The air war lasted two weeks, and the Pakistanis scored a three-to-one kill ratio, knocking out 102 Russian-made Indian jets and losing thirty-four airplanes of their own. I'm certain about the figures because I went out several times a day in a chopper and counted the wrecks below. I counted wrecks on Pakistani soil, documented them by serial number, identified the components such as engines, rocket pods, and new equipment on newer airplanes like the Soviet SU-7 fighter-bomber and the MiG 21 J, their latest supersonic fighter. The Pakistani army would cart off these items for me, and when the war ended, it took two big American Air Force cargo lifters to carry all those parts back to the States for analysis by our intelligence division.