The day had been trouble from the onset. La Casa Airlines had lost my bags coming from New Orleans and over 100 pounds of antibiotics I had begged borrowed and stolen were traveling in the belly of a 727 somewhere in South America. I was trapped along with about 400 other pitiful people in the sweltering terminal of Tegucigalpa’s only airport. An entire Honduran family sat against the wall beside me, toddlers crawling on the little group’s makeshift bags and rope wrapped boxes, the young mother weeping softly into her husband’s shoulder.

Just about everyone here had been displaced by the hurricane. It was a bad one. A storm that couldn’t make up its mind. It would move offshore every day and inshore, into the mountains, every night. Most of those I saw were homeless, their property literally washed away. Only the lucky ones had escaped without the loss of a family member. For five days the walls of water had blown in from the sea and sat over the steep fertile mountains of the central states. The little villages nestled along the tropical rivers had no recent history to warn them against the dangers. As the soil let go at the top the momentum carried everything with it and an avalanche of mud and rocks and trees instantly obliterated dozens of towns and settlements in the heart of the country. By the end of the sixth day over 10,000 people were known dead and 15,000 were missing. Most of the bridges were destroyed and the hydroelectric dams, the only source of power, were knocked offline. By the seventh day cases of cholera and typhoid were popping up throughout the country. By the tenth day those families and business people who had the means had flooded the airport to try and arrange an escape. That’s when I arrived.

I had worked on and off as a young medical missionary over the past couple of years and had grown to love the country of Honduras and her people. My wife and I had even thought about adopting one of the abandoned children from the agencies there. I had been following the news of the storm and when I heard of the outbreaks of cholera it reminded me of all the children we lost to that disease in Korea during my first mission experience a few years before.

Within hours I made the calls to my doctor friends all around the states of Arkansas and Mississippi. Some of them met me in the middle of the night at their clinics to rob their sample bins of the antibiotics and antidiarrheal medications I would need to take to the isolated villages. I begged my way onto a flight in New Orleans and now was dead-ended without my supplies or transportation to San Pedro Sula.

In frustration I wandered out of the mud caked terminal and onto the tarmac. At the end of one of the open fronted hangars was a Douglas C-47 Dakota in camo paint. A group of Honduran Red Cross workers were milling about looking at the old war bird. After a brief question and answer session in Spainglish I found that they were waiting on a pilot and mechanic to arrive via helicopter to crank up the old girl. She was Honduran military equipment and hadn’t been flown in a couple of years and obviously hadn’t been cleaned in twice as many. Their idea was to fly supplies into several of the isolated areas with as many planes as the officials could scrounge together. This old girl, built for the US war effort back in 1942, was going back to work!

I had flown in several C-47’s and DC-3’s through the years. A friend of mine used them to fly genetically superior one-day-old chicks (yes, chicks, as in chickens) into Mexico and Central America and occasionally I would ride with his crew and several hundred thousand peepers. But I really fell in love with the planes when we would fly from the mainland in Mexico and Honduras over to the islands of Guanaha and Roatan and Cozumel back in the early 1980’s. The Dakotas were used as huge, wonderful bush-planes, in and out of barely improved strips.

One old pilot, Captain Joe, would make the jump from La Ceiba to Roatan every morning, flying tourists for the scuba diving operations. After he unloaded most of the passengers he would take off on his way to Utila and deliver his morning newspaper route. He would have a pile of newspapers between the pilot and co-pilot seats and would open the pilot’s sliding window as he banked over some of the estates on the islands. With uncanny precision he would bomb the papers onto the lawns from a hundred feet AGL and wing off to the next drop, waving at the occasional early riser.

During my years of exploring the tropical reefs in that part of the world I discovered many of the Dakotas who gave up the fight and became permanent fixtures below the water. The "Gooney Birds" and Beech 18’s were favorites of the drug and contraband smugglers for more than three decades and many of both went off the ends of coastal runways or spent their last whiff of fuel out over the warm oceans of the Caribbean. Having investigated some of those wrecks first hand, I can assure you the majority were lost from no fault of the planes.

So here I was, just days after a devastating hurricane trying to beg a ride on a Dak who had been sitting so long that a crew of teenagers had been hired and were chasing iguanas from the fuselage. Within the hour we turned to watch an old Bell 47 come chopping in between the mountains, which surround Tegu’s airport. A tanned and interesting looking gringo flew the helicopter down within feet of the wingtip of the C-47. They told me his name was Jim Smith.

I had met maybe twenty different "Jim Smiths" in Central America and had come to recognize it as a cover for a lot of incognito ex-patriates. This Jim Smith obviously knew several of the officials there and conversed and joked with them in fluent Spanish. After a while he came around to me.

"So you’re needin to go to Sula?" he asked. He was really eyeing me over.

"Yes sir." I answered, "but I have to wait to see if my bags show up."

He laughed at my stupidity, "They’re probably being divided up by the flight crew down in Panama about now…you might as well write them off son."

"It would be a real crime for that many drugs to go to waste." I said

"Damn you’re sumthin! You bringin drugs into the jungle when most people are tryin to figure how to fly em out. You got the wrong man buddy, I quit that stuff several years ago."

"No sir, I’m talking about antibiotics. I’ve got a load to get to one of my buddies down in Sula. We’ll be taking them back into the jungle from there"

"Are you with the blood suckers here?" he said, pointing to the Red Cross workers in their little red and white vests.

"No sir, just me, myself and I." He looked me over again, trying to figure out my angle.

"You a Holy man?" He wasn’t giving in to easily.

"I used to hang out with them to do some medical work, but I couldn’t handle the guilt trip they were laying on the natives. I go by myself now. I learn more that way." I said with complete honesty.

"Then you’re on, ex Holy man!" he laughed shaking my hand. "You may be okay but I ain’t flyin with any more of those holier than thou bastards."