Steve Mathisen No DM's

An American dad in an Ohio Home Depot parking lot pointed at his Ford F-150 pickup truck and gave me a sacred battlefield mission. "Hey buddy," he said. "Can you hold the edge of this plywood down for thirty seconds while I hook the ratchet strap?" "I will guard this timber with my life," I replied. "Haha, alright man, just lean on the corner so the wind doesn't catch it." I planted my sandals shoulder-width apart and pressed both palms onto the twenty sheets of plywood like a warrior holding a castle gate against a battering ram. "You good there, chief?" he asked, threading the bright orange strap through the metal teeth. "Nothing shall move while I draw breath," I told him, not blinking once. He cranked the steel handle four times until the webbing hummed like a bowstring. "Alright, step back a second, let me test the tension," he said. He reached out with two fingers, plucked the tight orange strap twice like a bass guitar string, and nodded at the sky. "Yep," he whispered solemnly. "That's not going anywhere." "Is that an ancient American spell of protection?" I asked. He grinned. "Honestly brother, if you don't slap the load and say those exact four words, the whole thing flies off on the highway." He handed me a cold root beer from his cooler and slapped my shoulder. "Couldn't have tied her down without you, partner."

If someone asks you how much two newborn babies are worth to the United States Air Force, tell them the exact price: two 200-million-dollar C-17 Globemaster III warplanes and an airborne refueling tanker over the Pacific Ocean. In May 2009, two tiny babies at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Okinawa, Japan were fighting for every breath. One was twenty days old. The other was a nine-month-old infant in severe heart and lung failure. To survive the seven-thousand-mile flight to Texas for open-heart surgery, the nine-month-old needed an external heart-lung bypass machine called ECMO. Within hours, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Daniel Dirnberger, Major Dr. Melissa Tyree, and the 59th Medical Wing turned a massive C-17 cargo jet at Kadena Air Base into a flying neonatal intensive care unit. Then the first C-17 suffered a mechanical failure right before takeoff while the babies' portable incubators began running low on medical air and battery power. The Air Force did not blink. Crews rushed the babies into the Kadena clinic for oxygen and immediately pulled a second 200-million-dollar C-17 Globemaster III onto the runway. And because landing in Alaska for fuel would cost five precious hours, the 168th Air Refueling Wing scrambled a tanker from Eielson Air Force Base to refuel the C-17 in mid-air over the Pacific, delivering both babies safely to Texas in fourteen hours flat. A superpower is not measured by the tanks in its cargo bay. It is measured by how fast it clears that bay for two tiny cribs.