About fifty men were stationed at the ATC base near Sharjah then, in the spring of 1945. They serviced a small airfield, and they kept the installation going. In the daytime, the heat frequently rose to 157 degrees. The base building stood like a brown sore on an endless white expanse of glistening sand. It was easy to understand why, once in a while, someone there went mad.
Courage is a very quiet thing.
I was in Cairo, and they told me the story of the Green Project. A revolutionary step in air transport, the Green Project was a plan whereby fifty thousand men a month would be shipped from the European and Mediterranean theatres back to the States, without interruption of the regular air transport schedules. This was a gigantic and visionary movement, and it was being accomplished as smoothly as though a new air age were not being ushered in. I was shown charts and maps and statistics. The loaded 46s and 47s, slipping in and out of Payne Field, told the rest.