Thanksgiving week, 1964, found Capt. Mack Secord sleeping on a C-130 on a bleak African airstrip, waiting to pull off one of the most audacious rescue missions in history.
Piloting one of 15 Lockheed C-130s, he would drop into the former Belgian Congo and successfully free missionaries held hostage in Stanleyville (later called Kisangani) by rebel “Simba” kidnappers. In all, 1,800 Americans and Europeans would be rescued that day, along with 300 Congolese.
It all went remarkably right, but only after a whole lot went terribly wrong.
Secord, now a resident of Buckhead, had landed with the rescue force at an abandoned Belgian air force base in Kamina, three hours south of Stanleyville, waiting for the go-ahead from U.S. officials. As he climbed into his C-130 to get some rest Monday evening, a 300-pound cargo door dropped onto his head, practically knocking him out.
At 3 a.m. Tuesday morning, Nov. 24, Secord lifted off; the Hercules transporters carried U.S. troops and 600 Belgian paratroopers. But as Secord reached 4,000 feet, a life raft in one of his wing compartments suddenly inflated. The raft and a metal bottle of CO2 were sucked into one of the four engines, which sent shrapnel slicing into the airplane.
“Every red and yellow light on that panel lit up,” said Secord, who returned to Kamina.
He thought his day was over. But his commander put him at the controls of a spare C-130, and sent him back toward Stanleyville. “I wound up being the last airplane to land.”
What he found when he landed was a scene he’d been prepared for, through many years of service in the Air Force. What he did afterward would earn him the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Secord, 83, has the amiable disposition of a former public relations man, and he has served in that capacity, first for the Air Force, then for Georgia Power and other organizations.
But the Buckhead resident also has the unflappable air of a natural stick-and-rudder man. Even when serving in the public affairs offices at Eglin Air Force Base in Valparaiso, Fla., and Itazuke Air Base in Fukuoka, Japan, he kept his skills honed by getting checked out on whatever equipment was available, including the T-33, the Convair and the C-47.
He was flying C-130s at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina when the Stanleyville rescue was planned.
The Congo, rich in uranium, gold and diamonds, had been kept in servitude as a Belgian colony from 1908 to 1960, its people coerced to enrich the Europeans. The country won independence in 1960, but continued as a site of internal strife, fanned by foreign interests.
During the 1950s and ’60s, the Congo was also home to many members of medical and religious missions. These included Delbert and Lois Carper, a devout couple from Kansas, who were part of a nondenominational group called the Unevangelized Fields Mission, based in a compound just outside Stanleyville.
By the summer of 1964, conflict between communist-backed rebels and Western-backed government troops put the missionaries in jeopardy. Rebel “Simbas” began to lock up Europeans. On Nov. 24, as they heard reports of an impending invasion, the Simbas marched one group of Westerners to the center of town, then sprayed them with automatic fire, killing 30, including medical missionary Dr. Paul Carlson.
(The doctor’s photograph would soon be on the cover of Time and Life magazines, and he would become the best-known casualty of the crisis.)
At the mission compound, rebels ordered the residents, including the Carpers and their 11-year-old daughter Marilyn, to gather inside, then one soldier pulled his pistol and fired into the group. Two of six McMillan boys were injured, but outside there were more gunshots, and Hector McMillan, father of the six, was killed.
Marilyn, now 61 and a retired nurse living in Los Angeles, remembers being scared, but buoyed by the unearthly calm of her parents. “They didn’t fall apart, and that makes a huge difference to kids,” she said.
A missionary named Al Larson arrived with several jeeps driven by a group of Cuban expatriates. Machine guns blazing, they ferried the group to the airport, where the paratroopers had cleared the runway of debris and scoured the area of rebel forces. About 125 hostages climbed into Secord’s waiting C-130 — which is intended to carry only 92. As Secord taxied down the runway, a few remnant Simbas, who had been hiding in the elephant grass along the runway, fired upward into his wings, puncturing one of his gas tanks.
Leaking fuel and minus one engine, Secord flew 800 miles to Leopoldville and safety. Toward the end of the trip, he was running on fumes, and when he landed, his tanks contained “hardly enough to start a barbecue in your backyard.”
The events in Africa were pushed to the back burner in his mind as Secord continued flying missions in Vietnam. He would have a 22-year career in the Air Force. But a few years ago, he heard a voice on the phone asking him, “Were you the pilot on the first plane out of Stanleyville?”
Marilyn Carper, now Marilyn Wendler, had tracked him down.
She and a small group of other rescued hostages met with Secord last year. Together they traveled to Middle Georgia to visit the C-130 that flew them to freedom, now parked at the Museum of Aviation in Warner Robins.
This month, a much larger group met in Miami, to thank the Cuban rescuers, whose participation had been a secret for many years, since the Cubans had been recruited by the CIA.
Ruth Reynard, of Nashville, Tenn., was 4 years old when a Cuban named Juan Tamayo cradled her in his right arm during that race to the airport. With his left arm, he fired a .30-caliber machine gun. “The hot bullet shells were falling on me, and he put his scarf around me to try to protect me.”
In Miami, 50 years later, the two met again. Said Reynard, “I suddenly went back to being 4 in my head. I bawled like a baby. I cried and cried.” Tamayo told the Miami Herald he was concerned only that the little blonde girl wasn’t deafened by the noise. “I always worried that her hearing was damaged.”
Secord, president of the Atlanta Kiwanis Club, has gone on to fly many other rescue missions, but these days he rarely comes under fire. He is a 30-year volunteer pilot with Angel Flight, a free transportation service that flies patients to hospitals around the country.
This doesn’t surprise Marilyn Wendler. “I think God picked the nicest man in the U.S. Air Force to be our pilot.”
