20 years ago
Elena and I moved into the first home that we owned. It was a townhouse in the
Blossom Hill area of San Jose. One night we were watching television in bed. A
movie came on with the title of Behind Enemy Lines. Here is the IMDB report for
those of you who are curious:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159273/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
The movie was set during the 1990s
conflict involving Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc. A US Navy fighter aircraft
with two men on board roars off the deck of an aircraft carrier. As it flies
over territory controlled by the Serbians, it is shot down by a surface-to-air
missile. The two men eject and are able to land safely.
The rest of the movie is the story of the
fight to survive by the two downed airmen. It also followed the huge effort on
the part of the US and Spanish military officials to save these two men.
Elena was mesmerized by the movie. When it
was over, she told me that she was amazed at the amount of money, time, and use
of personnel that was in the rescue process. She said that such a thing would
never happen in Argentina.
I pointed out to her that in the US
military, a social contract existed. If one was sent out on a mission and got
in trouble, everything humanly possible was done to get one back to safety.
Let us first forward to a few days ago. I
was out doing my afternoon walk. I saw many fire and emergency vehicles at the
end of the beach near the Sharp Park golf course. More emergency vehicles
arrived. Fire personnel were not talking. A lady who had been hiking high in
the hills told me that she saw some fire personnel repelling down a cliff.
I went home sure that some unlucky person
had fallen to their death. (We had a similar case a few weeks earlier.) When I
did my research, I got a pleasant surprise. No human had fallen to their
deaths. A dog had got stranded. It appears that the animal was rescued alive.
It was amazing and refreshing to see the resources employed to save a dog.
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