Parallel Flights: A Father-Daughter Memoir.
by
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Chinese Bandits The Hump was the air route across the Himalayas from Calcutta to Kunming to service forces such as Chennault’s Flying Tigers. I was working at the Kunming end of The Hump out of Yunnan Yi, the western Yunnan province bordering Indochina and Burma. One of the guys who flew for Chennault was a fellow named Tott. He had quite an operation, and the Japanese were fearful of him. The P-40s had sharp noses on ‘em; they were scared to death of those. A plane had gone down on the eastern side of the Himalayas. We pretty well had a fix on it because of the search-and-rescue radio that became an automatic type beam we could follow in on. The ELT – emergency locator transmitter. We found the airplane. There was nobody there alive. Just bodies that had been completely stripped of everything. All three of us in the search party had United States flags on the back of our jackets. As we started to fan out, searching the area to see what else we could find, bandits came out of the hills and started after us. They were the dirtiest-looking humans you ever saw. Dressed in furs and this type of stuff. And were they big! They carried typical folk-country knives, crude-type machetes -- we’re talking a foot and a half long here! And they could really operate ‘em.
They started coming after us – there were two of ‘em. I remember I was a little isolated from where the other guys were, and the bandits were coming at me. I told ‘em, "Ti Kai Joe. It’s OK, don’t bother me." They didn’t pay any attention to that or they may have not understood it or whatever. I could tell what they were going to do though. They planned on separating me from whatever I had. That’s when I found out just what my .45 could do. I drew it. They didn’t pay any attention to it, just kept coming. I hit one dead center. I never saw anything fold up like he did. The other one paid no attention. Apparently that made him even more eager to get to me. So I had to do both of ‘em.
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About the Book
WWII stories, aviation escapades, family history-- Hal McCord, a young personnel officer, was selected to hand-deliver secret documents to General Stilwell in India. A case was chained to his wrist and his mission was to deliver or destroy the contents along with himself. He later realized he carried war plans for the Chinese Theater. To boost troop morale in Casablanca, he requested music scores from Kansas State and formed musical groups that became the envy of two continents. He midnight-requisitioned Navy refrigerators to keep beer cold in desert outposts. He flew the length of the Nile in a B-25 salvaged from the Sahara. When the higher-ups left Paris for meetings shortly after he arrived, he became the ranking officer in the command and responsible for getting Mrs. George Patton to the dying General. There was danger, too. He was part of a search-and-rescue team looking for a downed plane in Western China when machete-brandishing bandits attacked from nearby hills. This book details a life spanning most of the 20th century that began in a small college town in Kansas, built to a successful military career, then to being subject of FBI scrutiny Washington, D.C., and finally, leading to retirement.
About the Author
Manhattan, Kansas, has been hometown for several generations of the McCord family. Marilyn’s great-grandfather homesteaded there in 1878; her youngest grandson was born there in 2001. Ms. McCord spent nine years on a farm in Western Kansas, taught school in Wichita and Topeka and has three degrees from Kansas State University. During the 1970s, she served as full-time volunteer staff with the Ecumenical Institute including three years in Taiwan and a year in rural India. In the 1980s, she was employed by Texas Instruments in Dallas where she programmed software for seismic survey boats then taught artificial intelligence classes. Currently she teaches programming in industry and lives near Durango, Colorado, with her companion Don Anderson and her Labrador, Nelson Nelson.