Cracker boxes on duty - War Stories Ain't All Alike - # 6
They look like tanks
Cracker Boxes are otherwise known as ambulances; however, Cracker Boxes are ambulances built into those rough and ready "4x4" military truck bodies. Each looks like a small panzer tank with red crosses painted all over it. Not only do Cracker Boxes look like tanks left over from a war someone deserved to lose, they drive like tanks as well.
It was not much, but it was all ours
Brooks Air Force Base, located in San Antonio, Texas, hosted a group that dealt with getting the wounded back home and into military hospitals. Brooks Air Force Base had no hospital, but it did have a little sick-call dispensary. It also had a small landing strip that no sensible pilot would consider on his own.
Why are we landing here?
Because of their general feebleness and inability to climb out of the litters onto which they were strapped, the sick and the wounded men had no good way to complain to the pilots about the choice of landing field. That had been decided by the brass. Any patient who had enough strength to look out of the aircraft’s windows as the planes were landing on the Brooks strip assumed that they were crash landing on some farmer’s corn patch.
Brooks Air Force Base was not famous for its landing facilities.
Firetrucks chased the planes and Cracker Boxes chased the firetrucks
The medics assigned to the Brooks Air Force Base sick-call dispensary were required to have military driver licenses. At night and on weekends those fine pill rollers would jump into the Cracker Box set aside for flight-line duty and would then roll that ungainly machine over to the flight line. There they awaited incoming air evacuation planes.
As each plane landed, base fire trucks would roar down one side of the single runway and then line up behind the airplane once it had touched down. Finally, they would chase the plane at top speed to the tarmac at the other end of the runway.
Behind the fire trucks limped the Cracker Box. As soon as the air evacuation plane began to transfer patients to the waiting hospital bus the fire trucks peeled out of their formation to roar back to their fire station and the card games that needed finishing there. Guarding the aircraft and, now, the hospital bus, the Cracker Box remained on station.
Seven long years...
Never did a single patient wind up in the Cracker Box, nor did its driver ever leave the driver’s seat.
No one seemed to know why Cracker Boxes chased landing medivac planes and firetrucks around the single Brooks Air Force Base runway. There must have been a good reason for the chasing, for the chasing never ceased until the pilots formed some sort of a union and bargained successfully to land their airplanes elsewhere. Those negotiations took close to seven years.
