The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

hours, we made a forced landing in Damascus, where the hijackers said they would blow up the aircraft 60 seconds after landing. There were some 175 passengers on board, about half of whom were Americans, I would guess. But the even bigger concern was that many of them were Jewish, something I didn’t really concentrate on until right before our forced landing. Remem- ber, this was just two years after the Six Days War, and Syria and Israel were still at war; there was only an armistice. And we had no diplomatic relations with Syria, no embassy on the ground. As we approached the ground, I stationed myself at the rear door to help get people off the plane. Though it was not exactly a crash, the pilot had never seen the airport before so it was a pretty rough landing. We were all in our stocking feet because the cabin crew had collected all our shoes as part of the emergency procedure. (If you leave your shoes on, as soon as you hit the ground they go shooting forward at the speed of the plane, along with pencils and everything else, becoming projectiles.) When the back door of the plane opened, it turned out we were in the middle of a prickly-pear field! People were falling down and screaming while frantically moving away from the plane, so it was a real mess. When most passengers were safely across the field, I noticed three passengers still under the port wing. One woman was in really bad shape, with com- pound fractures to her left leg. There was an American G.I. among the passengers and the two of us crossed the field together to carry the wounded to safety. It was very fright- ening, as the clock was ticking — well past the 60 seconds. The plane could have blown up any moment. We were very lucky. Just as the five of us regained the trench where the rest of the group was huddled, the front half of the plane exploded. FSJ: So you saved a lot of lives that day. TDB: No question about it. We could either have been blown to pieces or incinerated in the fireball. It was a close-run thing. But there was still a big problem. An American aircraft with many Jewish passengers had landed in Damascus. To protect the innocent, I needed to establish some authority and then play for time. So I walked up to the fellow who seemed to be in charge, identified myself and showed him my U.S. diplomatic passport. I informed him that everyone on that plane was under the protection of the United States because the hijacked J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 19