Operation Overdue

I can remember watching TV with my brother when Angela D’Audney came onto the screen, interrupting Chips or whatever we would have been watching in the early evening of November 1979.

Dad was often on his way home from work in the evening, in those days; my brother was very trustworthy and I am sure I am right remembering that we were alone. It was after 7pm when the news of the loss of the Air New Zealand aircraft on Mount Erebus was released to the press.

Rogue Productions from New Zealand made a documentary about the police officers who were sent to Antarctica to deal with the aftermath, they named it ‘Operation Overdue’ and it is a superb testament to the men who went and did work which had to be done, but which changed them forever.

The documentary is shot in large part with the men simply speaking to camera, and to a man, when they begin to speak you can see how the things they attempt to describe are right there in front of them, as real for them now as they were in 1979.

Some of their words were hauntingly simple.

‘I packed some jerseys, some warm jerseys I had, and said goodbye to my kids’.

Woollen jerseys, every kiwi had a few of these in the wardrobe for the cold and wet of a long winter. These days the operation would be outfitted with the very latest gear made from fabrics with unpronounceable names created in Scandinavian think tanks. Back then he thought he had better keep warm the only way he had ever known, jerseys that he would have worn on the farm helping an uncle dock sheep, or put on when the sun started to slide behind the dunes at the beach after a family Sunday out.

And said goodbye to the kids. ‘See you kids, look after your mum’. All those amazing men struggled with their words, held themselves together for a moment before they began each of the sentences they spoke into the camera. That is the ‘service’ part of such work, giving up something of yourself even though you don’t really know what will be left for afterwards, for the kids.

‘The jet would have dwarfed the terminal, now all that remained was a cigarette smudge on the side of that stark white mountain’.

New Zealand is a long way from anywhere in itself, tiny in the vast Pacific. I remember going to Auckland airport as a schoolkid, raising money and flying up there from Hamilton just to the south, and how big the place seemed, how enormous the planes which could actually make it to Europe and America and all those places on the other side of the world had to be. For the DC-10 to be a cigarette smudge lost in a sea of unending whiteness gave you some idea of just how big Antarctica is, how unending and silent.

‘We built a snow toilet and found some perfume from the aircraft. Very effective.’

The nuts and bolts of life never change. They needed a toilet and it needed to be right there, so the work could continue.

And the myriad of pieces which had been the aircraft just before it crashed were strewn around them, including the duty-free perfume and aftershave the passengers might have been beginning to think of buying as the flight neared its half-way point.

The incongruousness of the perfume somehow emphasises the horror, taking things which make sense in one orderly world, and throwing them to the freezing emptiness of another.

‘Bodies were frozen solid. Whatever grotesque shape they landed in, that’s how they froze.’ 

I remember some of the reporting after the crash telling us how people had still been standing, looking out the windows. The plane had a lot of its seats removed, so that passengers could do exactly that. And there was no warning, the plane went straight into the mountain.

‘Our gloves became full of grease, human grease. Because the bodies were burned. We ate wearing the same gloves.’

More than any of the other comments this one gives a sense of how those men were never going to be the same people. They were immersed in the work, and the site of the crash. It imbued them in the way that the grease imbued their gloves.

‘Sea birds, they never shut up. They squawked the whole time, circling the site. They tormented me.’

Coping mechanisms. Those men were filthy, exhausted and each day got up and found more bodies and pieces of bodies. 

And the thing he remembered tormenting him were the sea birds, squawking overhead. Not the sheer, relentless hell of what he touched and smelled and saw. 

Was it the noise, the constant noise? Or the intrusiveness, and lack of respect of those birds looking down constantly? 

They were all so hell-bent on finding everyone, giving everyone the dignity of being returned home, at least. 

For me, he took all the anger and desperation and rolled it into the sound of those birds.

‘Of course, you always remember the last one. She was perfectly preserved.’

So many things making up such a simple sentence. 

Grief he could finally feel.Working knowing there were many more bodies to be found he could simply close off one task and move to the next. The last one, then you can think about what it is you have actually done. 

Shame, at the feeling of relief that he must have felt knowing there were no more. 

Relief, they would finally go home. 

Fear, who would he be, home? 

He would be able to describe her down to the finest detail, still.

‘We found champagne from the galley, intact. We drank it with our backs to the site, utterly spent.’

That same sense of unreality, the enormity of what had happened and what had followed transforming the world so that filthy men with grease covered gloves sit in the middle of Antarctica drinking French Champagne.

‘Each of those families who lost someone grieved for that person. I grieved for the whole lot.’

What can you possibly say? Imagine the weight of that grief, you can’t begin.

‘We didn’t have a debrief when we got back to New Zealand, and it seemed we just faded away.’

I love being a New Zealander, there are so many pieces of what makes a person a kiwi which are things to be proud of. The ability to deal with grief, to allow emotion and fear, desperation and desolation full voice, is not one of them. 

Stoicism is a curse which ran its strong hand the length of that country then and still does. 

They were men who should have been icons. And should have been allowed to fall to pieces in front of the country, and put back together with support and understanding.

I can imagine the quiet fear that would have greeted them instead, fear they would ever want to acknowledge and voice such grief.

‘Smells remind me, the ferry terminal. I smell diesel and I’m back there.’

I imagine the man who hated the seabirds having a wonderful day out, probably with grand-kids these days, and a seagull trying to bully its way to the front of the queue when his grandson is tossing away the last of his chips. And that man is back there on the mountain, just like that.

‘There are triggers. Hands. Older ladies as I pass them on the street. I look at their rings, and their painted fingernails, and I am back on the mountain’.

It might be the face of the last woman that he remembers, but they are all there with him, sometimes.