Steve Mathisen No DM's

If someone asks you how much two newborn babies are worth to the United States Air Force, tell them the exact price: two 200-million-dollar C-17 Globemaster III warplanes and an airborne refueling tanker over the Pacific Ocean. In May 2009, two tiny babies at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Okinawa, Japan were fighting for every breath. One was twenty days old. The other was a nine-month-old infant in severe heart and lung failure. To survive the seven-thousand-mile flight to Texas for open-heart surgery, the nine-month-old needed an external heart-lung bypass machine called ECMO. Within hours, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Daniel Dirnberger, Major Dr. Melissa Tyree, and the 59th Medical Wing turned a massive C-17 cargo jet at Kadena Air Base into a flying neonatal intensive care unit. Then the first C-17 suffered a mechanical failure right before takeoff while the babies' portable incubators began running low on medical air and battery power. The Air Force did not blink. Crews rushed the babies into the Kadena clinic for oxygen and immediately pulled a second 200-million-dollar C-17 Globemaster III onto the runway. And because landing in Alaska for fuel would cost five precious hours, the 168th Air Refueling Wing scrambled a tanker from Eielson Air Force Base to refuel the C-17 in mid-air over the Pacific, delivering both babies safely to Texas in fourteen hours flat. A superpower is not measured by the tanks in its cargo bay. It is measured by how fast it clears that bay for two tiny cribs.