2 US military choppers help snow-bound Montenegro
PODGORICA , Montenegro — Two US Army Black Hawk helicopters have dropped food, medicine and livestock feed to people stranded in the mountains of Montenegro by up to 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) of snow.
And for those being helped, it was great to see the U. S. military on a peace mission. That’s because the last time citizens had seen U.S. military aircraft flying overhead in 1999, they were bombing sections of their country, then known as Yugoslavia.
“The Americans are good people,” said Darko Kukovic as he sat in one of the Black Hawks on Saturday, guiding its pilots to the village of Starce in central Montenegro, where his elderly parents have been stranded by the snow for two months. “We should forget about the past and focus on the future. My parents would starve or freeze to death without their help.”
The delivery of aid, which began Wednesday, was going to the remote villages hit by Montenegro’s heaviest snowfall in 60 years, and it also was rewarding for the U.S. soldiers, despite the mission’s challenges.
“We just got back from Afghanistan in July,” pilot Capt. Terry Hill of Kellyville, Oklahoma, said aboard one of the Black Hawks. “The flying there was intense, but it’s intense in a different way” in Montenegro.
“There we were getting shot at. Here it’s helping the Montenegrin people,” he told two Associated Press reporters traveling aboard one of the flights. “As you could see, we were just hovering at that almost vertical mountain beside us.”
The deep snow and steep mountain slopes were making it difficult to gauge the helicopters’ height above the ground. The pilots could not land in the snow, so they had to make tricky hovering maneuvers in order to drop their supplies to the stranded residents below.