H is for Hercules
Pickles didn't like talking about his life before the service. It had been a hard life…one that he would have preferred to forget. His parents were absent, and he had struggled to get enough nutrition to successfully fledge. Even as he entered adulthood, he was a bit of a runt for a C-130 and struggled to carry as heavy of loads as others in his class. He wasn't fast, he wasn't strong, he wasn't smart…he was just below average in everything that mattered. His spectacular lack of skills is what lead to his name…Pickles. The term for a failed load.
At first, Pickles had been slagging sure that he wasn't going to get out of Vietnam. That he was simply going to get shot down somewhere in the jungle before he really had the chance to learn what it was to live. He thought he was without value, but one officer had seen something in him. One officer had given him a chance, and that chance had changed his life forever.
The officer had been the base commander, one Col. Cabbie McHale. The smaller aircraft was one of the last C-119s to remain as a cargo plane instead of being converted to a gunnery platform. The Flying Boxcar had a reputation for being a hardnosed boss who expected his base to run like clockwork. He flew his people hard and trained them even harder. But despite his cold exterior, it was clear that Col McHale cared deeply about his people. When he saw something going wrong, he always found a way to get the ailing team the resources they needed…which is how Pickles ended up being moved from being his unit's, well, Pickle, to being an assistant on the bird colonel's staff.
Honestly, Pickles had been rather surprised that Col McHale had seen any good in him at all, but the older plane had spotted something that all the younger models had missed. That being a runt gave you an advantage on shorter, rougher runways, which made you super valuable in a war zone. Even though Cabbie was far smaller than the C-130 he mentored, he still somehow took Pickles under his wing. Over the next weeks, the C-119 not only taught Pickles how to fly to his strengths, but he also taught the younger plane how to live. Suddenly, as Pickles flew over the jungles of Southeast Asia, he gained the will to fight…to live…to find a way to wing on his own path.
Pickles didn't like speaking about his life before the service…but he was always more than willing to talk your ears about everything that followed it. And that was okay from his perspective because it wasn't until life had handed him a father figure in the Cabbie McHale that he had a chance to have a life worth living.
Lockheed C-130 Hercules: The C-130 Hercules is considered to be one of the most versatile military aircraft ever built. While it was originally designed to be a cargo transport, it is often used as a troop carrier, medevac aircraft, gunship, and for search and rescue. A few airframes have also been modified to allow them to perform weather reconnaissance, support polar missions, provide aerial refueling, and be large wildfire tankers. Capable of taking off and landing on a wide range of runways (or lack of runways) it is the largest aircraft to ever make a successful landing on an aircraft carrier.
Considered to be the successor to the C-119 Flying Boxcar, the C-130 Hercules was designed to have a substantially larger payload but also have as durable of an airframe as its predecessor. It was also designed to be flown with a single pilot, something that was not possible in the Flying Boxcar due to the complexity of its controls. The design has lasted, and the C-130 is now the longest continuously produced military aircraft with over 60 years in service. C-130s are fairly common aircraft and can be found at nearly every aerospace museum that has a reasonably large military aircraft collection and the space to handle a plane of that size.