Flying in a Boeing 747 between Khartoum and Nairobi, over Ethiopia in the night sky, we had reached for altitude, the pilot coming on the speaker to tell us we were going up to 40,000 to fly over an African thunderstorm, and even at that, we felt the occasional bumps and rocks of thunderheads reaching up to us. I could look out my window and see the slight curvature of the earth on the horizon, the first time in a passenger plane then or since. Below was an inferno, a St. Elmo’s fire of connected streaks of lightning spreading out horizontally in all directions, creating a white grid against the blackness, accompanied by random pinpoint flashes of light, further down below, white dots popping off at different places almost simultaneously. I was thankful we could fly over it.

As the Ethiopia Desk Officer in the State Department, I knew Congressman Mickey Leland of New York was down there somewhere, making one of his food runs in Ethiopia, bringing with him a convoy of relief trucks, food donations from the school children of New York City, raised by saving their milk money to help the starving Ethiopians. Children helping children. I had seen the newsreels of Leland on his previous trip to Ethiopia, in his open car leading the convoy, grasping the hands of admiring Ethiopian children who lined the roads as he approached the feeding camps upcountry, with masses of kids running beside and behind the car, cheering and reaching out to touch hands, shouting “Mic-key Mic-key.” Leland was leaning out, reaching back. It was more than touching.

The U.S., like the rest of the world, had been surprised by the famine. We estimated a million Ethiopians had died already, and another two million were at risk. Fortunately, we and the world had mobilized quickly. With the help of the BBC, the support of the UN, and huge funds raised by rock bands, everyone was working together to bring the famine to the world’s attention, creating an outpouring of support. In Washington, at my desk, I received hundreds of calls from average Americans offering cash and food. I still remember one call, from a man in Utah with a southern drawl, speaking amid static, saying he was calling from the cockpit of a Boeing 707 full of food, and needed to know where to take it. In the background, I could hear the high whine of jet engines. “Just say where,” he was yelling, “which airport, and how I get approval and flight clearance?” It was not that unusual.

At this time, Ethiopian expert Paul Wenke and I had been invited to a town hall meeting at Meridian House to talk about the emergency and solicit donations. Knowing that Ethiopia had been the largest Peace Corps program under Sergeant Shriver, Wenke, at the end, asked a question of the over-crowded five hundred people assembled. “How many here,” he said, “are former Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Ethiopia in the past?” To my surprise, over half the hands went up. One of those stepped forward, saying he could probably talk for most of those with their hands raised, saying he was ready to take immediate leave from his investment firm in order to go back to Ethiopia to help out. Everyone was nodding yes, they were ready. I was not surprised that Ethiopia meant so much to them. Ethiopia always affected people that way. It was a country that stayed with you forever.

The United States had taken a lead in meeting the crisis. We had engaged the United Nations’ World Food Program, diverted our ships carrying food to Egypt and the Indian sub-continent, and organized the international relief organizations, assigning responsibilities to meet the challenge: CARE would do overall administrative coordination, Save the Children, World Vision, and others would set up feeding camps in specific Ethiopian states, in Gonder, Tigray, Welo and Shoa provinces; Bread for the World and others would focus on logistics, digging wells and settting up clinics. Polish helicopters would do the high elevation food drops in the mountainous north; the Scandinavians would attempt to deliver food in war torn Eritrea; and the ICRC, with U.S. pushing, would help with that, flying its flag on convoys crossing battle lines between Eritrean and Ethiopian government forces. We would engage Ethiopian Marxist dictator Mengistu, to make all this possible. The U.S. bureaucracy, usually slow moving, in this case moved quickly, under the leadership of Peter McPherson, the USAID Administrator, and point man on the relief effort, and Julia Taft, the Director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. I would sit in staff meetings he held each morning with involved U.S.agencies, and watch in awe as McPherson coordinated the effort, overcoming one “we can’t do that” after another. “We can’t divert ships in time.” “Just do it!”

There had been early policy discussions on whether we should even deliver food, with some arguing the tragedy was partially a man-made and recurring one, due to the country’s Marxist agriculture. There would be periodic droughts in the region, and no real ability to meet them, other than a band aid, without Ethiopian reforms. We would be throwing our money away. Plus, it was the Cold War, and we had lots of problems with Ethiopia, which was anti-U.S., hosting 13,000 Cuban troops, and supporting Moscow. Why prop up the Mengistu in his crisis? The State Department argued the humanitarian case, noting the longstanding U.S. policy of not playing poitics with food, no matter how bad the regime.

The matter was to be decided by President Reagan one Saturday afternoon at the White House, with the principals gathered. In order to provide background at the meeting, the State Department representative, Crocker’s Deputy, Princeton Lyman, arranged a showing of the BBC documentary, “Seeds of Despair” in the White House film room. The film, which had just come out, graphically portrayed the terrible situation in Ethiopia at the time, including several shots of starving children. Everyone watching was shocked. When the film was over and the lights were turned on, Reagan said four words before leaving: “Do whatever it takes!”

Little did I know, riding in the Boeing over Ethiopia, that I would never get to meet Congressman Leland. That night, when I was safe up at 40,000 feet, Leland and his staff were in a small plane below attempting to fly in hilly terrain in the terrible storm, taking a chance, determined to deliver food and medical supplies despite the conditions. The pilot, Leland, and four passengers, including State Department officers, died.

At one point in my tour, I found myself in Ethiopia, visiting a relief site in Shoa province in a camp run by Oxfam. There were several large tents with doctors, nurses, and aid workers working, and lines of Ethiopians sitting on the ground inside the tents, where infants were being weighed in scales. Once their weight was recorded, they were given either intervenous solution or formula, usually the latter.   These were the ones with mothers. They seemed to be okay. But, there were a large number of toddlers and infants who looked so thin, almost without any body fat, and who were at risk and being cared for.

I found myself thinking about the more desperate and crowded camps further north, in the hills and mountains, where the Ethiopian children would sit patiently in the fields surrounding feeding centers, wearing their traditional white shamas with coptic crosses hanging from around their necks, terribly hungry, but waiting patiently, sometimes hours, for their ration of food to get to them, never complaining, sometimes lying down with stomach cramps. These were the lucky ones, we were told. Their parents had not survived the difficult, three to five day trek from their small farms and villages in the mountains to feeding camps in Welo and Gonder below. Along the way, as the food ran out, they stayed behind, giving their last crumbs to their children, and pointing them south, towards the camps.

As I was about to leave the camp in Shoa at the end of the day, I noticed a mini-bus with eight nurses sitting inside. We had been introduced to them earlier. The Embassy officer escorting me said the nurses had to be rotated frequently, due to burn out and exhaustion. These were Irish nurses, in transit from camps in the north, at the end of their tours. They were being taken directly to the airport in Addis, to be flown home to Ireland for recuperation and new assignments. Some were leaving early due to the stress, and one, he said, the one who had been short with me that day, had numerous infants die in her arms in the past few days, which explained her behavior.  As we drove out, I looked back and watched the nurses sitting in the bus. They were still, not talking, just sitting there, exhausted, looking straight ahead. I think one was crying. Not one eye looked my way.  I realized they were the first heroes I ever met.