CHAKLALA AIR BASE, Pakistan – High in a remote valley, the U.S. Army transport helicopter settled with a bump on the dry riverbed Thursday, and the earthquake survivors came running.
Jostling and shoving for space, they crowded around the rear cargo hatch as the soldiers on board began tossing out tents, blankets and biscuits until they had no more to give.
As the helicopter revved its engines for takeoff, a balding man with a beard leaned across the edge of the lowered cargo ramp and, smiling his gratitude, extended his hand toward Brandon Chasteen, 21, an Army medic from Chattanooga, Tenn., who gave it a hearty shake. A moment later the chopper was churning toward another landing zone to pick up a load of injured.
Nearly two weeks after the massive Oct. 8 earthquake in northeastern Pakistan, a mushrooming U.S. aid operation is doing more than just saving lives. It also is helping to improve the dismal public image of the United States in a conservative Muslim country where anti-American feeling has been aggravated in recent years by the United States-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Television news broadcasts have been filled in recent days with images of U.S. Navy cargo ships offloading relief supplies in Karachi, olive-drab Chinook helicopters disgorging bundles of tents and blankets in isolated mountain villages, and American soldiers – some diverted from military operations in Afghanistan – working with their Pakistani counterparts to evacuate the injured.
President Bush’s Oct. 14 visit to the Pakistani embassy in Washington, D.C., to offer condolences for earthquake victims received wide coverage in the country’s media, as did pleas by some in Congress for an increase in the $50 million in earthquake relief that the Bush administration already has pledged.
Even the conservative clergy, which has long been on the vanguard of anti-U.S. feeling in Pakistan, has grudgingly praised the U.S. response.
“Obviously, this is the other side of the United States,” said Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Shujabadi, a prominent religious scholar in the port city of Karachi. “For the first time in so many years, I have seen the American planes dropping relief and not bombs on the Muslim population.”
The United States has supplied the relief effort with 17 helicopters, including 12 from the military and five that already were in Pakistan on counter-narcotics duty. An additional 20 choppers are en route, according to Rear Adm. Michael LeFever, who is heading the U.S. military relief effort.
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