Ghost Camaro and Big Wind

On this episode, Author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Patricia Larash discuss some badass vehicles that hauled ass into warzones to try and bring humanitarian aid to people who needed help. It's the story of Helge Meyer and his Ghost Camaro, an armor-plated muscle car that burned rubber through the war-torn streets of Sarajevo to bring food and medical aid to children, as well as the story of Big Wind, a heavily-modified T-34 tank fitted with MiG jet engines that was used to help put out Kuwaiti oil field fires during the aftermath of Desert Storm.

My original article on the Ghost Camaro can be found here, and the article on Big Wind can be found here.

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Episode Transcript:

The streets of Sarajevo are pitch black. All lights have been extinguished for fear of snipers or airstrikes. Strict sound discipline is maintained at all times. Enemy forces lie in wait, unseen in the darkness, waiting to strike. That quiet is violently ripped apart by the roar of a 447 horsepower V8 engine and the squealing of tires taking a tight turn at high speeds. The matte black 1979 Camaro is almost invisible in the darkness. It accelerates quickly down an empty street, running with no headlights, relying on a massive steel dozer blade welded to the front of the vehicle to deflect away the rubble, razor wire and land mines that line the war torn Bosnian streets.

Gunfire responds almost immediately. Muzzle flashes from building windows and dark alleys, followed quickly by sparks and ricochets as their bullets strike. The armor plating, covering the speeding vehicles, windows and chassis in the driver's seat. His face obscured by military grade night vision goggles. Danish Special Forces operative Helga Meyer flinches slightly as another enemy rounds strikes the steel plate covering the passenger side window. Meyer hits the clutch. Downshifts. Spins the wheel and peels out down a side street into the darkness beyond. He carries no weapons. His vehicle is unarmed, but it is full of food, clothing and medical supplies. And he won't take his foot off the gas until he's delivered them to the children who are still trapped in this war torn wasteland.

Pat [00:01:36] So then the other night I was meeting a friend for dinner at this sushi restaurant, and they had this robot going around, bringing people their drinks, kind of like R2-D2 on Jabba the Hutt boat thing.

Ben [00:01:49] I call it the hover barge.

Pat [00:01:51] Yeah. Yeah, that barge in Return of the Jedi. But with a less self-aware motion, it was actually more like a Roomba.

Ben [00:01:58] Honestly, I do love the idea of a group that brings you drinks. I do wish I had something like that in my house.

Pat [00:02:04] It could happen. And the drinks robot actually got stuck in the waiting area because it was surrounded by people and they were just sitting around and no one was moving out of its way. But it was just a sad little. It was kind of it was trying its best, you know, and just people just like, you know, having human conversations. And this robot was just sort of kind of going back and forth over the same three yard stretch or this.

Ben [00:02:25] Is why we have to fear the singularity, because that thing's going to have its revenge.

Pat [00:02:30] Yes. Unless you tip it well. Mm hmm. But that got me thinking. This is a thing that people do. You know, this this particular robot was custom made. It had little shelves built into it and everything. But this is a thing that people do. They mod their Roombas. Sometimes they hack the software to make the software work better, and sometimes it's just a cosmetic thing, like sticking googly eyes on top. And sometimes people mod their Roomba to add actual functionality, like adding a paint brush so it can graffiti up your living room or duct taping a phone to it and then running zoom so your remote friend can follow you around in this kind of weird telepresence thing that reminds me of this one Doctor Who episode, but whatever.

Ben [00:03:10] That's the million dollar idea here. We're spending all this time researching things for this podcast, but the million dollar idea is to just tape a phone to your Roomba and livestream it, and then people can like follow it on Twitch or whatever. And I feel like somebody is going to make $1,000,000 or has already made $1,000,000 off of this idea.

Pat [00:03:29] Yeah, it's like putting GoPro on your cat, except it's a Roomba.

Ben [00:03:33] Now that I would watch on Twitch for me where I go with that because people do that, they jailbreak their phones and they they you know, they recycle old pieces to kind of put things together. And, you know, where I always go with that is the thing kind of Mad Max, the kind of things I've been playing this game called Thunder Road recently, which is like a board game version of Mad Max where it's like low budget, 40 K, Warhammer, you buy like a $2 model and then you mess it up to make it look old and beat up. And then you play this board game with it. It's very fun. But yeah, I love the, you know, like beat up muscle car with machine gun strapped to it esthetic.

Pat [00:04:10] Like a DIY Batmobile or a DIY Knight Rider. For those of us who remember Knight Rider.

Ben [00:04:16] Yeah, Knight Rider was great. That's but that's actually a perfect segway into our story this week because you're talking about a car that's basically the Knight Rider car.

Pat [00:04:26] Yeah, actually, yeah. Only real life and somehow even more badass than fiction.

Ben [00:04:32] More badass than Hasselhoff.

Pat [00:04:33] Well, at least as badass as Hasselhoff.

Ben [00:04:38] But real life. So we'll take it.

Pat [00:04:39] And we'll talk about it after this word from our sponsor. I just thought.

Speaker 3 [00:04:57] This one is for someone who turns out on this quote, which makes me smile. The motion is for the children. No chocolate? No, no, no. Nothing.

Pat [00:05:05] The year is 1992, and somewhere in Denmark, Helga Meyer is sitting in front of his TV watching the news. What he sees on his screen horrifies him. He's looking at the aftermath of the Bosnian war, the horrors of the former Yugoslavia. This was the first war on European soil since World War Two. There's been ethnic cleansing, massive civilian casualties. The cities of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia have been devastated by this action.

Speaker 3 [00:05:34] And if you look at the Civil War Requiem, this one is for someone killed over there. We need somebody who's going to make peace here, not to keep peace. You have to live together again.

Pat [00:05:47] There's tracer fire surface to air missiles, artillery craters, you name it. What he sees on his screen is the civilian cost. Houses destroyed. Shops destroyed. Mosques destroyed. Churches destroyed. There's no rule of law. There's brutal street warfare. It's racially charged. It's ethnically charge. You know, gangs are taking over. And there are people just fighting each other in the streets. And then there are dangers that you can't see. There are landmines. The whole thing is declared a war crime by the U.N.. And the gangs, the rebels, the outlaws, the bandits that are roaming in the cities, in the countryside. They even go after U.N. humanitarian aid trucks that had tried to go in. They tried to go after Red Cross vehicles. They intercept them. They steal the humanitarian aid before it gets to the starving, suffering civilians. The rest of the world heard about this, but they didn't go in. The political situation was too complicated. They didn't want to make their humanitarian crisis worse after a certain point. What are you going to do? Even the actual literal humanitarian aid workers weren't even given clearance to go in. It was that.

Speaker 3 [00:07:02] Bad. The mission is to look at the children. They need somebody who's going to make peace here.

Pat [00:07:09] What would most people do? Well, most people would give money, right? Call their elected officials, have a bake sales and thoughts and prayers. But Helga meyer was not most people. Helga Meyer had trained with the Green Berets, the Danish Special Forces, And he was also in addition to all that. The proud owner of a 1979 Camaro.

Ben [00:07:39] Dad, I don't want to kill the vibe of that because it was awesome. But I have to interject and say, Do you know who else owned a late 20th century Camaro?

Pat [00:07:47] I don't know, Ben. Who else did own a late 20th century Camaro?

Ben [00:07:51] I had a 1992 Camaro, Z 28, and I loved it. That was my favorite car I've ever had. I named her Black Ice. She was awesome for a decade. That car was the most important thing in my life, I think. Or top three, probably. So when we're talking about this type of car, this 1979 Camaro, you mentioned Knight Rider earlier and Knight Rider was a Trans-Am, and the Camaro is a similar body style. They're both General Motors. This is the generation before the Iraq and the Trans-Am, but this one is kind of a very similar body type to if you want a picture like Smokey and the Bandit, those Firebird cars with, like, the Big bird on the hood. It's like that style of car.

Pat [00:08:41] So with that visual in our minds, let's picture Helga and his Camaro. I don't think he had a mullet at this point, but I don't want to make any assumptions. He was furnished with the Camaro and the courage of his convictions. He actually said in some interview later, he said that God had called him to do this.

Ben [00:08:59] Was like the Blues Brothers. Like you're on a mission from God.

Pat [00:09:02] Exactly. So he goes to the United Nations and he says to the United Nations, Hey, folks, looks like people in that part of the world need help. I would like to provide help. I have a plan. They said no, look. He was undaunted. He approached other governmental agencies. He approached other militaries. He approached other non-governmental agencies. They all said, no. No. Too bad. Nope. Helga. Sorry. So what does he do? He toodles on over to Germany. Well, toodles. I don't know. Toodles. Not the right word. He speeds on over. He dashes on over. Yeah.

Ben [00:09:38] Yeah. As a fellow Camaro owner, I'm not comfortable with Tuttle being the verb here. I think he'd cruise.

Pat [00:09:44] There we go. Cruise. He drives.

Ben [00:09:46] I do think it's worth mentioning here that, like, it's literally just some guy is some guy in Denmark with the 1979 Camaro, which we've established beyond the Shadow of a doubt is cool. And I don't think we have to belabor that point any longer, but it is just a two door car from the late seventies, and he's just some guy from Denmark and he's driving that car over to the United Nations and being like, I want to help with the war in Yugoslavia. And they're like, No. And he's just doesn't want to take that for an answer.

Pat [00:10:20] No, he is just some guy, but he is also some guy who was in the Jaeger Corps, which is kind of the Danish equivalent of the Green Berets. So he wasn't just any some guy. He was a very particular some guy with skills, moxie, confidence in his own abilities.

Ben [00:10:40] I'm just going to say that if Hasselhoff showed up at the U.N. with the camera and was like, I want to help in Sarajevo, they might have said, yes.

Pat [00:10:48] He was cool, but alas, he was not David Hasselhoff. So he had to pursue alternate routes. So he drives. He drives, He drives. And I'd like to think that the Autobahn was involved for at least part of his journey because Germany's involved. He goes over to Germany, he goes to the five Mein Airfield, which is a home to a U.S. Air Force base, and he drives his Camaro onto the tarmac. He says hi to the folks there, and these are U.S. Air Force guys. And he tells them what he intends to do. He he wants to say, hey, U.S. Air Force guys, I want to go to war torn Sarajevo and drive around and hand out food as humanitarian aid. And the U.S. Air Force guys are like, yeah, you mean like a post-apocalyptic Santa Claus? Maybe not quite those words, but.

Ben [00:11:38] Maybe those words.

Pat [00:11:39] Maybe those words. Yeah.

Ben [00:11:41] And the Air Force guys are in. They're down with just some guy driving his Camaro onto the tarmac of Rhine Main Air Force Base and being like, Hey, can you guys fly me to Serbia so that I can start passing out candy to children?

Pat [00:11:58] Yeah, candy and stuff with actual nutritional value and.

Ben [00:12:02] Yeah, medical aid, you know, all of that stuff too, but mostly the candy.

Pat [00:12:06] So honestly, Ben, I think bad asses recognize other bad ass.

Ben [00:12:09] That's true. That does happen.

Pat [00:12:10] They say to Helga, Hey, hey, how can we help? And Helga says, Can you pimp my ride? And they say, Hells, yeah, we can pimp your ride.

Ben [00:12:19] I mean, I guess it's probably kind of an awesome question for these guys, like, Hey, what can you do to, like Mad Max, my 79 Camaro? And they're just like, Oh, yeah, dude, I got some armor plating around here somewhere we can. But this year, like, let me get my rivet gun and, like, we'll figure something out here.

Pat [00:12:35] Yeah. So they're like, Let me check in the back. They bring all sorts of stuff out. The back. They do their thing. And Helga, even though he had had this whole litany of no, no third time, no seven times, no ten times, no from all these other big, presumably powerful organizations. He and his new best friends, his buddies in the U.S. Air Force, they trick out the Camaro. And if you imagine the Camaro such as Ben describe, which is just sort of the ordinary, like, baseline bad ass Camaro such as a mere mortal might drive. Sorry, Ben, I'm considering you a mere mortal for now.

Ben [00:13:15] I'm extremely mortal. It's totally fine. I'm not offended by this.

Pat [00:13:18] Well, okay. When you think of humanitarian workers driving around, handing out supplies, helping people, I usually just picture like a big, boring van, maybe with a Red Cross logo on the side or something like that.

Ben [00:13:29] Yeah, a big white truck packed up with as many supplies as you can get in it. But that's what they were driving in there before. And those trucks were getting ambushed and and looted and they were getting all their supplies jacked by these warlords and all this stuff. So, you know, maybe that's not the right move to go in with the vehicle that people are expecting to be full of things that people who are in a war zone might need the.

Pat [00:13:52] Scooby Doo van or whatever you want to call it. It's maybe not the best option. So you need something, maybe a little more aerodynamic and you need something that's suited to this really dangerous context. You need something maybe a little less obviously visible. So you take this muscle car and Helga's priority was speed and speed and more speed and ideally not getting fatally shot.

Ben [00:14:17] Right. And yeah, the stealth is the good is a good option here because yeah, they are they are looking for humanitarian trucks and it's not great to be kind of sitting in one.

Pat [00:14:27] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. He wants to get in, get out. So he and his U.S. Air Force buddies strip everything down as much as they possibly can. They get rid of the back seats, they armor plated as much as possible. They Kevlar the heck out of it. They painted the whole thing matte black. The enemy, enemy ambush, brigands, robbers, bad guys would not be able to see it on thermal imaging or radar or whatever. They took out all the lights. And I have to confess, I'm just freaked out at the idea of driving at night without lights. But on the other hand, I am not Helga Meyer.

Ben [00:15:04] Yeah, They say that he wore night vision goggles and just looked at his G.P.S., and he's driving through Lake. When he gets into Sarajevo, he's driving through streets that are mined with land mines and barricaded and blockades and barbed wire. And he's never driven in Sarajevo. He's never been to Bosnia before. And yeah, he's driving this car. And I'm not going to lie to you. I loved that 92 Z 28 Camaro, but that thing broke down on me all the time. It was not super reliable. And it's a kind of I mean, he's painted it with this aircraft like stealth aircraft paint that like, absorbs light and he's driving it with the lights off in the dark, trying to navigate by night vision goggles and not not to like awesome night vision goggles that we have today. But the night vision goggles from what is this, 1996 like the first gen night vision goggles, which are like, you know, not as good.

Pat [00:15:58] Yeah. So he's got all that. He's got a military radio, he's got a front blade, which I'm picturing is kind of like a cow catcher, but much cooler. So he can kind of plow through or just kind of shove away whatever, or whoever needs to be shoved away.

Ben [00:16:15] Yeah, it's it was it was to, like, push debris out of the road and stuff like the blockades we were talking about. And and when you read it interviews with him, he said it was too a you know, he thought that maybe having that blade out front, it just a big shovel like a snow plow. And he was like, oh, maybe having that out front would set off landmines before they went off so that they wouldn't blow up underneath my car. That seems extremely ill advised, but it apparently worked out for him.

Pat [00:16:42] How big is this thing? It can't be more than a few feet away from his car, so. Okay. Okay. You do you, Helga.

Ben [00:16:48] It's not blowing up directly under your ass, I guess. Yeah. It's more in your face, which is probably better, I guess.

Pat [00:16:55] Yeah. It's blowing up adjacent to your ass.

Ben [00:16:58] Yeah.

Pat [00:16:59] Be that as it may, it apparently worked out for him. He survived. Oh, well, so was that a spoiler?

Ben [00:17:06] Yes. Spoiler alert for this. Also, the car had a spoiler on it, so I don't know if.

Pat [00:17:10] That's a huh. I see what you did there.

Ben [00:17:13] Yeah, I regret it.

Pat [00:17:15] I regret nothing.

Ben [00:17:18] No, that's it. And, you know, this car looks like something out of Mad Max. It's just. It's black. It's got the roll cage on the interior. It's got a front blade, it's got armor plating on all the windows. All the side windows are armored out. It's just the front window, which is tinted like crazy. The main difference between this and a Mad Max car, though, is that he didn't put any. John's on it because he's not a warrior, he's not a soldier. He's not trying to kill anybody. He's not looking to shoot his way out of a out of the situation, which in some ways is almost more badass, that this guy didn't even even carry a sidearm. He didn't carry a pistol into this war zone because he wasn't there to fight. He was there to help people. And like, that takes some serious guts, right? I will say, though, that my favorite upgrade to the car is that he put like, a little rubber ducky in the grill.

Pat [00:18:07] Wait, what, then You're kidding about the rubber ducky, right? No, no.

Ben [00:18:10] No, no. So if you go and look up pictures of the car, he called it the ghost Camaro because it was all blacked out and you couldn't pick it up on thermal imaging. And it was really hard to see it at night. It was. [00:18:19]He only drove it at night and it was very stealth. [1.6s] But if you look up pictures of the ghost Camaro on on Google [00:18:25]or if you go to our site and check it out there, there is kind of buried in where they took the grill out and replaced it with some more armor plating kind of stuff. But [10.3s] if you kind of look down in where the grille is supposed to be, you can see like just the little eyes and beak of this little plastic yellow rubber ducky like you'd see in a bathtub. [00:18:47]And so anytime you see pictures of this, you can kind of you've got to really look for it because you didn't you couldn't have it on the outside, but it's buried down in there. And if you look for it, you can spot it. [8.9s] You see these little rubber ducky eyes looking back at you.

Pat [00:18:58] That must be the baddest ass rubber ducky of the 20th century.

Ben [00:19:03] Yeah, that rubber ducky has probably seen some shed. And Helga Meyer, it's important to remember that he's doing this without any approval by anybody. Right. I think it really needs to be said that it's like everybody told him. No, you can't go. It gets in his car and he is making sorties every night. He is driving his Camaro however many miles to whatever school or location he needs to go to. I mean, it's amazing, right? In a.

Pat [00:19:30] Way, he's got all of this equipment, but he's basically using the Air Force to go through Sarajevo and he's getting up to like 90 miles an hour. So that sounds about right.

Ben [00:19:42] Yeah, that's right. Like, there's several stories of him being ambushed. There's stories where he's being chased by a car full of dudes with AK 47 shooting at him. The armor plating is bouncing bullets and like, it's constant danger for him. [00:19:57]And he's doing this without, like, he doesn't have any skin in the game either, Right? He's doesn't know anybody here. He's just there to help kids and bring them stuffed animals and candy and medical treatment and diabetes medication or whatever else they need. [14.1s]

Pat [00:20:12] [00:20:12]Yeah, whatever. Useful stuff. [1.6s]

Ben [00:20:14] [00:20:14]Right. [0.0s] And I had enough mechanical issues with my Camaro that I wasn't comfortable getting it up too far above 90 [00:20:20]degrees, [0.0s] like on a flat terrain, not in a war zone for this guy. Like he installed, like, nitrous oxide into the car, which is crazy. It's nothing. The kind that gets you high. It's the kind that you inject into your engine. I don't know if you remember, like the Fast and the Furious movies they used to be about racing. And that was the thing that you always see in those movies where there's the little red button on the dash and you push it and you go super fast. [00:20:46]It has some reaction with the gasoline and the oxygen and it burns really fast and it makes the car go faster. [5.0s] So he already has a pretty juiced up car between what he has done to the car beforehand and the Air Force guys, you've got this 440 horsepower V8 and injecting knots in there is going to give you a little bit of extra acceleration. Kind of think of it as like an afterburner for a fighter plane.

Pat [00:21:08] Yeah. Over roughly a decade, he made over a hundred runs. He delivered nearly £1,000 of food and he survived. He took a bullet off of his helmet. The car itself took a lot of heat, but both Helga and the car and the rubber ducky were so well-protected that they were otherwise unscathed and they survived the war. And also, honestly, so did many of the good residents of Sarajevo because they had access to the supplies that Helga, the renegade, delivered to them. And so, yeah, that's. That's Helga Meier.

Ben [00:21:40] Yeah. And there's some great pictures that you can find. We'll post some of them on Badass of the Week. Ackerman is part of his article, but if you search the ghost Camaro and Helga Meier, he drives this car through Sarajevo, through the streets of Bosnia and Serbia, and he's just basically unloading these big cardboard boxes of cotton candy for school kids. And, you know, like you said, like there's there's some more important things that can be delivered. But, you know, there's this psychological like morale bonus of, hey, you know, we got candy, we're in the middle of this war zone and this nice thing is happening today. I think it's hard to put a value on how much that contributes to the the happiness and the morale of people who are going through one of the most horrible wars we've seen in a very long time. The the the worst the world had seen since World War Two.

Pat [00:22:29] Yeah. And especially since normal humanitarian aid wasn't getting through. The residents of Sarajevo are thinking, Hey. Someone out there is actually thinking about us.

Ben [00:22:40] And he still has the Camaro, which is cool, at least as of the time of the article I wrote about him, which was a few years ago, he still had the Camaro, which is cool. And so that's the story of Helga Meyer in the Ghost Camaro, and that's pretty awesome. From there, we are going to transition into another story of similar repurposing, and we're going to do another modded Roomba. When we come back from this, we're going to be talking about a group of guys who took a tank in a jet fighter and duct taped them together and used it to fight oil fires. We'll be back after this. So if you turned on the TV in the late nineties, you were seeing the horrors of the Yugoslavian war. But if you turned on the TV in the early nineties, you were seeing the horrors of the aftermath of the Gulf War. So in 1991, Saddam Hussein owed a bunch of money to Kuwait, and instead of paying them back, he invaded and conquered their country. And a lot of people said, no, maybe you shouldn't do that. And they formed this big coalition of various countries around the world attack Saddam Hussein and the Desert Storm War as we know it in the U.S.. Saddam had the third biggest army in the world at the time, only behind the United States and Russia. And that army was destroyed. And I think like a week to ten days, honestly, within a few hours, most of it was kind of beat up. And by the end of the war, it was mostly annihilated. So Saddam decides, okay, maybe this might have been a mistake and he leaves Kuwait. But he says, you know, if I can't have all this oil, no one can. So he sets all of the Kuwaiti oilfields on fire on his way out the door. And I'm sure you've seen the pictures of this and the footage of this, like towering fireballs, like the inferno, like hellscape.

Pat [00:24:32] Oh, yeah. It's scary to look at. And what's also scary is thinking about the environmental damage of all this.

Ben [00:24:38] Yeah, the environmental damage of these oil fires is catastrophic, right? The ecological impact is staggering. It's like one step removed from basically being an extinction level event, like a nuclear winter. You know, it depends on how long these fires were going to burn for. But you're still looking at literally hundreds of oil fires. All of these oil derricks were lit on fire. They say 6 to 700 of them. They are 200 foot tall pillars of flame burning at this huge heat. They're just spewing black smoke into the atmosphere like millions and millions of gallons of crude oil are just burning every day forever, nonstop. So, you know, I mean, oil wells are pressurized and the oil shoots up out of them. And as soon as it contacts, the air catches on fire and they're not going to stop burning. And when you look at that from an ecological perspective, you're looking at like gas raining, like gasoline spraying everywhere and raining down on things. You've got acid rain that comes out of this thousands of miles away. You're seeing these pillars of fire. And if they burn too long, there's a chance that, you know, you get this kind of nuclear winter conditions where it's going to, you know, lower the temperature of the earth by a degree, which is just, you know, doesn't sound like much, but it's real bad deal. And basically every firefighter on earth is watching this on TV and is like, we got to we got to do something about this. There's a big problem.

Pat [00:26:00] Yeah, it's a huge problem. Hundreds of oil fires of honestly, biblical proportions. How does a firefighter deal with something of that magnitude?

Ben [00:26:09] I mean, I have no idea. Like, I look at these images of these humongous fires and it's just like like you're literally shooting a flamethrower in the air from underground is what it looks like.

Pat [00:26:18] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:26:19] I have no idea how you would begin to even deal with something like that, let alone 700 of them. And at first, a lot of engineers were like, Yeah, we don't know what we're going to do. I don't know if we're gonna be able to put these out fast enough before it does, you know, cause some very serious problems globally. And they want to get firefighters from all over the world out there to help. And so just as Helga meyer was watching Yugoslavia on his TV, there's a group of guys in Hungary watching their TV. They work for a company called M.B. Drilling. They're based about 30 miles south of Budapest in Hungary. And these guys are watching and they're like, we have what might be a solution here and now is when we need to talk about big wind, big wind.

Pat [00:27:02] That's either a really cool name or the punchline to a fart joke.

Ben [00:27:09] Yes, it is a really cool thing. It's it might be both. I don't know if they have any big wind jokes about it. It's it's it's an old style like Russian engineering thing. It's kind of came out of, you know, the Cold War, which is like, hey, in Siberia, we have a bunch of airfields that are covered in snow 11 months out of the year and we have to clear the snow off. So I don't know, what do we do? How about we just strap a jet engine onto a flatbed truck and turn it on and use the exhaust of the MiG engine to, like, blow, like snow blower the the snow off the runway.

Pat [00:27:43] So they MacGyver a huge ass snow blower. Yes, it could work.

Ben [00:27:47] Very like Russian style. I definitely, like, have an image in my head of what these guys looked like when they came up with this solution. But apparently it works. I don't know how efficiently, but it worked. And then they decided like, okay, well, how do we how do we googly eye Roomba, this version of it? And how about we take two jet engines and we mount them onto a tank and that's what big wind is. Big wind was built by NB drilling company in Hungary, and it is two jet engines from a MiG 21 fighter mounted onto the turret of a World War two Soviet T-34 tank. And it looks awesome.

Pat [00:28:26] It does. I've seen pictures. It's painted. I am not making this up. Fire engine red. You could kind of say it looks like a railgun, but I think calling it a railgun doesn't do it justice. This thing is honestly surreal. It looks like rejected Star Wars concept art. [00:28:44]Picture the following. You've got a tank and then on top of the tank there are these two huge circular cylindrical things. I guess those are the big engines. [9.4s]

Ben [00:28:54] Yeah, the engines are ten feet long, which is roughly like a short school bus, and they are filled with jet fuel, although forget.

Pat [00:29:00] [00:29:00]So you've got these large cylinders, things filled with jet fuel and they're coming out of the front. And I'm looking at these photos and I'm thinking the. [10.3s] This is sort of like some weird oversize, oh, you know, Wall-E, the little robot character. He's got those kind of big round eyes.

Ben [00:29:21] Yeah, that's a great analogy for what it looks like. It looks like Wall-E, except I think.

Pat [00:29:25] Except the. Yeah, much, much, much bigger than Wall-E. And these big round things come out the front and these huge cylinders or AI stalks or whatever you want to call them, that's where they shoot the air out, right? Yeah.

Ben [00:29:38] That's where the air comes.

Pat [00:29:38] Out and they're on these mounts so they can be get this angled around. They can shoot air in different directions. And then each of these two AI stock cylinders have these three, like long rigid eyelashes coming out at the top, making it look even weirder. And that's where the water comes out.

Ben [00:29:57] Yeah. And so so finding the water is a bit of a challenge here. But yeah, you have to like basically you plug a hose into a lake or some groundwater, you just, like, dig a hole down to groundwater and plug it into that. And, you know, whatever giant water source you can find, because this thing needs a lot of water. And so that shoots out of the eyelashes and basically it produces enough water to fill an above ground swimming pool in about 20 seconds. It's shooting at at about 770 miles an hour, which is roughly the speed of sound.

Pat [00:30:28] Wow. And I do kind of wonder what it's like to be a human being in the vicinity of these things.

Ben [00:30:33] It's probably not super fun. So we'll get into it in a second, though.

Pat [00:30:38] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:30:39] And be drilling and the leader of this unit that's going to be deployed here with big wind, his name is Nandor Shumway, and one of our producers said we can't mention him without including a reference to Nandor the relentless from what we do in the shadows. But Nandor goes in with his two buddies, Thomas, Deborah, Xeni and Esteban Cherish. My Hungarian pronunciation is very poor and hopefully that was close enough. I apologize to any Hungarians who had to witness that. But basically these three guys, they're all in their late forties, early fifties, and they take big wind from Budapest to Kuwait and they just start driving this tank around the Middle East. Just three middle aged Hungarian dudes driving around a tank full of jet fuel trying to put out oil derrick fires.

Pat [00:31:27] And they're in the vicinity of water that's being shot out at, what did you say, 770 miles per hour. So it's faster than the speed of sound. How are their eardrums doing it? All of this.

Ben [00:31:38] You have to wear hearing protection or your ears will bleed.

Pat [00:31:40] Yikes. Okay. So this is loud yet.

Ben [00:31:44] I mean, it's a jet engine, so the whole thing is loud. Right? And the t-34 itself is loud.

Pat [00:31:49] And the t-34 that's the mean Soviet tank of World War Two. But that's from like the 1940s, Right?

Ben [00:31:54] Right. And it's a tank from the forties and they're driving it around in 1991. It's a 50, 60 year old tank. It, it clanks and rattles and just kind of chugs. Then, you know, the T-34 was famous for making this kind of rattly noise when it drove around. Anyway, it's not quiet and it's got this big lake, you know, with the camera we talked about the 5.7 liter V8. This thing has a 40 liter V12. It's loud and it just cranks out plumes of black smoke. And then on top of that, you got the oil derricks which are making noise. It's like rushing water out of the ground, catching on fire and burning. So it's like that rumbling of water kind of sound. And then you have the the fireball on top of it. And it's loud. It's so loud that the only way these guys can communicate, you can't do hand signals because you can't put your face outside the tank when you're next to this burning oil derrick.

Pat [00:32:45] Oh, hell, no. No.

Ben [00:32:46] So they have these boxes with lights on them. Like red? No. Green? Yes. Up, down, left, right.

Pat [00:32:53] And so it's kind of like Captain Pike in the Menagerie episode of Star Trek.

Ben [00:32:56] It's exactly like that.

Pat [00:32:58] Not the most nuanced form of discourse.

Ben [00:33:01] That's perfect. Yeah. That's the only way they can communicate. Right? So you have Thomas Denny. He's sitting in the driver's seat of the T-34, and it's like, okay, you've to really trust this 50 year old technology from World War Two to keep you alive here, because you can't really see out the front because the heat is so intense that the entire front of the tank has to be a heat shield. So there's no there's no periscope. There's no looking out the front of this thing. He is just sitting at the controls, driving it, looking at these colored boxes. And then this friend cherishes in the he's the platform controller, he's in the back, he's operating the turret, kind of aiming the jet engines at the fire. And Nandor is probably the biggest bad ass of all of them because he walks next to the tank, just like wearing a radiation suit.

Pat [00:33:51] He walks. Walks? You mean like on the ground?

Ben [00:33:55] Like on the ground 12 feet away from the tank into the side, not behind, because he's got to look at where he's going. So he's wearing like full hazmat suit, right? Like when you see like a pandemic movie and everybody's wearing all those bio suits. The anti nuclear anti-radiation anti. Whatever suits he's wearing one of these giant fireproof suits, and he walks next to the tank and he just kind of eyeballs it and he's got the control box and he's like, Go forward. So he hits the forward button and they drive forward. And to me, that's pretty baller.

Pat [00:34:24] Yeah, that's. That's pretty baller. That's pretty badass. That's pretty relentlessly badass.

Ben [00:34:30] An interesting thing about Big Wind is that they originally developed it to kind of hose down the aftermath of, like a nuclear attack.

Pat [00:34:38] So if some city in Hungary got hit with a nuclear attack, you could just drive this bad boy in there and it would be shielded against heat and radiation, and you could use it to hose down tanks or buildings or whatever. And that was the original purpose of this. But then they were like, okay, maybe we can make this work for a different purpose.

Ben [00:35:02] Yeah, exactly. And they did. Yeah. It was designed to kind of combat the heat and radiation and fires after a nuclear attack, but it's actually pretty well suited for fighting oil fires. They have this big fire engine, red tank with jet engines, and they fly it to the Middle East and the C-130 lands and opens the back hatch. And this thing drives out into the middle of all of these other firefighter crews from all over the world who have come here together to band together and fight this global disaster.

Pat [00:35:33] Yeah, one of the guys out there was Red Adair, the most famous firefighter at the time. And you've written about him on the blog, right? Man, I have, yeah. And he was famous for putting out, guess what oil field fires. He was from Texas. He put out a bunch of fires in Texas, and then he showed up here, here being Kuwait. He was 75 at the time. Hey, you know, he's living his best life and he used explosives. How do you use explosives to put out a fire? Apparently, what you do is you basically bomb the oil field fire, and that puts it out. Is this what people mean when they say fight fire with fire? And apparently you can use the specially shaped explosive. The explosion creates a shockwave and that blows the fire away from the oil well, the source, the fuel. And it's kind of like blowing out a birthday candle only much, much bigger. And there's no cake involved.

Ben [00:36:33] Yeah, And that's like the interesting thing with putting these outright is because the the, the oil comes directly out of the ground and ignites, but it doesn't ignite immediately because when it's coming out of the ground, it's moving so fast that it doesn't ignite. And so what you have to do is break that connection between the stream of fuel and the currently bursting fire. And, you know, you do have to cap the well. Yeah, these explosives aren't capping the well, big ones not capping the well. But you just have to stop the fire from being continually fueled out of the ground. And yeah, somebody asked me to talk about Red Adair because Red Adair at the time was like the most famous firefighter in the world. And John Wayne basically played him in a movie once. And they asked Nanda about Red Adair and he was like, Oh, he's explosives to put out oil fires. And then to was like, what? Like, I'm not crazy. I know all of that. That was his reaction anyway. Like these guys who are in in Kuwait, even the Red Adair guys are watching this giant fire engine red t 34 with big engines on it like drive off the C-130. And they're just like, what is the deal with this guy? I mean, talk about like apocalyptic, right? This thing looks completely bonkers. They arrive in the Middle East in August of 1991, and these guys spend the next 57 days fighting fires with big wind, which, you know, like I said, they're wearing these radiation suits. They're driving them out to these fires. The controls get so hot when you're sitting inside the tank that you have to wear these like special super thick gloves to touch them because you're basically cooking inside the tank, putting these fires that have to be like super thick oven mitts basically to even grab the control stick.

Pat [00:38:13] Oh, yeah.

Ben [00:38:14] You got to get within 25 feet of this fireball for big wind to be effective against it. And 25 feet is like not that far. It's like a big room in your house or like, you know, a swimming pool, like a normal swimming pool, not an Olympic sized swimming pool. And you got to drive this tank that close to these things before you can like blast the air at it. So the jet engines, you couldn't crank them up beyond 70% because if you went higher than that, they were going to overheat. The jet engines are designed to be run in the upper atmosphere where it's cold and not in front of like a hail of burning oil.

Pat [00:38:46] Yeah, This is not their natural environment.

Ben [00:38:49] No. It's designed to be run in Siberia on a landing pad or like in upper atmosphere. And yeah, they, they'd find a water supply or they did they dig a hole or whatever, they'd get some kind of water supply set up and they'd shoot at the thing with big wind for like 10 to 20 minutes, which is a long time to be sitting there cooking inside of a base of like. Literally a metal oven. And they'd sit there and they'd hose down the fire in it and then it would work in. And they say that when when the fire was out, like the tank, the exterior of the tank would be burning so hard that you could literally just like slap a steak on there and cook it in a couple of minutes. It would char grill it.

Pat [00:39:27] You never know. That could be the next gastronomical trend.

Ben [00:39:32] Chargrilled on the exterior of a tank. I mean, I would totally eat that if that was on a menu or somewhere if I didn't know it totally. As long as they weren't hosing down the radiation, you know that nuclear radiation, I think I'd probably actually would eat that. And neither were there for 57 days and 57 days. 57 days they were in Kuwait. I don't have like a good count on how many fires they put out. But one thing that's worth mentioning is that these guys and all the other firefighters out there who are working on this, right, there were teams from all over the world and they were out there working crazy hours and they came from everywhere to do this because it was a global problem that had to be dealt with. And these guys, Red Adair and Big Wind and all of these other teams that were a little bit more conventional in their approaches to putting out fires. These people came from all over the world and they were working day and night. They were under under, rested and they were putting out all together people managed to put out all these teams combined to put out something to like three or four fires a day. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And towards the end of it, once everybody started getting the hang of it, like collectively, these companies were putting out 4 to 6 fires a day. When the fire started, people believed it was going to be five years before they would all be put out. And that is like serious global problem, global temperature change problems.

Pat [00:40:53] Oh, yeah, Yeah.

Ben [00:40:54] But when everybody in the world came together, including Big Wind, including Red Adair, and they were able to put these fires all out in six months and avert global catastrophe, climate change on like a post-apocalyptic level.

Pat [00:41:09] Climate change on a frighteningly immediate timeline.

Ben [00:41:12] And yeah, it was averted thanks to all of the big wind and all of these other like brave firefighters who got out there. It's heroic, though, right? It's what makes a badass, I think.

Pat [00:41:20] Yeah. You do something, you go above and beyond. Yeah.

Ben [00:41:23] And that's kind of the connection between our stories today.

Pat [00:41:26] Yeah.

Ben [00:41:27] Regular people watching some horrible stuff around the world volunteered to personally go in and try to make the world a better place. And it's admirable and it's badass and it's heroic and it's inspirational. And that's what we have for today is, you know, yeah, maybe I don't know how we can apply this to our daily lives, but, you know, maybe, you know, in the old lady at the grocery store, drop something. You can get it for something. It's the least you can do because these people are doing driving around the world to fight.

Pat [00:41:57] But it's. Oh.

Ben [00:42:00] So yeah. With that in mind, thank you guys so much for listening as always. And we really appreciate you guys. And yeah, we'll see you on the next one was probably something significantly more violent. Thanks so much.

Pat: Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.