Flyboys and Cowboys by Michael McClelland
Depending on who was asking, Guy Harris called himself an aviator, a pilot, or a soldier of fortune. He used aviator when he was looking for work. Pilot he’d say if he didn’t care much about the conversation, usually if he got cornered by a woman in a bar. If he ran into a man like himself, a man who was that way, that’s when Guy was a soldier of fortune.
It was July of 1930, and Guy was in Panama City, en route to Venezuela, where the American Museum of Natural History was paying top dollar for pilots to fly over Venezuela’s Gran Sábana, a massive, unexplored grassland. The museum said their goal was to map the region for “scientific evaluation,” but the five thousand dollars they were offering said they were looking for oil. It didn’t matter to
