Letter from Banda Aceh: The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has about 10 helicopters among its huge airborne fleet, but spend a few hours sitting by the field that has become the landing stage for Aceh's massive tsunami relief effort and you'd think there were many times more.
From dusk to dawn, the choppers land and take off, flying more than 80 missions a day, each lasting two to three hours, and taking a break only to return to the ship, 12 nautical miles offshore, to refuel.
The helicopters, Seahawks that can carry up to 5500lbs of cargo, create clouds of dust and filth, and the din of the rotor blades makes normal conversation impossible.
Dozens of young sailors from the carrier group volunteer to spend a 12-hour day loading supplies. With no size discrimination in the US military, some, like medic Sylvia Esthay, are carrying close to their own body weight each time they haul an 80lb sack of rice onto their backs.
The heat and humidity are punishing, and the conditions health-threateningly foul. A doctor with the Royal Australian Air Force told me that a sample taken of the thick mud around Banda Aceh airport for an e-coli reading had to be diluted 100 times before it could be tested.
"We're literally living in faecal matter," she said.
Around the airfield, tents have been set up by non-government organisations and a variety of United Nations agencies. Indonesian taxi-drivers park their cars neatly under the trees lining the concrete pathways and tout for business. Unwanted, they go back to chatting and smoking fragrant cigarettes.
The Indonesian army has a camp a few hundred metres away. Some of the tents don't have plastic sheeting on the floor so soldiers are, literally, living in faecal matter.
A couple of cafes have been set up and rotting garbage, tossed nonchalantly by the cooks, is piling high outside the kitchens because there are no bins.
Near the airport, paramilitary police sit in groups in their large green tents, chatting and smoking.
The Singapore army has brought in a portable air traffic control tower.
The Malaysians and Germans, among many others, have mobile hospitals. A team of French firemen have erected their tent near that of a group of Spanish doctors. Patients don't come to them, however, because the tsunami destroyed roads and the injured have no way of getting here.
The Chinese delegation has pitched four small tents about 150 metres from the Americans' airfield. The doctors spend their days working with the Malaysians and Singaporeans to get the local hospitals running again. The rest of the group of 40 were lying around their tents on a recent afternoon, complaining about the noise from the choppers.
"Just what do they think they are doing with all these helicopters," asked the deputy team leader, Dr Chen Hong, a professor of seismology with the China Earthquake Administration in Beijing.
After being told that the US navy was delivering food, water, medicine, doctors and American civilians who had made their way to Indonesia to offer what help they could, Dr Hong said: "Well, if they are helping, then I like them." Not many people here like the American effort to help the tsunami victims.
The UN and independent agencies have been so open in their reluctance to work with troops that sometimes it seemed their disdain for the Americans was more important than saving lives. Some have even suggested the troops swap their uniforms for the blue helmets of UN peacekeepers, a move that would apparently make them more acceptable to the international aid community, and to some journalists who expressed disdain for the Americans by refusing to cover the relief effort.
"Not interested," was the reaction from one Western correspondent when she had covered the American activities. Another, asked about his time aboard the Abraham Lincoln, said: "It's a big ship full of Americans."
By then, the US navy had moved more than two million pounds of supplies into Aceh. The aircraft carrier is producing the major source of drinking water for Acehnese who have lost everything, and it is delivered to them in 20-litre containers by helicopter.
A German radio reporter said the main motivation for the American effort was good publicity to counter the international ill-will over Iraq.
As evidence of how "misguided and naive", as he put it, the Americans are, he told the story of a helicopter crewman who, after unloading sacks of rice onto a clearing in the swamp where villages once stood, handed a teddy bear to an Indonesian child before taking off.
"He had just one teddy bear, and he handed it to one child, though there were lots of children.
"As the helicopter took off, I saw that all the children there were fighting over that one teddy bear," the reporter said.