In the early 1990s I was in Kuwait with the company overseeing extinguishment of the oil well fires left over from Gulf War I. My job involved driving regularly to many of the burning wells to liaise with the firefighting teams working them. Much of the road network between wells was destroyed or otherwise unusable, so we drove on this stuff they called "gatch," which was a claylike substance laid over a very sandy base.
One day I was leaving a site, and when I attempted to back my vehicle away from the burning well, I managed to break through the gatch to the sand below and within seconds all 4 wheels were hub-deep in the sand and the vehicle was basically sitting on its frame.
I was sufficiently close to the well that I couldn't get out of the vehicle on the driver's side because of the heat and I was seriously concerned that the vehicle was going to go up in flames once pressure in the gas tank got high enough. We had already lost a couple of vehicles in a variety of ways and I knew with a certainty that my boss would be thoroughly unimpressed if I did the same.
I had no choice but to slide out the passenger side and run over to the chief of the firefighting team for assistance. As it turns out, the team was eager to help, because they really didn't want my vehicle exploding where they were working. One of their equipment operators got into a utility vehicle (a really big, 4-wheel-drive pickup), drove it over to my stranded Range Rover, quickly hooked up a tow chain, started up his engine — and broke through the gatch and buried his truck's wheels to the hubs.
So now we had two stuck vehicles threatening to explode at any moment.
The operator got out of the truck (cursing a blue streak), stomped back to where the team had their vehicles, fired up a Caterpillar D8, wheeled it over to where the two vehicles were stranded, hitched up another chain from the Cat to his truck, clambered into the D8's cab, and wrenched both stuck vehicles away from the fire.
So for me, 'higher power' was manufactured in Peoria, Illinois — using (at the time, anyway) union labor.
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