“Heartbeat 10–4” and the campaign behind it: https://youtu.be/aWAvrVsbO6A
Ten-Four, Heartbeat: Answering the Call That Never Came
Heartbeat “10–4”
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From the Onion Patch shore, past midnight, she flew,
Heartbeat climbing through the quiet and the blue.
Twenty-four thousand, a long road north,
A lifeline of mercy, a promise set forth.
Our grandfathers’ onions went north on this tide,
Now mercy goes north with a prayer at its side.
Oh, Heartbeat ten-four, calling over Boston air,
Three nations weeping, wrapped in a blanket of prayer.
When the static grows heavy and the signal breaks,
We hold every name that the silence takes.
Ten-four says “I hear you,” the onion asks, “Are you OK?”
Three flags, one thread, and we answer today.
Fighting with peace, not for it, hand in hand,
Healing the heart of every grieving land.
A weak voice crackling, the signal worn thin,
Boston still calling, “Heartbeat, come in.”
Dark water off Nantucket, a search through the night,
Three nations holding their breath for a light.
We are not okay tonight, and we say so out loud.
The old folks said the onion makes you cry,
Then sweetens everything you simmer by.
Peel it back, layer by layer, tears and all,
The bitter and the sweet will hold us when we fall.
Not a weapon drawn, not a battle line cast,
Tragedy’s ember to a spark that will last.
Unity in the community, world vibe,
Peace is the shield, and peace is the guide.
Oh, Heartbeat ten-four, calling over Boston air,
Three nations weeping, wrapped in a blanket of prayer.
When the static grows heavy and the signal breaks,
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We hold every name that the silence takes.
Ten-four says “I hear you,” the onion asks, “Are you OK?”
Three flags, one thread, and we answer today.
Fighting with peace, not for it, hand in hand,
Healing the heart of every grieving land.
Six precious lives, a legacy grown,
You are never forgotten, you are never alone.
Boston to Heartbeat: we hear you now.
Bermuda to Heartbeat: “Are you OK?”
Ten-four.
Love is our anchor. Love holds the ground
In the early hours of Saturday, October 3, a medical flight called Heartbeat 104 left L.F. Wade International Airport bound for Boston. Somewhere over the dark Atlantic, as controllers handed it from New York to Boston, the voice on the radio grew weak, and then there was no voice at all. Six lives were lost, two of them our own. For an island that depends on that kind of flight, the silence that followed felt like the ground giving way.
“Heartbeat 10–4” begins with a small piece of wordplay hidden in the call sign. The air ambulance operator flies under the name “Heartbeat,” and this flight was Heartbeat 104. In radio shorthand, ten-four means message received: all right, understood, OK. The name of the flight is also an answer, and it answers the question we ask each other in a crisis: are you OK?
The song is an attempt to give a lost transmission the reply it never received.
That idea shapes the ending. After the full band falls away, leaving only a heartbeat pulse and a hum of radio static, the song turns the controllers’ own call around. Boston to Heartbeat: we hear you now. Bermuda to Heartbeat: are you OK? There is a pause, some static, and then one soft word, “ten-four.”
The song is careful about what it claims. The verses stay with what was publicly reported: the climb to cruising altitude, the weakening voice, the controllers calling “come in,” the search in the dark waters off Nantucket. It does not guess at a cause. An investigation is under way, and grief is not a license to speculate. Nor does it rush to comfort. The bridge says, out loud, “we are not okay tonight.” That honesty is deliberate. “OK” is not a bandage. It is something a community earns by saying how it really feels first.
The song also holds three nations in one frame. Bermuda mourns two of its own, Canada mourns the air ambulance crew who gave their service, and American responders and search teams answered the call. Rather than reaching for a single color scheme, the chorus offers “three flags, one thread,” because each of those flags is a different flag and the grief is shared anyway.
To understand why the song reaches for an onion, it helps to know where Operation Kitunguu comes from. According to the campaign’s own profile, its story begins not in Bermuda but in Beverly Hills, California, with Andrew Williams Jr., an advertising executive with a passion for social marketing who had built a team of collaborators spanning the world.
His work took an unusual turn when he was recruited to promote a masked fantasy character from Bermuda named “AJ the Little Gombey.” The Gombey is one of the island’s most recognizable cultural figures, a masked and costumed dancer who moves to the drum, and AJ was conceived as its small ambassador, standing for “unity in the community world vibe, fighting with peace and not for it.” The campaign nicknamed the idea onionicity: turning bittersweet events into opportunities for personal growth and transformation.
The profile then describes how the project took on a life of its own. Pressed to look at his immediate inner-city surroundings at Operation Hope, Williams put on the head of an AJ mascot suit one day to demonstrate its features, and the onlookers were electrified. A new spirit of optimism followed. He was asked, again and again, to wear the costume, officiate at special events, and pose for the cameras, and he took the name “Ambassador AJ.” The live appearances grew into choreographed “flash photo” events, post-produced for viral distribution, built on the belief that the power to smile is the most effective tool of social networking.
Williams pledged to use that power for good and launched a unity campaign named Operation Kitunguu, after the Swahili word for onion, to organize the goodwill his intercultural diplomacy had generated. His line for it is simple: “the pursuit of happiness begins with a smile, and a little onion.”
That provenance matters to the song. Kitunguu was built on smiles and goodwill, not on mourning, and its guiding question, “Are you OK?”, began as a greeting before it became a vigil. When the Heartbeat 104 loss struck, an open letter of condolence signed by Andrew Williams Jr. addressed Bermuda, Canada, and the United States together. “Heartbeat 10–4” carries that line forward. It takes a framework made for joy and tests it against grief, which is the hardest test onionicity can face. It is worth saying, too, that this account comes from the campaign’s own materials, which present themselves in the language of a scenario, with its own characters and cast. That is part of its character, and it is why the story is told here as the campaign tells it.
The onion also carries older, local nostalgia. Bermuda is still nicknamed the Onion Patch, a reminder of an era when the island’s onions went out to American markets and carried its name with them. Anyone who has peeled an onion knows the tears come first and the sweetness after. The bridge borrows that image: peel it back, layer by layer, tears and all.
The campaign’s mantra, “unity in the community, world vibe, fighting with peace and not for it,” carries the song’s moral weight. The phrase “not for it” matters. Peace is treated as the method, not the prize. No weapon is drawn and no battle line is cast; peace is the shield. In a week when everyone from every background found they relied on the same lifeline, the song asks us to remember that when the siren sounds, nobody asks whose face, whose creed, or whose status.
Musically, the piece moves from sparse acoustic guitar and a quiet heartbeat drum in the verses, through a stripped-back, spoken-sung bridge, to a full-band chorus with soaring strings. It travels the same road a community does: reflection, silence, honesty, and then a rising pulse of hope.
To the families of the six, the song offers no explanation, because there isn’t one yet. It offers company. We needed that plane, and now they need us. We hear you. Ten-four.
ABOUT THE SONG
Title: “Heartbeat 10–4”
Sound: Acoustic-driven soul with ambient electronic layers, mid-tempo (about 76 BPM)
Length: Approximately 3:00
Arc: Reflective grief, through honest silence, to a unifying pulse of hope
Origins: Operation Kitunguu, as profiled on the campaign’s website (Andrew Williams Jr.; “AJ the Little Gombey”; “onionicity”)
Themes: The lifeline, ten-four as “OK,” three nations in shared grief, the Bermuda onion, peace as method
𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗨𝗦 — Andrew Williams, Jr. and Ambassador AJ Gombey represent a shared mission of community building, youth empowerment, cultural diplomacy and peace-centered action. Andrew Williams, Jr., President of Five Points Youth Foundation, is a business development strategist, alliance builder and advocate for converting relationships into practical systems that create measurable economic opportunity, stronger communities and a more peaceful and equitable world. Ambassador AJ Gombey serves as the campaign’s cultural symbol and bridge builder, using the spirit of Bermuda’s Gombey tradition, storytelling, smiles and the Operation Kitunguu message of “unity in the community, world vibe, fighting with peace and not for it” to encourage compassion across borders. Together, they advance a simple but powerful idea: human connection can turn grief into solidarity, relationships into action, and moments of crisis into opportunities to build a better future.
