During low-altitude practice runs, Zink’s crew would radar bomb targets throughout the American West, hitting SAC radar huts in places like Sheridan, Wyoming; Bismarck, North Dakota; and La Junta, Colorado. And before a training mission ended, the pilot would spend an hour or two doing “pattern work,” landing the plane, rolling down the runway, and then taking off again. Zink found these touch-and-go landings even harder to endure than heavy turbulence. At the end of every training flight, he felt like someone had just pummeled him for hours.
The Klaxons sounded about once a week during ground alerts. The drills were supposed to be “no-notice” and come as a total surprise. But by the late 1970s, SAC was taking some precautions. Whenever Zink and his buddies saw three fire trucks and the wing commander’s car park on the alert pad, they’d know a drill was about to begin. They’d stand in the tunnel, waiting, making bets on how many seconds would pass before the Klaxons went off. And then they’d run to their planes. As navigator, Zink would decode the message from SAC headquarters. It usually called for an engine start or a “mover,” an exercise that involved taxiing the bomber to the end of the runway, turning around, and returning to the alert pad. Once the drills were completed, the crew would spend about three hours reconfiguring the plane for the next alert.
A few months earlier, during the first week of June, Zink had been fast asleep at about twelve thirty in the morning when the Klaxons sounded. He jumped out of bed, looked out the window — and didn’t see any fire trucks or the wing commander’s car. He and the bombardier thought, “Oh my God, it’s the real thing.” Drills were never held late at night. Hearts pounding, they ran to the plane. Zink decoded the message and felt profoundly relieved that it didn’t contain an emergency war order. The whole episode felt strange, and it wasn’t until weeks later that they learned NORAD had experienced a false alarm. The gunner on Zink’s crew, a young staff sergeant, was so shaken by the experience that he quit the Air Force. All of a sudden, the meaning of their wartime mission had become clear, and he realized, “I can’t do this.” Zink believed strongly in the value of nuclear deterrence and tried not to dwell on what would happen if deterrence failed. He knew that any attack on the Soviet Union by his crew would be not only murderous but suicidal. And yet he never thought about those things while crawling around the Mark 28s and Short-Range Attack Missiles in the bomb bay, checking their serial numbers before an alert.
Zink and his crew were expecting the drill on September 15, 1980. It was about eight thirty in the evening, and out the window you could see the fire trucks and the wing commander’s car. The Klaxons sounded. They ran to the plane. Zink put on his headphones and turned the crew volume low, so he could hear the code from SAC headquarters over the radio.
“Alpha, Charlie, Delta…” he heard, copying each letter down. And then his pilot’s voice was shouting over the intercom.
“Terminate, terminate, terminate.”
For some reason, the pilot was ending the drill. Zink felt scared for a moment, wondering why the pilot was yelling. He and the bombardier looked at each other. They couldn’t see outside, had no idea what was happening — and then heard a loud bang. Something big had struck the right side of the plane. The lights went out, the cabin became pitch black, and Zink knew it was time to evacuate. The navigator was supposed to open the hatch for the rest of the crew and leave the plane first. But the gunner, who sat upstairs, had already jumped down, landed on the floor, and opened the hatch. And without a word, the gunner leaped through the hatch to the tarmac below. Zink’s seat was closest to the hatch, yet four of the five other crew members managed to get out of the plane before him, like rats from a sinking ship. Through the open hatch, Zink could see a bright orange glow — not a good sign.
Zink didn’t bother with the ladder. He jumped the five feet to the runway, landed in a crouch, saw that the right wing of the bomber was on fire, and ran as fast as he could. Now he understood why the crew was in such a hurry. A B-52 had caught fire on the runway a few weeks earlier, at Warner Robins Air Force Base, near Macon, Georgia. Within minutes the plane had exploded, and it literally melted into the ground. But that B-52 hadn’t been carrying nuclear weapons. This one was loaded with eight SRAMs and four Mark 28 bombs.
