Griffis conferred with the wing commander, going over diagrams of the console and the position of switches in the cockpit. Griffis and Rausch borrowed “silvers,” hooded firefighting suits, from one of the trucks. The boots were two sizes too big for Griffis, and he had to grip the insoles with his toes to walk in them. He stuffed a handheld radio in his hood to communicate with VanKirk, and their conversation was recorded.
“Chief, that engine is getting pretty hot,” Griffis said, five minutes before midnight, “it’s starting to pop, if we’re going to go in, we’ve got to do it now.”
“Yeah, go.”
Griffis and Rausch ran to the plane, entered through the bottom hatch, and climbed into the cockpit. Griffis realized he didn’t need Rausch with him after all. The cockpit was so bright from the flames right outside the window that a flashlight was completely unnecessary. Rausch could have stayed outside in the truck. Griffis had been in burning planes before, but never in one where the fire was cascading with such force. He had no idea if the fuel could be shut off. But he’d give it a try — and if it didn’t work, they’d get their asses out of there. He saw that the fire suppression handle had already been pulled. All he had to do was plug it in. He switched on the emergency battery, and the fire went out, like the burner of a gas cooktop that had just been turned off. And then Griffis and Rausch heard everyone cheering outside.
As Griffis walked from the plane, VanKirk handed him a radio and said, “Here, somebody wants to talk to you.”
It was General Richard Ellis, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command.
“Mr. Griffis, I want to thank you,” Ellis said.
Griffis was impressed that the head of SAC knew his name. He subsequently received a Civilian Medal of Valor. But he didn’t consider himself much of a hero. Climbing into a B-52 that was on fire, without power, in the middle of the night, loaded with nuclear weapons, was no big deal. If you’re an Air Force firefighter, he thought, that’s what you do.
During a closed Senate hearing, Dr. Roger Batzel, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, subsequently testified that if the B-52 had caught on fire, the nuclear weapons inside it could have scattered plutonium over sixty square miles of North Dakota and Minnesota. The city of Grand Forks, with a population of about sixty thousand, would have been directly in the path of the radioactive plume. Batzel failed to mention that one of the Mark 28 bombs could have detonated. It would have destroyed Grand Forks and deposited lethal fallout on Duluth, Minnesota, or Minneapolis — Saint Paul, depending on the high-altitude winds. An Air Force investigation discovered the cause of the fire in engine number five: someone had forgotten to screw a nut onto the fuel strainer. The missing nut was smaller than a penny.
Jeffrey Zink and his crew were taken to the hospital, given drug tests, and kept there until three in the morning. They later resented the obsession, among local newspapers, with the question of whether nuclear weapons had been on the plane. The Air Force would neither confirm nor deny it. The crew focused on a more immediate issue: how easily they could have lost their lives. Some of the bombers on alert that night were parked facing west. Had the nose of their B-52 faced west, the fire would have entered the plane the moment the hatch was opened. They would have been incinerated, and the flames would’ve quickly reached the SRAMs and the Mark 28 bombs. The difference between life and death was their parking space.
Not long after the accident, Zink and his wife were having a romantic, candlelit dinner. They were newlyweds. When his napkin brushed the candle and caught on fire, Zink came unglued. All the feelings that had been suppressed hit him at once. He lost it, he felt like a complete basket case. He didn’t have post-traumatic stress disorder or anything really debilitating, just a sudden realization that was hard to express, without sounding trite. Zink was twenty-five years old, and something abstract had become real. These planes are dangerous, he thought. People die in them.
