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Lt. Col. Robert L. "Viper" Brown, USAF (Ret.)
(15 March 2009)
There's an old saying that any landing you can walk away from is a good one. It could have been a lot worse, but there was no fire and everyone got out with only relatively minor injuries. The rescue teams rushed everyone to the hospital, but Stu Williams and I didn't have a scratch, so we just sat in the waiting room while the medical people checked the others out and patched up those who needed it. As we waited there an odd assortment of people started to come in to look at us. First the Protestant chaplain arrived, but left when we told him no one was dead or dying. Then the Catholic chaplain walked in and asked what he could do. We said a drink would be nice and he came back in a few minutes with a bottle of bourbon. The nav and I then proceeded to drink several shots out of those little white hospital paper cups, until Stu looked down at his cup and said, "What am I doing? I don't even like this stuff." Suddenly the door flew open and this Major was standing there, his jacket open and no hat. He looked around wild eyed and then asked, "Did you get my call that the last 2,000 feet of the runway weren't cleared?" It was the officer who had been in the tower, our friend who had cleared us for landing. We looked at him like something that had escaped from an insane asylum, then Stu simply said, "What difference did it make? By that time we had turned into a pumpkin."
Webmaster Note:
Stu Williams' pumpkin comment is the basis for naming Viper's home movie "The Iron Pumpkin".
Later back at the hanger, the maintenance troops broke out more than a few bottles of Kentucky comfort, which I don't believe they were supposed to have, and made us tell what happened again and again. Everyone was so high on the effects of our close encounter and more than a few gallons of black coffee that the whisky had little effect. Most of us didn't sleep for days afterwards. When it was daylight, we could look out from the second floor of the hanger where we had the coffee bar and see the tail of the airplane just sticking beyond the runway. Thinking that he would go get a few photographs before the wreck was sealed off, Joe Hall grabbed his camera and started down to the end of the runway. Just before he got to the end overlooking the crash site, he heard the sound of large jet aircraft. Looking up he watched dumbfounded as two Soviet Bison medium bombers roared overhead at low altitude. It was after the Bisons had vanished beyond the horizon that Joe remembered his camera hanging around his neck, the lens cap still on. Somewhere filed away in the Soviet military intelligence archives are photos of the Rivet Ball off the end of the Shemya runway, and in at least one of those pictures is the image of a lone figure standing there looking up with his mouth open.
Spirits were high for several days after the crash. We had faced the big one and walked away, and we told the same stories over and over, celebrating that we had actually made it. But the bad weather got worse, and it was a week before the investigation team arrived to interview us and produce the reams of paperwork that follow every crash. By the time the interviews were over and reports written and we finally got back to Eielson, over three weeks had passed and everyone was tired, edgy, and irritable. The big question now was what next. The crash landing had put the Rivet Ball operation out of action for the immediate future, and Team-2 ceased to exist as a unit. Most of us ended up our Alaska tour flying on the RC-135D Rivet Brass out of Eielson. The missions were long and lacked the excitement of the Rivet Ball flights, but we did our bit to keep an eye on the Soviets and managed to ferret out a few interesting things. Still, it was nothing like our experience working and living together on the Rivet Ball.
Things had about settled down when six months after our accident, the RC-135E Rivet Amber, the second airplane at Shemya, was lost on a flight back to Eielson. We scrambled everything that could fly and started an around the clock search over the Bering Sea for over a week, flying sortie after sortie, often very near the surface of the water, but no trace of the airplane or crew were ever found. The cause of the crash remains a mystery and is still debated among the aircrews today. At Eielson we held a memorial service for the lost crewmen and helped the families pack up for their long, lonely trips back home. The Cold War had claimed another recon airplane and her crew. Before it was finally over, over 200 aircrewmen would be lost flying recon missions worldwide, including six of the replacement for the Rivet Ball, which would be destroyed in 1981 in another ugly Shemya landing.
