Last night I saw a B-52 bomber sprinkling bombs into history on the History Channel. I think it was the same, black and white, archival footage I have seen all of my life. A young airman probably shot it with a spring-loaded camera (like the 8mm Bolex) on a run over Vietman in the 1960′s.
My first B-52 experience happened in the early 1980′s at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. Before it closed in 1994, Carswell headquartered a lot of the behemoth bombers. They were going day and night, it seemed. I never knew where these things went all day. They took off and roamed the skies of America and then return like massive, metal birds to their nest next to Lake Worth. A B-52 Stratofortress coming in low overhead is not something you forget easily.
A B-52 is hardly subtle. It is a blunt instrument, a club for pounding opponents not into submission, but into little fleshy leftovers. I watched the wings getting wider as the airplane descended like a raptor on a rabbit. I felt very rabbit-ish, indeed, as I watched the eight groaning, double-barreled, turbojet engines pushing toward me. A B-52 would give stretch marks to the largest stadium in the country. Standing at the end of the runway, I thought about just how many people had witnessed this view, followed by pain and torment of a flavor so violent, no one gets a second taste. A B-52 can carry 70,000 pounds of weapons, some nuclear.
As a child in Montgomery, Alabama, our house was under the flight path of Maxwell Air Force Base. I can’t recall a B-52 at Maxwell among the wickedly fast fighter jets bursting air above us day and night leaving the sound barrier in their wake. That is why I was standing beside the highway in Fort Worth waiting for the black beast to belly down and smoke its tires on the asphalt strip.
The sound assaulted my ears in a way that brought Dr. Strangelove to mind. The sheer magnitude of a thing this big being able to fly is dinosauric. I squinted into the sky at the shape that had defined fear worldwide for 50 years. I understood exactly what this plane could do. Watching it fly over me and land in the distance put a knot in my gut like the feeling after seeing an accident on the highway.
Tex Johnston flew the first B-52 in 1952. Some variation of the workhorse has been in continuous service for the Air Force since 1955. The plane I watched twenty years ago was flying long before I was born. B-52′s dropped hydrogen bombs on the Bikini Atoll in 1956 when Eisenhower was president and Khruschev was running Russia. In Operation Rolling Thunder, B52’s dropped enough metal and explosives on Vietnam to probably build a country twice the size of Vietnam. B-52’s kept the hated Commies at bay during the protracted Cold War. B-52’s dropped bombs on Iraq in the Gulf War in 1991 and they launched missles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The plan is for them to be in service until 2040, eighty-something years after production ended. Few things built by man last that long and none of them can fly.
There are several versions of B-52’s: B’s, C’s, D’s, F’s, G’s and H’s. The planes have been modified for over fifty years. Today its jets suck alternative synthetic fuel making the monster sort of green in a deadly way.
My sighting was years ago. There was a time when big, clunky B-52’s, plated with Detroit Steel had their way with entire countries and continents. These behemoths no longer rule battlefields, replaced by faster, more accurate planes, laser-guided weaponry and deadly precision drones. Even so, they are still on those battlefields, lurking over the carnage.
It’s impressive how we can find ways to kill each other.