Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [40]
Christmas season, 1972. I was twenty-seven years old, stationed in England and flying in the backseat of RF-4Cs as part of the Allied Forces staring down the Russian threat. Jim Humphrey and Tom Carr were in the squadron planning area. We were kibitzing over coffee as they put the finishing touches on their training maps. I handed Jim my BX cigarette ration cards. I didn’t smoke and he did. He thanked me. Then he and Tom headed for their plane. It was the last time I would see them alive. Shortly after takeoff their Phantom inexplicably nosedived into the earth at 400 miles per hour. There had been no distress call. The squadron commander came into the ready room and told us of the crash. “Stay off the phones,” he ordered, then departed to pick up the chaplain and drive to inform the wives.
I worried for Donna. In a couple minutes she was going to see a staff car drive up to the apartment with the squadron commander and chaplain. Every apartment in the complex housed a flyer’s family. Donna and I shared a wall with the Humphreys. Our entry sidewalks were fifteen feet apart. I could just imagine the two uniformed officers hesitating between those concrete ribbons, checking the address before choosing one. I could see Donna and Eurlene Humphrey watching in horror from their windows, wondering which one of them was the new widow.
Screw the commander’s order,I thought. I grabbed a phone and called Donna. “There’s been a crash. Jim Humphrey and Tom Carr are dead. The chaplain will be there soon. I wanted you to know it wasn’t me. Go visit Eurlene as soon as they leave. Don’t call anybody else.” She was sobbing as I hung up the phone. Eurlene had two small children.
When the squadron commander returned, he appointed me as the casualty assistance officer for Jim’s family and told me to visit the crash site. It was a muddy morass reeking of kerosene jet fuel. The vertical impact of the plane had left a crater about twenty feet deep. Shards of camouflage-painted aluminum littered the area. About thirty feet from the edge of the plane’s crater was a smaller crater made by Tom Carr’s body and ejection seat. Tom had ejected, but it had been far too late. His body, still strapped to the seat, had impacted the earth at the speed of the plane.
The flight surgeon was directing a group of hospital orderlies in the recovery of remains. Of Jim’s there were none aboveground. The F-4 ejection sequence put the pilot out last. The twin craters made it obvious Tom, the backseater, had just cleared the rails when the plane hit, meaning Jim had to have still been in the front cockpit. Fifty thousand pounds of plane had been behind him at impact and had compressed his body deep into the Earth. Of Tom Carr there was nothing recognizable as human. Each orderly had a plastic bag and was picking up shards of his flesh—bright pink and red strings of it.
The saddest thing I yet had to do in my young life was to give Eurlene her husband’s wedding band. I found it in his locker. Like most of us, he removed the ring prior to a flight to prevent it from snagging on a piece of aircraft equipment and causing injury.
Weeks later the squadron commander ordered me to have a brass plaque etched with an appropriate inscription memorializing Jim and Tom. The twin craters in the rolling hills of East Anglia, England, were truly their graves and the commander wanted the plaque on a nearby tree. I went to the site and screwed a brass plate into a majestic two-hundred-year-old oak.
Five months later Eurlene returned to England to visit her air force friends. The squadron commander invited her to attend a Memorial Day remembrance at the crash location. The day prior to the service he asked me to drive to the site and polish the plaque. I gathered Donna and our three children. The day was a rare one for England, sunny and warm. I wanted them to