Wickline shut down the damaged engine. “All of my flight instruments, including airspeed and attitude were out,” he said. “The glass in most of the engine instruments on both sides of the cockpit was shattered, and they no longer worked. All hydraulic power to the left wing was out, and all fuel gauges on the left wing were either spinning or stuck. I polled the crew. Everyone answered except Sergeant Killgore. A few minutes later we felt a thump and heard his parachute beeper go off.”

Flames, which the rest of the crew could not see, forced the gunner to bail out on his own. Killgore, riding in the gun turret at the rear of the plane and facing aft, jettisoned the turret, leaving nothing but air in front of his seat, then leaned forward, fell clear of the aircraft and pulled the rip cord to open his parachute.

Catastrophe struck the two men on the lower deck, eight feet below and 15 feet behind Wickline’s seat on the top deck. A fuel-transfer valve above radar navigator Klingbeil’s head was destroyed by shrapnel, and a highly flammable jet propellant, JP-4, poured out, soaking Klingbeil and McTernan, leaving severe chemical burns on their exposed skin. Klingbeil, the most severely burned, screamed in pain.

“The lower deck was floating in jet fuel,” Wickline said. “I worried if they could get out. The escape hatches were filled with JP-4. Any tiny spark could ignite the fumes and destroy the aircraft.”

The crew members were extremely concerned about the leaking fuel. “We didn’t even want to shut down our equipment on the lower deck because we were afraid moving a switch could create that spark,” McTernan said.

Two sister B-52s stayed with Ruby Two as Wickline started the descent. He leveled off at 12,000 feet about 90 miles north of the U.S. base at Da Nang. The huge Stratofortress was barely controllable. Every time Wickline attempted to slow down, the aircraft would start a roll to the right and could be straightened only by increasing the airspeed. “The fire in the No. 1 pod continued to burn intermittently, and I lost control over the No. 8 engine throttle,” he said. “I think it was running at idle. As near as I could tell, the other six engines were working OK, but I didn’t have reliable instruments, so I couldn’t be sure.”

Wickline and co-pilot Milcarek struggled to keep the plane in the air for the next half-hour as they flew toward the safety of the 17th parallel and South Vietnamese airspace. “As soon as I heard over the radio that rescue forces from the USS Saratoga were in contact with Sergeant Killgore,” Wickline noted, “I turned out to sea and ordered bailout about 20 miles east of Da Nang.”

Wickline fired up the big red warning light and shouted over the interphone: “Bailout. Bailout. Bailout.” It was now about 5 a.m., and the crew members prepared to jettison into the pre-dawn China Sea, illuminated mostly by the fire that began to consume their plane.

On the lower deck the spilled fuel still worried McTernan. “I tried not to think that the entire airplane could become an instant fireball if the ejection seat rockets ignited the fumes filling the cockpit,” he said. “I pulled my parachute straps so tight, I must have looked like Popeye.”

His lower-deck companion, Klingbeil, ejected. And at the same time, McTernan yanked the trigger ring between his legs. His seat was pushed back and downward. But the hatch didn’t blow as it was supposed to. “I heard the ejection seat thruster and felt the seat accelerate briefly,” McTernan said, “but there was no wind blast or ruffle of the parachute, and I felt no separation. I opened my eyes and saw the hatch must have been jammed by shrapnel from the missile explosion.” The thruster that normally propels the seat won’t fire if the hatch is not released. McTernan was trapped.

On the upper deck, Wickline heard two thumps below him and assumed that both McTernan and Klingbeil had ejected. By the time he turned his head to check on the electronic warfare officer, 15 feet behind the co-pilot, Wickline saw only a hole where Fergason’s escape hatch had been. Looking across the throttles at Milcarek, he said, “Bill, get the hell out of here.”

The co-pilot nodded, rotated his armrests and squeezed the triggers.

Wickline made a last call on the interphone to confirm that no crew member was still on board. “When no one responded,” he said, “I waited a few interminable seconds, pulled the throttles to idle and ejected.”

When Wickline left the plane, he felt a tremendous kick in the seat of his pants, a blast of cold air, a sense of severe tumbling and a sharp jolt, which tore the ejection seat from his hands. Then there was a loud pop, followed by intense silence.

“It all happened in seconds. I looked up, saw that beautiful big orange and white canopy above my head, and said, ‘Wickline, you lucky son of a gun. You’ve got it made now.’ Then I pulled off my oxygen mask and barfed into the South China Sea a few thousand feet below.”

Back in the plane, McTernan was all alone as the burning Stratofortress plunged toward the ocean 10,000 feet below. He knew he would die when it hit the water. McTernan had only seconds to get out.

“My only hope was to bail out through the hole left by the radar navigator’s ejection seat escape hatch,” McTernan said. “I crouched above it, rolled into a ball and fell through the hole into total darkness. I knew I bailed out a couple minutes behind the rest of the crew, and I’d land in the water miles from them. Though I remember nothing, I must have pulled the rip cord.”

As Wickline floated down, the B-52 pilot remembered he left his favorite cigarette lighter in the tray by his window. “I got furious at my forgetfulness,” he said, “but that passed quickly as I glanced at the horizon and saw Ruby Two explode into a huge reddish orange fireball.”

Wickline, Milcarek, Klingbeil and Fergason all reached the water safely, although Wickline had injured his shoulder, making his right arm useless as he tried to get into the life raft that deployed from the ejection seat, along with a survival kit.

“It took me about 15 agonizing minutes to claw my way into the life raft as waves as high as a house washed over me,” Wickline said. “Then I discovered I [had] crawled into the narrow end, which made the raft very unstable. I held on as I got tossed about, pulled out my survival radio, turned it on and waited.”

Wickline remembers sitting in his raft as the sun came up, about 6:10 a.m. Some 20 minutes later, more than an hour after bailout, the four men were picked up by a helicopter. A horse-collar device was lowered and pulled them up to the copter, which flew the men to Da Nang Air Base hospital, where they met up with Killgore.

“When I woke up it was daylight,” McTernan remembered. “My chute floated behind me, my life preserver had inflated, and I was covered with blood. I couldn’t remember anything and thought I must have lost consciousness, but later they diagnosed it as pain amnesia.” McTernan’s life raft and survival kit, attached to the failed ejection seat, was back on the aircraft. “Only my life preserver kept me from drowning in 10-foot swells while I waited for rescue,” he said. “My last hope was that the choppers would come quickly.” They didn’t.

For four and a half hours, McTernan attempted to use the equipment from his survival vest worn by all B-52 crews on combat flights.

“Nothing worked, and I wasn’t doing much to help myself either,” he said. “I lost two radios and couldn’t ignite the two flare/smoke canisters. Somehow, I punctured my life preserver and needed to constantly re-inflate it by mouth.”

“My parents even got a telegram that same day saying I was missing in action,” McTernan said recently, managing a slight smile.

Not until 10 years later at Mather Air Force Base near Sacramento, California, did McTernan learn how very close he came to being listed as killed in action.

“A fellow officer and I were sharing war stories,” McTernan recalled. “We discovered that he worked in command support at Da Nang at the time of my rescue. He told me the small fixed-wing aircraft searching for me turned back when its fuel approached Bingo [just enough to return to base]. As the craft made the turn to base, the pilot saw a spot of color on the ocean. I must have just hit the top of a wave and became briefly visible. The pilot radioed a helicopter to pick me up.”

McTernan looked thoughtful and added, “If that rescue plane hit Bingo fuel a few seconds later or earlier, or if the pilot made a right turn instead of left, or if I wasn’t at the top of the wave at the right instant, I never would have been found.”