The 307th Bomb Wing recently had an opportunity to connect with Joe Carvalko, Jr., a former member of the 307th Bomb Wing. Here, he provides a brief recollection of his time in uniformed service as a young airman in Nebraska during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
On October 22, 1962, President Kennedy addressed the nation—I missed it entirely. Walter Cronkite will call it The Cuban Missile Crisis, though I won't hear the words. Two hours before he speaks, I’m already at the flight line, as a 20 mm fire control A&E mechanic with the 307th Bomb Wing, SAC. Command had sounded a high alert, there’s no quiet here, no room for debate, only the relentless preparation of war machines under Operation Clutch Pedal. One hundred B-47 bombers are armed, fueled, shivering with potential as we prepare them to slice through the atmosphere. My hands work fast, too fast, too precise to be mine alone. It’s instinct now—a drilled-in rhythm that overrides thought, dulls fear.
We’re at DEFCON 3, but the air feels tighter than a noose. In two days the noose will cinch when Kennedy declares, DEFCON 2—one heartbeat short of war. At that point, SAC has teeth bared, claws extended. Nine hundred twelve bombers stand ready, loaded with their apocalyptic payloads, each one assigned to a Single Integrated Operational Plan sortie that ends not with a bang, but with a world swallowed whole. Four hundred two air refueling tankers wait like lifelines in the sky, stretching our reach far enough to take the fight to the Soviets if called.
And then it comes. A sound like precision itself. The first 50 B-47 bombers come off the alert pad and roar to life. Engines stutter and cough at first, then settle into synchrony, a growl so steady it feels like music. One after another, their hulking shapes lurch forward down the slight incline, brakes whining, wheels crunching, engines surging—metal beasts waking from an uneasy, fitful sleep. The air grows electric.
Each bomber claims its place on the 8,000-foot runway, a long concrete vein splitting earth from sky. Their lights stab the gloomy distance, illuminating the cracks and seams. The first one throttles forward, tires grinding against the shove of momentum. Fifteen seconds tick by, another follows. Faster now. Fifty miles per hour. One hundred. The ground shudders as they scream past. At last, like ancient leviathans rising from tar pits, they lift off. Wings tilt, their incline deliberate, almost imperceptible—until a flash erupts, splitting the air with a deafening JATO boom. These planes aren’t meant to come back empty; they’re meant to change maps and history books, to scorch sky and soil until nothing remains. And yet they climb, relentlessly, one by one, each vanishing into that vast blue domain with chilling grace, in solemn, practiced rhythm.
Ground crews scramble like ants, swarming the others, pivoting and flourishing, crew chiefs wringing every second to slide the next beast into formation. They mean to launch everything—over 50 more planes still waiting, crouching on the earth like lean predators fixed on prey just over the horizon. In less than 20 minutes they disappear into the Nebraska sky.
And as I stand there, I realize I’ve witnessed something terrifyingly beautiful—perfect, yet terrible. Perhaps the end of the world has already begun, and we’re simply waiting for the plummet. The base, now cleared of all bombers, generators were turned off, trucks returned to their squadrons, everything became eerily quiet, as quiet as I can ever remember it. If this presaged a nuclear war, our job was over— and so would be our lives.
I looked out over the vast plains that surrounded the base, and coming in from the West, I saw geese gliding across a cosmic emptiness that they’d not known for decades. When night fell, I was handed an M-1 and centurion-like, walked up and down an unclothed parking lot, once the metropolis for airmen and their flying machines, now guarding crickets, black-clad, that would inherit this place, if the bombs fell.