Earl Pennington of Poplar Bluff served in two wars before retiring from the Air Force. It was his work with nuclear bombs, however, that put him in the most peril.
Pennington joined the military in 1951. He trained as an aircraft mechanic.
"If you were in maintenance you could progress up and fly if you chose."
Pennington chose to fly.
He got orders for Korea in December 1953. The war was near its end.
Pennington was a flight engineer on a B26 bomber. He eventually would log 8,000 hours in that aircraft.
"It was almost a fighter bomber," Pennington said. "It had bombs, rockets and machine guns."
But when Pennington got to Korea, that firepower wasn't needed.
"By the time I got there we flew routine missions, mostly training. We were on standby and every morning we would preflight the plane and be ready to go if needed. We flew training missions over North Korea but didn't drop anything. We were armed and loaded with everything and ready if needed."
Pennington served as the flight engineer.
"I managed the fuel, deicing, helped with flaps, run the airplane systems, everything but fly."
The only thing the pilots knew, he said, was how to fly the plane.
"If something went wrong they'd ask us 'what do we do?'"
In 1956, Pennington was tasked with hauling nuclear bombs for SAC (Strategic Air Command). That assignment had him flying all over the world.
"We landed in Midway, Guam, Wake Island, pretty much all over the Pacific," Pennington said as he reeled off a seemingly endless list of countries he flew into as well.
"We'd haul them to bases or depots when they needed inspecting. They were scattered around the world. The movement was top secret. The enemy knew we were doing it. They just didn't know when."
The bombs were transported on specially-made rubber tired trailers.
"We had special chains to tie them in so they wouldn't come loose. If anything happened to the nukes we called a code 'Broken Arrow.'
"When hauling nukes we had to park on a remote area of the base with armed guards. Nobody was allowed on the plane unless we escorted them."
In the early 1960s, Pennington flew into a small atoll in the Pacific where testing was done.
"Johnston Island did a lot of A bomb testing," he said. "They set up towers to test nukes and we flew structural steel in for them."
The atoll was small. In fact, the runway ran almost the length of it.
"To go into that place we needed 5,000 feet of runway and it was 5,000 feet," Pennington laughed. "If we had a big load we might not get out, but we could get in. Our wings hung over the runway and we rattled everything when we took off."
Things got a little hairy on one of those nuke runs.
"We had dropped off nukes at a base in Washington state and planned to make a nonstop from Washington to Georgia. We were going to make a night flight in freezing rain."
Pennington wasn't the flight engineer for that trip. If he had been things would have been OK. But he wasn't. He was the flight mechanic.
"The flight engineer let the 3 and 4 engines ice up. At 11,000 feet we started to go down. We were losing 400 feet a minute. The field (from which they had taken off) closed down because of the weather."
Didn't matter.
"We just had to ride it down."
Things got hairy once they hit the landing strip.
Because the engines were iced up, "we couldn't do reverse props. We had to use the brakes and burned the tires up. We stopped three feet from the end of the runway."
Toward the end of his military career, Pennington was sent into the Vietnam war zone.
"We were stationed in Thailand, way up on the Mekong (River). We were closer to Hanoi than any other base. We flew all prop planes because you couldn't operate jets in there because it would suck things up in the engines."
Pennington was stationed there during parts of 1968 and 1969. He had a ground job there as a supervisor.
After serving in two theaters of war and logging thousands upon thousands of flight hours, Pennington retired from the Air Force on Oct. 1, 1971.