How Obie Won His Medal

At 32,000 ft. in the dark Texas skies, Air Force Lieut. James Edward Obenauf made a split-second, life-and-death decision. Around him, his six-jet B-47* seemed to be falling apart: the right outboard engine was boiling with flame, scattering red-hot pieces of steel across the wing and fuselage. The navigator had bailed out of the nose compartment; so had the pilot. Copilot Obenauf, squeezing along the catwalk toward the nose, was ready to jump too. He looked down and froze: there, lying unconscious, his oxygen equipment disconnected, his chute pack gone, was the navigator-instructor, Major Joseph B. Maxwell.

As the wind roared through the open trap door, "Obie" Obenauf hurriedly searched for Maxwell's parachute. His body was weakened from lack of oxygen. He could not find the chute. He looked down at Maxwell again, felt an awful, strong urge to leave him. "Gee, I got my own battle to fight." Then Obie, just turned 23, five years out of high school, father of a ten-month old boy, father-to-be of a second child, turned around and crawled back into his rear cockpit and took control of the airplane on the chance that he might be able to fly it to safety.

The Needle. He hooked his mask into the life-saving oxygen system, dove the bomber toward a lower altitude so Maxwell would not die of anoxia. The Plexiglas canopy had been jettisoned in the first attempt at bailout, so, as the plane knifed ahead at 400 knots, Obie's face was seared by the sharp, --30DEG wind, by whipped dust, bits of wire and insulation. His eyelids rolled back in the fierce air torrent. He dropped his amber-tinted visor over his tearing eyes--but he could not read his instruments again without lifting it. His gloved hands froze to near helplessness. Under his seat was the armed, unexploded powder charge that had failed to fire his seat out of the cockpit in the early bail-out try. "You're so numb, I don't think there's any fear at all. You're just numb."

Into the blood-stinging wind he flew. He called his "mayday!" SOS and got an instant response, first from an Air Force base at Altus, Okla., 200 miles away, then from another airborne B-47. Altus gave Obie a compass heading to come in on. His panel lights grew dimmer, his eyes burned like hot lead. He could see the compass needle but not the numbers. He turned his plane to bring the needle toward the heading he wanted: his own field, the Strategic Air Command's Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene, 150 miles away.

The Pearl. The night now hung with bad weather: ceiling, 1,500 ft.; visibility, five miles; rain. Maxwell woke up, groggily plugged in his headset. He cut his speed to 200 knots to reduce the buffeting of the plane and the charge of the biting wind. "I think I said about 50 prayers. I thought about everything--the things I used to do when I was a kid, like playing ball, and my family. They were the ones I was really fighting for."

On the ground, a mighty communications system sparked into action. CAA stations, military bases and airline offices monitored Obie's radio. In the dimly lit control room at Fat Chance, a Texas-based air defense radar station, trackers picked up Obie's blip on their screen. Like a tiny translucent pearl on green glass, the blip moved toward its target, rolling to one side, then to another, now erratic, now steady, minute by minute, guided all the while by Fat Chance.

The Letdown. In the Dyess control tower, Obie's boss, Lieut. Colonel Anthony Perna, got on the mike.

Perna: "You can make it. No sweat. The firefighters are standing by just in case."

Obie: "Colonel, I'm probably the only copilot who has soloed a B-47."

Then came the letdown to the field. It was a few minutes past midnight--two hours since the trouble had begun--when Obie turned into his final approach. He was too high, too far to the left of the runway. "I didn't have time to think. The GCA station was telling me to go around. The tower told me to go around--everybody in the world told me to go around. I didn't say one word. I just kept coming in. I felt I had used every bit of energy I ever had. I didn't have enough visibility. I couldn't make out anything. I don't think that if I had to go around we would have made it. Things were getting worse instead of better. I could smell smoke in the cockpit."

Suddenly Obie saw two rows of lights. He banked sharply to the right, lined his plane up with the runway and with power on, poured straight for it. Firefighting crews, an ambulance, staff cars and red-blinking emergency trucks shrieked down the runway in pursuit. Obie neatly kissed his plane down. "I flew it into the ground. I wasn't strapped to the seat. I was just sitting. I never made a better landing in my life. I couldn't make a better one in a hundred thousand years." When the plane stopped, he jumped out. Shocked by momentary blindness, he ran and ran until they stopped him.

Less than 36 hours later, about 800 Air Forcemen and their families crowded into the Dyess base theater. Lieut. James Edward Obenauf, 23, one eye bandaged and the other kept closed against the bright lights, stepped out on the platform with his wife. He had performed far above and beyond the call of duty. And General Tom Power, boss of the Strategic Air Command, pinned a medal on Obie's chest. It was the Distinguished Flying Cross.

* Plagued with 14 B-47 crashes and resultant 34 deaths in the last four months, the Air Force announced last week that it would soon begin to make structural modifications on its 1,400 SAC B-47d. Apparent sore spot on the massive (116-ft. wing span, 108-ft. length, 200,000-lb. gross weight) plane is the metal-twisting strain that it endures in the low-level atom-bombing tactic: the aircraft dives, releases its bomb on an upturn, executes a partial loop while the bomb describes an arc on its trip to the target.

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