“There but for the grace of God go I.”
It’s a saying Washington state Sen. Mark Miloscia says he remembers every day – and not only as a way to honor the five servicemen who perished after an explosion occurred while they attempted to repair a faulty circuit breaker on his his B-52 Stratofortress plane. The phrase and the tragedy itself, in addition to 10 years of service as a United States Air Force pilot, helps him bring grace to all the actions he takes and the decisions he makes as a lawmaker.
Miloscia said he is well aware the tragedy could have easily gone the other way and included him along with the others who died that night in North Dakota in the midst of the tensions of the Cold War. Because of that, Miloscia said, he goes out of his way to practice the Air Force’s core values of integrity, service and excellence.
He remembers being “incredibly thankful” to go home to his family the evening his colleagues lost their lives.
“Bad things happen. You can’t always succeed,” Miloscia said. “You truly learn what is important in life. Life, your family, the people out there serving – things like materials, money, really become background in terms of what life is all about.”
A calling
Miloscia was a wanderer as a high school junior growing up in Queens, New York. Without a plan in sight, he happened to drift into a local college fair where he discovered a booth for the United States Air Force Academy.
Miloscia saw the words “Defending the Constitution of the United States” printed in large, bold letters on the booth, and he was hooked — instantly.
While he was there, he saw the Air Force was looking for pilots, something that intrigued him more. But Miloscia said he couldn’t take his eyes off the mantra.
“All of the flying stuff was neat and everything else,” Miloscia said. “But it was the mission of what the purpose of serving in the Air Force was that got me.”
After speaking with recruiters, Miloscia found out he needed to add sports and clubs to his academic background in order to be accepted. He did, and a year-and-a-half later he began his freshman year at the academy.
He had no plans to enter the academy as a pilot, however, but the Air Force had a high demand for pilots in the mid- to late-1970s. So that’s the direction Miloscia went.
A blur
A school-life balance was tough for Miloscia after arriving on campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was spending countless hours learning to lead and preparing to go off to flight school, and he was busy with other concerns – the academy is where Miloscia and his wife, Meschell, first met and began dating.
Miloscia said the next four years flew by.
Everything culminated for him on May 28, 1980, when he graduated from the Air Force Academy and was commissioned into the Air Force. To end the long, already-noteworthy day, he and Meschell married once commencement was over.
“I always recommend to people, ‘Don’t do as I did,’” Miloscia chuckled. “Don’t do it all on the same day. But it was the start of my life going into ‘the wild blue yonder,’ so to speak. Off to pilot training with a brand new bride.”
Pilot training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma was first, then the newlyweds darted off to bomber training at Castle Air Force Base – which closed in 1995 – in Merced County, California.
Miloscia received a year-and-a-half of flight training at Castle before he and Meschell were assigned to Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota as their home base.
He compares those first few months in Grand Forks to being thrown into a pool for the first time – the base fell into the worst trouble a base possibly could.
“I got there and, literally two weeks later, the base failed its huge Inspector General audit,” Miloscia said. “There is nothing worse for a bomb squadron than to fail an audit.”
The base had six months to get back on track, and Miloscia was determined to do his part to ensure the base passed its next audit.
The squadron spent countless hours on weekends and holidays in the air, determined not to fail again. And Miloscia, a young, green pilot, was thrown right into the thick of the exercise.
Miloscia said there was added pressure as Cold-War whispers of nuclear war intensified.
To top it off, he learned he and Meschell were becoming parents for the first time.
“It was tough,” Miloscia said. “We were a young couple, child on the way, and serving a big, national mission. Not to mention our base had to pass the next inspection by December.”
A held breath
In the early 1980s, there were approximately 400 B-52 bombers commissioned by the Air Force, and 80 percent of them, including Miloscia’s at Grand Forks, were always on high nuclear alert.
As a 23-year-old, Miloscia spent one out of every three weeks stationed within walking distance of his B-52, which was loaded with 18-20 nuclear weapons. His job during those seven days: To wait. If the base’s klaxon alarm system sounded, it meant the worst-case scenario had arrived.
If it went off, Miloscia had 10 minutes to be suited and in the cockpit of his 488,000-pound aircraft, and he had five minutes to be in the air. The 15-minute window was critical: That’s the time it would take enemy missiles to get to and strike the base, destroying the bombers and their payloads.
“It was a very serious time in the early ‘80s,” Miloscia said. “We lived this scenario one week a month. We’d take care of our planes and study this mission in detail every day.”
Miloscia said manning a B-52 bomber isn’t as glorious as the movies make it out to be. Practice runs mean a 16-hour work day, the bulk of which is spent in mountain ranges at ungodly hours of the night, after departing from North Dakota and flying to Arizona and back.
The Air Force tried to lighten the load of fear and anxiety in its pilots, though. In addition to their bombers, Miloscia and his fellow pilots got keys to their own T-38 Talon supersonic jets and were able to practice flying them on the weekends.
That, in a nutshell, was Miloscia’s routine for about four years.
“There was no time to join the local bowling league. It was a heavy time,” Miloscia said. “I was either preparing for THE mission or I was spending time with my family, because I could get that call at any moment.”
A disaster
Miloscia still clearly remembers the cold night on Jan. 28, 1983 as one that would change his life forever, one that abruptly ended a routine 16-hour run in his B-52.
He refers to the incident as “the circuit breaker” on the rare occasions he shares the story.
During the flight, Miloscia said he was having trouble with a particular circuit breaker. It popped out of place in the cockpit, so Miloscia reached up and popped it back into place. No big deal.
Then it popped out of place a second time. The flight crew both in the air and back in Grand Forks decided it was time to bring the $15 million aircraft back for inspection.
Miloscia returned and wrote up his account. He handed it into the crew chief. Four flight engineers worked inside the plane and the crew chief stood outside, all five of them performing routine inspections.
Miloscia decided the written version wasn’t enough, so he chased after the crew chief to explain what he’d just written.
“I just said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this thing that popped here, be aware of it,’” Miloscia said.
He turned back and went inside to prepare an additional report on his plane and its protesting circuit breaker.
Five minutes later, Miloscia heard a loud explosion. One of the crew members had pushed the circuit breaker in a third time, which triggered a spark that ignited the bomber’s 18 gas tanks.
“The spark set them off like a string of firecrackers,” Miloscia said.
The massive blast killed all five of the service members in and around the aircraft.
Miloscia sprinted back to the flight deck, where he found what he likens to something out of a horror movie.
“I raced back to the aircraft,” he said. “And there it was. Melted – an inferno burning up on the ramp. All five people at the plane all perished. The flight chief I just handed the books to didn’t make it out.”
A reflection
Some time later, having had time to process the explosion and its tragic consequences, Miloscia said he was struck by how truly blessed he was to have a family to go home to – and to be able to do so.
While he’s moved on to other career ventures – politics, teaching, ministry – the events on the Grand Forks flight deck, he said, made him focus on what’s most important in his life: family, life itself, and those serving the country.
He views the five men lost that night as family. The memories of them are always with him, he said, but the sharp sting of the night’s horror and devastation are dulling as time passes.
Having a moment that forced him to re-establish his priorities is something that’s helped him maintain grace in his life, including during his latest chapter as a state senator.
“You only have to worry about what is right and good and true,” he said, “and don’t worry about stuff like losing elections or winning. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about how you live and by what principles.”
