By Conrad Easterday, CTCN Editor
Cold War veteran Homer Hulme didn’t spend much time considering his service years as a younger man. With the passing of decades, however, he is increasingly grateful for the experiences he collected in the pilot’s seat of a B-47 Stratojet.
“It’s amazing how many young people come up to me in Walmart when I’m wearing my vest and thank me for my service,” he said. “It means more to me now. I’m really proud of being in the service.”
His adult life was divided between four years in the Air Force (1956-60), six more with the reserves and 64 years as a CPA.
But his military aspirations were launched before his years in a cockpit. With the Korean War winding down and with his parents encouragement, Hulme attended and graduated from high school at Oklahoma Military Academy, and chose the University of Oklahoma instead of a community college because it offered ROTC for the Air Force.
Upon graduation, the young lieutenant flew trainers including the T-34 and the T-28, but he got his wings flying the World War II era B-25 Mitchell.
“I’m particularly proud too that I got my wings from Travis Hoover who was the second pilot behind Jimmy Doolittle in his raid on Tokyo,” he said.
The peak of Hulme’s military career came at the height of the Cold War behind the controls of the B-47, a six-engine behemoth that nonetheless was a technical marvel for its time, capable of delivering 100,000 times the destructive force of the more famous B-29 with only three men aboard.
In the belly of the Stratojet was a Mark 15 nuclear bomb. Hulme was based in England as part of Strategic Air Command’s deterrent against the Soviet Union. His plane’s target was Moscow. During the Lebanon crisis in 1958, tensions ran high among the air crews. As one of three lead crews in his air wing, Hulme would have been one of the first to cross into Soviet airspace, but the call never came.
Of all the difficult tasks Hulme was tasked with completing, the hardest by far was pilot survival training, which he performed for the whole of February in the Sierra Mountains. He had to wade the river in the training zone three times.