or a week at a time in the early 1960s, Frank Hadl slept in a basement with two other men and waited for a horn.

The building was underground, at Lincoln Air Force Base in Nebraska.

There was a dining hall, a television room, a reading room and a study room, and the beds were below. Out on the ramp sat a six-engine B-47 bomber with a hydrogen bomb aboard. If the horn sounded and the call was the right one, the three of them would run to the airplane, start the engines and head for Moscow.

“(The Air Force) had you planned all the way till your target to drop the bomb. What you did after that, there was nothing. You were on your own,” Hadl said. “You probably ran out of gas right after you dropped your bomb.”

His target was the Kremlin. He was in his 20s, newly married, with a baby daughter at home.

Hadl turned 93 on Nov. 3. The Nazareth native, now a Saylorsburg resident, spent 28 years in the Air Force and flew nine of its airplanes — trainers, fighters, bombers and transports.

He sat nuclear alert through the Cuban Missile Crisis, hauled cargo into Vietnam, spent a year on the ground in Saigon and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1983.

Afterward he flew charters out of Mount Pocono until he was 80, carrying business passengers, transplant patients and coolers of donor organs. He logged more than 11,000 hours in the air.

He nearly declined to talk about any of it.

“I’m not a publicity seeker. I don’t like it,” Hadl said.

A week underground

“When the klaxon sounded, you got the hell out of bed … and you ran out to the airplane and started the engines,” Hadl said of his time in the mole hole.

Three calls could come over the radio. Alpha meant check in and nothing more. Bravo meant start the engines and sit still. Coco meant taxi out, roll down the runway and come back to the parking spot.

The fourth possibility was the one nobody drilled, so Hadl worked out his own plan and told his copilot and navigator what it was.

“Hey, buddy, we’ll stay in the airplane till the fuel runs out. As soon as we drop that bomb over the Kremlin, we’re heading south,” Hadl said. “When the gas runs out, I’ll descend to a lower altitude so we could bail out safely. We’ll all three bail out, and you’re on your own, buddy.”

He does not dress up what the rest of it would have meant.

“It would have been the end of the world. We would have destroyed everything,” Hadl said. “But it was life. That was life. A bomber was a bomber. That was your job. You did your job.”

It is also the answer he gives when the subject turns to Veterans Day.

“It was my job, just like your job,” Hadl said. “I had a job. I did my job as best I could. It’s life.”

‘You had to be a fighter pilot’

He got to that bomber by way of balsa wood and a newspaper advertisement.

Hadl was born in Nazareth on Nov. 3, 1933, the son of an Austrian immigrant, and he gives his grandchildren a trick for remembering the date.

“Three times 11 is 33. Three November 1933,” Hadl said.

The war gave him the idea and the movies settled it.

“I lived through World War II, and when we were kids, my brother and I, we used to make these balsa wood airplanes. We made almost every fighter airplane,” Hadl said. “We lived in a two-story house, and we’d go up to the attic and throw them out of the window.

“We saw all these movies about fighter pilots. You had to be a fighter pilot. That’s what I wanted to be.”

High school ended with an undefeated football season in 1950 and a job stocking shelves at an Acme store. College arrived on a Sunday afternoon that September, on the front porch, when his mother came out with the Philadelphia paper. St. Joseph’s College was taking late applicants. Classes started the next morning.

“She says, ‘What do you want to do? You want to go to college or you want to work the rest of your life?’ ” Hadl said.

She sent him up to ask Father Walsh, the family’s priest, what he thought of it. The priest told him to be ready at 7 a.m.

“I never drove a car to Philadelphia,” Hadl said. “I had no idea where St. Joe’s was. Never drove 10 miles from home.”

They found a line of boys waiting outside the registrar’s office. The priest walked past all of them in his black suit and collar and asked the secretary for the registrar directly. Hadl had a few A’s and B’s in science to show for himself.

Asked which course he wanted, he gave the only answer he had.

“What you got?” Hadl said.

He took chemistry, and he was enrolled before he left the building.

“I’m sure he thought this kid’ll be gone in two weeks,” Hadl said. “I was enrolled right there. I could have started class that day. That’s how easy I got into college.”

A room near campus ran $5 a week. His mother needed the family car for her own job, so he found another way back and forth.

“I hitchhiked home every Friday afternoon for four years, from St. Joe’s to Nazareth, because I had to take my clothes home to get washed,” Hadl said.

Sophomore year he turned up in Air Force ROTC, got sent to the field house for a uniform and then sat for a flight physical. His eyes tested at 20/15.

“They signed me up, pilot. That was it,” Hadl said. “To hell with chemistry. I was going to be a pilot.”

He finished the degree anyway and used it for three months. He graduated on a Sunday, walked into J.T. Baker Chemical Corp. on Monday and was hired inside of three hours, analyzing the products whose labels he had read off bottles in high school. The Air Force letter came Sept. 25.

“Will you accept it? Damn right,” Hadl said.

Training ran six months at Mission, Texas, down by the Rio Grande, then six more at Laredo.

His first solo came early, in a two-seat T-34, when his instructor taxied clear of the runway and started climbing out of the cockpit.

“Honestly, I was so dumb. ‘Hey, where are you going?’ He said, ‘I’m getting out. You go out there and make three touch and goes, and then bring him back here,’ ” Hadl said.

“I taxied out. I took off, scared as all hell,” he said. “I got myself together and made three good landings. One of the first guys to solo in the class.”

His mother rode the train from Allentown to Laredo for graduation, a day and a half each way, and pinned the wings on him herself.

“Nobody’s mother came to a pilot training back then,” Hadl said.

‘Known as a killer’

Graduating pilots picked their assignments off a list. The F-86 was the one everybody wanted, the airplane that had made aces over Korea. The F-84F had a different reputation.

“At that time, the F-84 was known as a killer,” Hadl said. “It was a little bit unstable for some guys. They didn’t know how to fly it. They crashed all the time in it. Guys were killing themselves.

“Well, I was the first one to take it.”

Nine classmates followed him, and all 10 went to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. The F-84F had one seat, so there was nobody to go up with.

“The first time you flew it, you were solo,” Hadl said.

What they got instead was a blindfold test in a parked cockpit.

“You had to close your eyes and point to the switch. Altimeter. Boom. There. Airspeed indicator there. Hydraulic pressure gauge there,” Hadl said.

At Luke they also practiced throwing nuclear weapons, lobbing the bomb up so it released at an angle and flew on while the airplane turned away.

“That was the first fighter to carry an atomic weapon,” Hadl said.

He keeps a piece of one in the house — an F-84 control-stick grip, the trim button and gun trigger still on it, bought for $150 three or four decades ago.

From there he went to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas and checked out in the F-100A, which is still his favorite of the nine airplanes he flew.

“It was a single seat. It was supersonic,” Hadl said. “What else could you want?”

Crews were briefed not to take it high because the engine would flame out. He took it to 50,000 feet over Las Vegas.

“Then I flew it home,” Hadl said. “I just glided down, logged 15 minutes.”

He had gone supersonic for the first time in an F-84, pushing over from 38,000 feet at full power in a dive the airplane was not built for.

“You don’t know you’re going that fast. You read it on the instrument, that’s all,” Hadl said. “The needle would jiggle. But you wouldn’t know it unless you looked at the needle. There’s nothing in the airplane you feel.”

His first operational assignment put him at George Air Force Base in Victorville, California, where the officers club was full of men who had flown in Korea and World War II.

“That’s where all the Korean aces were,” Hadl said. “Chuck Yeager was there. I sat at the bar one time. I had a beer with him.”

Somebody painted his name on the side of his F-100 there, which he said was not the usual practice.

“The maintenance officer liked me, I guess,” Hadl said.

His crew chief took the black-and-white photograph of him standing beside it, and he still has it.

George is also where a main tire came apart on takeoff. His flight lead looked him over in the air and reported nothing left on the wheel but strings of rubber. Hadl burned off his external fuel to get as light as he could, flew a long, slow final approach and set the airplane down on the end of the runway. The drag chute held. He stopped in about 2,000 feet, firetrucks waiting, the airplane smoking.

“I saved the airplane, and that afternoon it flew again,” Hadl said. “Two weeks later, the same thing happened to a guy in Texas. He landed, cartwheeled and got killed. I could have been killed.

“Nobody landed an airplane like that with a blown tire. I did it.”

A crew of three

The news that ended his fighter years reached him in Pennsylvania, where he had come home for his brother’s wedding. The Strategic Air Command needed bomber crews.

“That was devastating. You didn’t want to go — a fighter pilot going into a six-engine bomber,” Hadl said.

So he reported to Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas, and the airplane he had not wanted became the one that put the Kremlin in his flight plan.

He married Fran during bomber training. They had met traveling home to Pennsylvania in 1958 and courted across the country while he was still flying fighters in California.

“I loved to fly, so that was some incentive,” Hadl said of the distance.

The B-47 carried three men under a canopy like a fighter’s, the navigator stationed below the other two.

“We never saw each other. Three people in a six-engine airplane,” Hadl said.

After his crew was named crew of the quarter for the whole base, the Air Force sent him to its pilot upgrade program. The course required 1,000 flying hours and he had 900, so the service waived the difference. He was a B-47 aircraft commander while still a lieutenant.

The airplane had a reputation of its own.

“A lot of people died in the B-47. It was a controversial airplane. Dangerous,” Hadl said. “I thought it was a piece of paper flying. You just had to know how to fly it.”

On Nov. 22, 1963, Hadl was flying a practice bomb run over Omaha, Nebraska, when a radio operator on the ground told him the president had just been killed in Texas. His copilot, Arthur Hood, later wrote a book about their bomber years, and it quotes Hadl’s reaction as “All you Texans are all crazy.”

“That’s not what I said,” according to Hadl. “I said, ‘Those damn Texans.’”

Then he scrubbed the rest of the mission on his own authority, which was not how the Strategic Air Command operated.

“We were on a bomb run over Omaha, and I canceled our flight. I canceled my flight,” Hadl said. “You don’t do that in SAC. We landed ASAP at Lincoln.”

Eggs, oranges and bullet holes

The B-52 made the B-47 obsolete, and the next airplane was slower still. Hadl is precise about what he did in the war that followed.

“I saw no combat in Vietnam,” Hadl said.

He moved Fran and their daughter to Japan in 1964 for a three-year tour at Tachikawa, flying the C-124 Globemaster, a four-engine propeller transport the crews called Old Shakey “because it shook all the time.”

“You fly it there, but it shook all the time. It just vibrated all the time,” Hadl said.

Nearly every trip out of Japan went to the war. Crews flew down to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, over to Vietnam, on to Bangkok, Thailand, for the night, back to Clark and around again, usually a week at a stretch.

“I spend more time away from home than at home. That’s why we only have one daughter. That’s what I always say to my wife,” Hadl said.

His logbooks count 102 landings in Vietnam, at $45 a month in combat pay.

The cargo was rarely dramatic. One load was several thousand dozen eggs bound for Korea, which he believes were meant for research.

“We took them over to Korea, and didn’t break a one,” Hadl said.

Another was a full airplane of orange crates for the troops at Saigon.

“But we stole one. We had oranges for the whole week,” Hadl said.

The airplane came home with holes in it more than once.

“There was one time the navigator sat at a table. A round came up through the navigator’s table seconds after he stood up. Missed it by that much,” Hadl said. “You land the airplane, you see the little bullet holes. We had bullet holes in the airplane, but that didn’t bother anything.”

One night he carried more than 200 civilians out of Da Nang to Saigon, far more than the C-124 had seats for. The crew strapped them to the floor. Hadl did not know who any of them were. An Army man aboard had a rifle and ammunition, so Hadl posted him at the bottom of the ladder to the cockpit.

“Anybody tries to get up that ladder, you have my authority to shoot him,” Hadl said. “I told him he had my authority. If he shot somebody, I was at fault. I would have to answer for it. But I was aircraft commander.”

Nothing happened on the flight.

In 1971 the Air Force sent him to Saigon as a lieutenant colonel for a year with no airplane. Once a week he briefed a two-star general on a target, and then the general went and flew the mission himself.

“We worked seven to seven, seven days a week in Seventh Air Force,” Hadl said.

He lived in the city, and the war came to him as sound.

“You heard bombs, probably mortars, things going off, explosions. You don’t know what they were. Almost every night,” Hadl said. “It was out in the distance somewhere. Sometimes it would probably be B-52s. I don’t know. You just lived through it.”

He earned the Bronze Star for that year. It hangs on his wall with the rest of his medals.

Hadl left in October 1972 hoping to never return.

‘All the jobs nobody wants’

After coming home from Vietnam, he did not fly again for eight years. The first three were at Kincheloe Air Force Base near Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, as chief of services.

“I had charge of the billeting, the dormitories, mortuary affairs, the commissary, the dining halls,” Hadl said. “All the jobs nobody wants.”

Then the phone rang with Germany.

“Would you like to go to Germany? Hell yes, I’d like to go to Germany. But it’s the same job, and twice as big,” Hadl said. “I had so much responsibility. I don’t even know today what I did.”

The family stayed in Germany longer than the Air Force intended. Hadl extended a year so his daughter could finish at Kaiserslautern High School.

“No, you’re not going to leave the kid. I can’t take a kid out of senior year in high school,” Hadl said.

They paid their own way on the base bus tours that ran most weekends — Pisa, Naples, Jerusalem. Americans were not allowed to land in Israel then, he said, so they flew into Jordan and crossed over by bus, and one day trip carried them south to the rock city of Petra. Fran found the ski club on base, and the two of them bought equipment and learned.

They also drove to Austria, where his father was born.

“We drove to Austria, the five of us,” Hadl said. “Drove him there to meet his cousins, his nephews.”

Flying came back by way of a desk job. At Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington he was made airfield manager, a post that had to be filled by an active flying officer, so the Air Force sent him to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois to check out in the T-39, a twin-engine jet. He had not touched a cockpit in eight years. His instructor told him it looked like he had flown the day before.

“Two, three flights, I was checked out,” Hadl said.

He spent the rest of his career flying dignitaries out of Washington, among them Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, whom he carried from Florida up to Andrews.

Hadl retired in 1983.

Three hearts in a cooler

Retirement did not stick. He took up charter work out of Mount Pocono for the simplest reason he gives for anything.

“It was the flying that I like to do,” Hadl said.

The job meant short notice and early mornings — a half-hour drive to the airport for passengers who wanted to be in Pittsburgh by 6 a.m. Some of it was air evacuation, and some of what he carried was in a cooler.

“Be careful. There’s three hearts in there,” Hadl said, recalling what he was handed.

One call sent him into northern Pennsylvania at night in heavy snow to pick up a woman bound for a heart transplant in Pittsburgh. He landed on a snow-covered runway, and she was driven out to the airplane.

“I said, ‘Lady, just sit down there.’ Got blankets over her. I said, ‘Just sit there and be quiet. Nothing’s gonna happen. Just believe me. Trust me,’ ” Hadl said.

“We got off and flew all the way to Pittsburgh with her, and she got off. I don’t know what happened,” he said. “That was an important job.”

Most of those trips he made alone.

“I landed many times at JFK by myself, me alone in a single-engine airplane. JFK, busy airport,” Hadl said. “All by yourself. It scares some people. I had fun, though.”

By his own count he put down at 53 airports in Pennsylvania alone. Shelves in his house hold the logbooks, Air Force on one side and civilian on the other, along with the pocket-size books he carried in his flight suit and filled in after every trip. His verdict on all of it is short.

“You could have killed yourself any day,” Hadl said.

What has changed since, in his telling, is not the military.

“There is no patriotism anymore,” Hadl said. “Big downfall of respect. It’s all respect, I think. They don’t respect the elders anymore.”

He last flew on his 80th birthday. His medical certificate had lapsed, so an instructor had to ride along.

“He only touched the door handle to get in the airplane, in and out. That’s all he did,” Hadl said.

They were up half an hour out of Mount Pocono, past the Pocono Raceway and over Camelback, in a hard wind. He had planned to shoot a few touch-and-go landings and changed his mind on final approach.

“This ain’t worth it anymore. I’m just going to make a full stop,” Hadl said.

It was his last landing.

The senior pilot wings on the wall at home are ones he made himself, cut piece by piece out of sheet wood and sanded smooth, the wreath painted silver, the star the only metal on it. Beside them hang photographs of all nine airplanes he flew for the Air Force, most of them pictures he took.

“I did a lot of things when I think about it. Nobody knows about it,” Hadl said. “Maybe you’re gonna tell them.”