Associated Press
Bruce Boolowon, then a lean 20-year-old, and a group of friends were hunting for murre eggs in a walrus skin boat on a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait when they saw a crippled airplane flying low. Its 11 crewmen had injuries in varying degrees of severity, caused either by the bullets sprayed by the two jet fighters, shrapnel or the fireball that erupted when the Neptune landed wheels up on the tundra of St. Lawrence Island and fuel tanks stored in the plane’s belly exploded. The men took refuge in a ditch on St. Lawrence Island — just 40 miles (64 kilometers) from Siberia and 715 miles (1,151 kilometers) west of Anchorage — to avoid the exploding ammunition and waited, but for what they weren’t sure.