Guard drops a bombshell &#8212; literally

TULSA — Before he flipped on the bathroom light switch Thursday night, Jeremy Isbell probably didn't feel like the luckiest man alive — but then again, he probably didn't expect his Canyon Creek apartment to have been bombed by his own government while he and his wife were out.

Isbell's bathroom tile was knocked out by a 22-pound dummy bomb. The bomb was released by an F-16 fighter jet, and was intended to be used in an Air National Guard training mission over a practice field in Kansas.

As strange as the situation was, Tulsa was not the first Oklahoma city to be accidentally bombed by American forces. Boise City lawyer Stan Manske said his town, which has long claimed to be the only U.S. city bombed by its own country, is happy to welcome Tulsa to the fold. "We will share the glory, with all due respect,” Manske said.

About 3 p.m. Thursday, a National Guard jet pilot left the Tulsa Air National Guard Base for the Smokey Hill Gunnery Range in Salina, Kan., on what Guard officials said was a routine mission.

Shortly after takeoff, a BDU-33, one of six dummy training bombs, was inadvertently released from the Air Guard aircraft and crashed through the apartment complex.

The military pilot apparently never knew the bomb had been released, and continued to the Kansas test field to complete the mission. Col. Bruce Butter, vice commander of the Oklahoma Air National Guard's 138th Fighter Wing based at Tulsa International Airport, said each of the two planes on the mission made six passes on the bomb range, dropping one of the bombs on each pass.

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