When you are a young boy and your father flies multi-engine jets all over the world on secret missions for days at a time, you don't think about the warrior part too much. Caught up in the adventure of moving from place to place in the '60s and '70s, all we knew was that our dads did some cool stuff, our moms probably drank a little too much, and that the next move to the next place was right around the corner, so don't make friends too deeply. I moved sixteen times in seventeen years. It was a fun life and it was most certainly never dull.
Jim Ehlers and my dad cooked up the trip. It was to be a surprise. We would leave on a Friday, come home on a Sunday and sleep in a gymnasium both nights. Both being officers, not a lot of dissension was offered up by the other dads and everyone thought the trip was a great idea--especially the moms who would would get a bit of a break from their husbands and their incessant talk at home about getting promoted below the zone, who got passed over, and begging their reluctant brides to go to happy hour at the Officers Club to rub elbows with the base commander and make friends with the base commander's wife, The Queen Bee of all Officers. And so we set off to Missouri with happy moms left behind.
No sooner had we arrived late that Friday night and set our sleeping bags in the gym when a smartly dressed Air Policeman with spats, boots, sidearm and blue beret began barking in a loud voice to get into the truck waiting outside. It was 10 p.m. We'd been driving for 5 hours. No matter. Youth running on natural adrenaline and more than a few Coca-Colas never tires. Our compliment of fifteen Boy Scouts bounded into the back of a windowless troop transport, our dads gamely trudging behind.
For what seemed a very long time, we bounced here and there and up and down. We could not see outside. Thankfully and finally pulling to a stop, the door opened, we clambered out, and were struck with how bright it was. Looking like prisoners of war in our rumpled green scout uniforms and shielding our eyes from the spotlights, we saw fences, dogs, M-16s and APs everywhere. It looked like a setpiece right out of The Great Escape, except these were Americans and not Nazis and there was no sign of Steve McQueen with a baseball glove.
Barking AP asked us to hurry and get inside. In front of us was a simple ranch house that was set inside a multi-ringed maze of concertina wire fences beyond which fanged German Shepherds waited to taste their first scout. We did not dally.
Inside the house a TV was on with men in uniform lounging around it. There were some overstuffed chairs covered in dark red vinyl, a card table, a military-issue gray metal desk, a black and white checkered lineoleum floor and a very large coffee machine. This was nothing special and we were all beginning to wonder what was going on. We didn't come all this way to see a bunch of guys pulling Alert duty. We'd all seen plenty of that in Nebraska with dads just feet from their siren-topped dark-blue trucks ready to take young dad-pilots from the family bar-b-cue area to the flight line where pre-fueled B-52's and KC-135's were waiting to make steep JATO-assisted climbs into the azure haze within minutes to ensure a successful return volley of nuclear catastrophe.
Barking AP told us to keep moving and to follow him. He didn't go far. Over in the corner was a podium and another AP behind the podium. He was different though. Growing up in the military even as youngsters we'd learned to pay attention to insignia on uniforms. This guy had insignia we'd never seen. There was a solitary missile on his chest instead of wings. Minuteman Missile Command. This was serious. We looked at the patch on his jacket "351st Strategic Missile Wing". I later learned the 351st was responsible for the control of 150 nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles.
The sign-in sheet was tattered and stained with coffee. My dad and Mr. Ehlers flashed their badges at the guard to prove their identity, their allegiance and their fealty to all things American. The guard examined each badge carefully and was in no hurry to return them. When he was satisfied and both dads signed in, he casually reached over and pressed an elevator button while eyeing each scout methodically, no doubt flipping through the mugshot photos in his mind of Russian spies.
Robert Snow, who had perennial migraine headaches at the age of twelve and whose dad pushed him incessantly to make Eagle by thirteen, asked out loud in a nasally voice why a one story house needed an elevator. No one answered him. We were agog. No one expected anything like this. The door to the elevator shaft opened and in we went. Barking AP made sure our hands and feet were all inside, then he tipped his hand to the Shaft AP, pressed the button and down we went into the black, hearts pumping with the excitement of getting to see the very expensive unknown that was about to unfold in front of us.
Our escort stepped out. We followed. We were standing on a concrete floor in a cave of some kind with an impressive array of machinery around us. Warning signs, symbols, tubes, beige paint, and god knows what else angled this way and that. What held our attention was what appeared to be a stainless steel circular plate easily ten feet in diameter directly in front of us. Walking up to it, our host produced a folder, scrolled through it and then punched a keypad by the cylinder while looking carefully at the folder and then back at the keypad. No one said a word. After a bit, we heard gears, clicks, clacks, thwucks and the very pleasing sound of well-machined and lubricated metal parts pleasuring one another as designed. With a final and very loud "thwok" things started happening.
A red alarm light started rotating, bathing the cave in irritating and oscillating Hell-colored strangeness. A klaxon sounded an alarm warning everyone to stand back. The gargantuan stainless steel plate moved ever so slowly toward us and began to take shape as a three dimensional object gliding beyond the confines of its locked existence. The sound of metal bearings moving a heavy load filled the cave. The plate then moved slowly door-like at ninety degrees to the wall and then ceased moving, showing its impressive thickness to us. The door had to have been at least two feet thick, maybe more. It is not often a group of teens are so struck by something they are completely silent. Even the dads were clearly amazed. Flying planes was quite different from this.
Peering not a little nervously inside through the ten foot doorway we saw a scene right out of a James Bond movie. There was a very large cylindrical object that looked to be the size of two school buses welded end-to-end and suspended symmetrically inside a mammoth cave on tens, if not hundreds, of shock absorbers. There was a catwalk that bridged the gap over to a door on the side of the school bus structure. We stood motionless staring like fifteen little birds in a nest, beaks wide open. Each moment so far since getting out of the transport had far exceeded the previous moment and it was even a bit much for jaded, cynical teenagers to take in.
Beckoning us to move through the doorway to the other side, our escort moved across the catwalk and spoke into an intercom against the bus-like structure and announced "Our guests are here. Permission to enter No Lone Zone requested." and then he read something out of the folder he was carrying out loud but we could not hear. A crackly male voice came back immediately with "Permission to enter the No Lone Zone granted!"
We could hear tumblers and other noises and then the bus door opened rather quickly. In the doorway stood a man in a blue uniform waving to us.
"Hi Scouts! Welcome to the 351st Missile Group Nuclear Launch Control Facility! Come on in!". This guy was chipper and quite happy to see us. He beckoned us across the catwalk. As we shuffled across bouncing in all manner of direction we crowded like tadpoles against the entryway to the launch control facility. Chipper Man got our attention and very clearly and precisely said, "Scouts, under no circumstances are you to touch anything. Let us know if you do accidentally. It's pretty hard to do any damage down here, but let us know just the same, OK? Do you understand, Scouts?". We all eagerly nodded our heads in unison. The thought of World War III being started by a Star Scout from Bellevue, Nebraska accidentally backing into a knob caused all of us to gulp. He motioned us to crowd into the very small room with two comfortable looking chairs fixed in front of two identical consoles. We literally watched each others butts as we carefully squeezed inside the missile launch control facility.
Someone asked him about the shock absorbers and he said those were there to absorb the blast of the nuclear warheads targeted at the facility by the Russians. This did -not- make us feel any better.
One scout noticed a manhole-like cover up in the corner and asked about it. Chipper Man told us this was an egress to the 'outside' and there were two shovels inside for digging out in case they needed to. No one spoke, but we all wondered who would want to.
A few of us noticed he had a pistol in a holster on his belt. Chip Pierce asked him if this was to shoot the other crew member in case he decided things were getting out of hand and wanted to take it upon himself to start World War III. Chip Pierce always had good questions. Chipper Man looked at us solemnly and said "Yes. If I have to shoot Lieutenant Jones, I will." Turns out the .38s were issued in the unlikely event there was intruders. This was Minuteman humor at its finest. We did not laugh though our dads did. And we still wondered about Chip's question.
These guys were clearly pulling a different kind of duty than our dads did. These were moles. Our fathers were birds. But they all had the same objective: blow up as many things as you can. There we stood, underground, a scant few inches away from enough firepower to wipe out all the big cities in the Western United States, or Russia.
A few minutes later and after a few more questions, a somber group of Boy Scouts got back in the elevator and headed to the surface. It felt good to breathe the outside nuclear fallout-free air.
I would never think about my father and his job the same way ever again.
The 351st Missile Wing was de-commissioned in 1991 and nary a shot was fired.
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/mimi/hrs2-5a.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/agency/351mw.htm
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