Command and Control (16 page)

After hearing about the problem at 4-7, Jones decided not to recall the entire Disaster Response Force. In his view, a disaster hadn't happened yet. The force didn't pack any gas masks, toxic vapor detectors, radiation detectors, or firefighting equipment. Jones did, however, bring a press officer to deal with the media and a judge advocate general (JAG) to process any legal claims filed by neighbors of the missile site.

At about nine o'clock the dozen or so members of the force left the base in a small convoy. A few of them rode in the mobile command post, a pickup truck with two rows of seats and a camper shell. A bioengineer traveled in a van that carried equipment to monitor the vapor from a fuel leak. A physician and two paramedics followed in an ambulance. And the press officer joined Colonel Jones in the base commander's car, along with the JAG, who brought his disaster claims kit.

•   •   •

S
ID
K
ING
STOOD
IN
THE
DARK
beside the Live Ear. It was parked on the shoulder of Highway 65, overlooking the entrance to the missile complex. A camera crew from KATV was on the way, and reporters from the other Little Rock television stations and local newspapers weren't far behind. Nothing much seemed to be happening. The white cloud was still rising from the complex, but nobody appeared to be dealing with it. About a dozen men in Air Force fatigues were hanging around a blue pickup at the end of the access road. A security policeman sat in the cab, talking to the command post on the radio. And a helicopter hovered overhead, shining its spotlight toward the ground, looking for someplace to land.

The missile combat crew was glad to be outdoors, with a good half a mile between them and the silo. The night was warm, help was on the way, everybody had made it out of the complex safe and sound. The problem with the missile hadn't been solved, but the mood was calm. Then Rodney Holder looked up and saw that the helicopter was about to hit some power lines. The pilot couldn't see them in the dark, and the chopper was descending straight toward them. Holder started to yell and wave his arms, and then Mazzaro, his commander, noticed, too. “Tell the helicopter not to land,” they both shouted, frantically, to the security officer in the pickup. “
Tell it not to land!” In an instant, Holder had gone from feeling chilled and relaxed to being absolutely terrified, convinced that the chopper was going to hit the power lines, spin out of control, and explode. It didn't. At the last minute, the pilot saw the wires, dodged them, and landed safely in a field near a farmhouse on the other side of the highway.

Morris and Kennedy climbed from the copter and joined the men
waiting on the access road. While Mazzaro spoke to the colonel about the accident, Kennedy and Holder discussed what should be done next. Kennedy didn't think much of Mazzaro and couldn't believe that his crew had abandoned the complex. But Kennedy got along with Holder. The two had taken some college classes together at the base and felt a mutual respect. They disagreed now, however, about whether there was a fire in the silo. Kennedy decided to see for himself. He asked Colonel Morris for permission to enter the site—and to bring David Powell, the airman who'd dropped the socket, with him.

Powell was one of Kennedy's closest friends in the Air Force. When Kennedy was a PTS team chief, Powell served as his right-hand man. Kennedy could count on Powell to do just about anything. He used Powell to train new PTS technicians, and Powell hoped to become a team chief himself, maybe a noncommissioned officer. Powell was always calm and reliable. But now he seemed anxious, agitated, upset. After the helicopter landed, Powell had run up to him and said, “
Jeff, I fucked up like you wouldn't believe.”

Powell added another detail: not only had he dropped the socket but he'd also used the wrong tool with it. A recent technical order said that a torque wrench always had to be used when tightening or loosening a fuel cap in the silo. The torque wrench ensured that a precise amount of pressure could be applied to the cap. Earlier that evening, Powell and Plumb had reached level 2 of the silo, fully dressed in their RFHCOs, before realizing that they'd left the torque wrench behind in their truck.

PTS Team A had already spent ten hours on the job that day. Everybody was tired, and instead of sending someone topside to get the torque wrench, wasting another ten or fifteen minutes, Powell grabbed the ratchet hanging on the wall near blast door 9. The socket fit on the ratchet, and for years PTS teams had used that ratchet instead of a torque wrench, without any problems. Powell had done it, Kennedy had done it, just about every PTS team had done it. This time the socket slipped off. And using the wrong tool could get Powell in even more trouble.

“
Oh, David,” Kennedy said. “David, David, David.”

Colonel Morris liked Kennedy's idea. They could use a better look at
what was coming out of the exhaust vents. But Morris didn't want anyone venturing too close to the silo. Captain Mazzaro approved the plan, as well. Technically, he was still in command of the launch complex. After arriving at the site that morning, he'd signed for the missile and the warhead—they were his responsibility—and he didn't want Kennedy and Powell to go near the complex unaccompanied. Mazzaro and his deputy, Al Childers, still wearing their handguns, would go with them. The two officers and the two enlisted men started down the access road in the darkness, carrying flashlights.

•   •   •

S
AM
H
UTTO
'
S
FAMILY
HAD
FARMED
the same land for generations. The inscription on his great-great-grandfather's tombstone said:
PIONEER OF VAN BUREN COUNTY AND FOUNDER OF DAMASCUS
. The Huttos had come to Arkansas before the Civil War, and the town they settled had originally been called Huttotown—until another set of Sam's ancestors, the Browns, decided to find a name with a more biblical flavor. “Damascus” sounded like a place that would one day be important, a worthy rival to Jerusalem, Arkansas, about thirty miles to the east. For decades, life in Damascus remained largely the same, as farmers struggled on small landholdings with thin topsoil. The poverty seemed as unchanging as the landscape. Even the Great Depression didn't leave much of a mark. “
We went into, through, and out of the Depression,” Hutto's father once said, “and never knew we had one.”

Despite the challenges of rural life, Sam Hutto thought his childhood was perfect. He was born in 1954, the same year his father quit raising chickens and opened a feed mill in Damascus. Everybody in the community seemed to know one another and be related to one another, somehow. Their children roamed everybody's land and hunted pretty much wherever they liked. The feed mill was about two miles from Hutto's house, and his parents let him leave home in the morning with a fishing pole and slowly make his way to the mill, as long as he arrived by quitting time. Hutto went to school a couple of miles from the farm, left town to attend the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, spent about a year or so there,
dropped out, lasted a semester at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, then came home. He had little use for the world beyond Damascus. Working at his father's mill gave him a chance to attend feed meetings and conferences throughout the United States—and Hutto never went anywhere that he didn't want to come home from.

For years, the Titan II sites in Van Buren County didn't attract much attention. Their construction had briefly provided some high-paying jobs, and the fire in the silo at Searcy had taken the lives of a few men from Damascus. But once the launch complexes were operational, most people never thought about them. Sam Hutto would occasionally see crews in their Air Force blue pickups, coming or going from the site near Damascus. Sometimes they'd stop at the little grocery store to buy sodas and candy. The launch complex was just another local landmark, useful for giving directions. You could tell somebody who wanted to visit Ralph and Reba Jo Parish: head north from Damascus on Highway 65 for a few miles, pass the access road to the missile base, and their house will be the first one on the left.

The oxidizer leak in January 1978 was the first sign that having a Titan II in the neighborhood might be a problem. Hutto was working in the barn when he heard about the leak. He was twenty-three years old, helping his father and his older brother, Tommy, run the farm. A few years earlier the family had sold the feed mill and gone into the dairy business. As a milk truck backed into the barn, the driver said something about passing through a bright orange cloud on the way over. Hutto stepped outside to take a look. Their farm was on a hillside about three quarters of a mile southeast of the launch complex, with Highway 65 running between them. Down below Hutto could see an orange cloud encircling the complex and slowly drifting south. He didn't think much of it and went back to work. His father, who was chopping wood about two miles due south of 4-7, thought the cloud tasted funny as it drifted past. It gave him a headache but didn't make him sick. When word spread that the orange fumes had killed some cattle and sent Sheriff Anglin to the hospital, the residents of Damascus began to wonder about the safety of the Titan II missile that sat about a mile from their elementary school. The Air Force response to the
leak—the assurances that everything was under control and that the missile was perfectly safe—did not reassure them.

Sam Hutto was at home on the evening of September 18, 1980, with his pregnant wife and their one-year-old daughter. The baby was expected any day. Hutto's father called at about half past seven and told him to get out of the house. There was another leak or something at the missile site. Sheriff Anglin had gone out there to see what was happening, bumped into an Air Force security officer near the fence, and asked him whether there was any need to evacuate. Nope, everything is under control, the security officer had said. The sheriff got on his radio and ordered an evacuation of all the homes within a mile of the launch complex. The Parishes lived the closest to the site, less than half a mile from the missile itself, and perhaps twenty-five other homes were within the evacuation zone, mainly on the east side of the highway. To the west of the complex, woods and open fields stretched for hundreds of acres. Sheriff's deputies knocked on doors, and neighbors phoned one another to spread the word. Sam Hutto drove his family to his brother Tommy's house in Damascus, helped them get settled, and then left.

It was a bad night to evacuate the farm. The heat cycles of the heifers had been synchronized, and about twenty were ready to give birth. They were grazing in a field right across the highway from 4-7. Hutto wanted to make sure the cows and their calves were all right. He knew the back roads of Damascus pretty damn well and felt confident that he could safely make his way to the farm.

•   •   •

T
HE
A
RKANSAS
O
FFICE
of Emergency Services had been notified by the Air Force, at 6:47
P.M
., that there was a fuel leak and possibly a fire at the Titan II complex outside Damascus. For the rest of the evening, however,
the Air Force provided few additional details about what was happening and whether the leak could pose a threat to public safety. Despite repeated calls to Little Rock Air Force Base, the Office of Emergency Services was told only that the problem was being addressed—and that more information would soon be forthcoming. Spokesmen at SAC headquarters in
Omaha were no more helpful, claiming that the Air Force didn't know what had caused the fuel leak, the white cloud rising from the silo wasn't toxic, and there was no danger of a nuclear incident.

State officials had good reason to be skeptical of reassuring words from the federal government. A few months earlier, when
about fifty thousand gallons of radioactive water leaked at a nuclear power plant outside Russellville, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had waited five hours before telling the Office of Emergency Services about the accident. And then the NRC allowed radioactive gas to be vented from the reactor into the air above Pope County, ignoring objections by the Arkansas Department of Health.

The cultural differences between the Strategic Air Command and the Arkansas state government may have contributed to the feelings of mistrust. SAC's devotion to order, discipline, secrecy, and checklists was at odds with the looser, more irreverent spirit that guided policy making in Little Rock. Steve Clark, the Arkansas attorney general, was thirty-three years old. Paul Revere, the secretary of state, was also thirty-three. And William Jefferson Clinton, at thirty-four, was the youngest governor in the United States.

Educated at Georgetown University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School,
Bill Clinton was an unlikely person for the Air Force to include in deliberations about the fate of a ballistic missile. He'd organized a demonstration against the Vietnam War, never served in the military, and supported the decriminalization of marijuana. During his gubernatorial campaign in 1978, the
New York Times
described Clinton as “
tall, handsome, a populist-liberal with a style and speaking manner as smooth as Arkansas corn silk.” His landslide victory that year seemed to mark a generational shift—the rise to power of a brilliant, charismatic representative of the 1960s youth counterculture. Many conservatives were disgusted by the idea of Clinton and his young, idealistic friends running the state government. “
He was a punk kid with long hair,” one Arkansas legislator said, “he had all those longhaired people working for him, and he was a liberal.”

Governor Clinton began his two-year term in office with an ambitious agenda for one of America's most impoverished states. He gained passage of
the largest spending increase for public education in Arkansas history. He created a Department of Energy to subsidize research on conservation, alternative fuels, and solar power. He proposed a rural health policy that would bring physicians and medical care to low-income communities. And he set out to fix the state's badly deteriorated highway system, promising infrastructure investments to create jobs and improve the lives of ordinary Arkansans. A number of Clinton's top aides and cabinet officers were recruited from out of state—sending a clear message that posts in his administration would be filled on the basis of merit, not as a reward for political favors. Instead of having a chief of staff, Clinton relied upon three close advisers who had long hair, beards, and an aversion to wearing jackets or ties. Nicknamed “
the Three Beards,” they looked like junior faculty members at Berkeley. Among Democratic officials nationwide, Little Rock was now considered a cool place to be, and the young governor became a frequent guest at the Carter White House.