Command and Control (48 page)

The missile crew carried the two injured PTS technicians to the emergency showers on the hardstand to rinse them off. The showers didn't work.

“
Get them under the fire hydrant,” Matthews said.

The crew put Hepstall and Malinger in front of the hydrant and turned it on. Water poured out, and then after a few seconds the hydrant sputtered air and quit. They had to get these men rinsed off, immediately. But the gate to the launch complex was locked. No one had remembered to unlock it before abandoning the control center, and the trucks were parked on the other side of the fence. With help from some of the PTS technicians, the missile crew carried Hepstall and Malinger through the breakaway panel in the fence and placed them in the bed of a pickup.

The crew drove to a nearby farmhouse, and warned the occupants that deadly fumes were rising from the silo. Wong said to leave the area at once—and Frost asked to use their phone. Wessel found a garden hose in the backyard. After spraying the two airmen with water, they drove Hepstall and Malinger to the nearest hospital.

A cloud of oxidizer floated from the launch complex, extending for about a mile and drifting toward the town of Rock, Kansas. The cloud looked like a dark, ominous thunderhead. Local residents didn't know what it was, and the cars and trucks on Highway 77 drove right through it. Air Force security police soon evacuated the roughly two hundred inhabitants of Rock.

Sergeant Thomas had been left behind, and none of the PTS crew members felt right about that. Even though he was gone, they thought, he shouldn't be lying down there, alone. Two men volunteered to get him: Mirl Linthicum, the team chief trainee, and Airman John G. Korzenko. They returned to the launch complex and put on RFHCO suits. Linthicum climbed into the escape hatch first, followed by Korzenko. Within seconds, Korzenko had climbed out; oxidizer was leaking into his suit. Linthicum came back moments later; he wasn't getting enough air in his helmet.

Another PTS team arrived from McConnell, with fresh RFHCO suits and air packs. They wanted to get Thomas out, too. Airman Middland R. Jackson put on a RFHCO and climbed into the escape hatch. He came right back; his helmet was leaking.
Jackson grabbed another helmet, tried the escape hatch again, and climbed the ladder all the way to the bottom in
his RFHCO. But he'd never been in the escape hatch before, and the oxidizer was so thick down there he couldn't find the entrance to the control center. He climbed back up the ladder, frustrated and yet determined not to quit.

A few minutes later, Jackson and two other PTS technicians in RFHCOs, Technical Sergeant John C. Mock and Airman Michael L. Greenwell, tried to enter the control center through the access portal. They wandered underground through dense clouds of oxidizer, literally feeling their way down the stairs and through blast doors. They could not see more than a foot or so ahead—and had to stick together because none of their radios worked. They made it to the control center, found Sergeant Thomas on the floor, and carried his body onto the elevator. But no matter how many times they pushed the buttons, the elevator wouldn't work. They decided to carry Thomas up the stairs. His body was heavy, their suits felt heavy, and it was hot down there. After a few minutes, they couldn't carry him any farther and had to leave his body on the stairs. Two more PTS technicians in RFHCOs, Sergeant James Romig and Airman Gregory W. Anderson, went down and carried him, then had to quit, because of the heat. The five men took turns going into the complex and carrying Thomas as far as they could. As soon as one group got tired, the other would step in. It took two hours to get Thomas up the stairs and out of the complex.

An investigation of the accident later found the cause of the leak.
Someone hadn't put a filter inside the oxidizer line. But the small rubber O-ring designed to hold the filter had been left inside the line. The O-ring blocked the poppet valve from closing fully, allowing oxidizer to pour out. Nobody accepted responsibility for failing to insert the filter. Oxidizer flowed more quickly without a filter in place—and
someone may have deliberately omitted the filter to save time and load the tank quickly.

The blast door leading to the control center wouldn't open because someone had propped open the blast door across from it with a bungee cord—and both doors couldn't be open at the same time. Hepstall had used the manual override to unlock blast door 8, and by entering the control center, he'd contaminated it with oxidizer.

Robert J. Thomas was killed by a leak in his RFHCO, most likely at the spot where it intersected with the left glove. Oxidizer may have poured into the suit as he tried to reconnect the line to the missile.
The Air Force recommended, in the future, that black vinyl electrical tape be used to seal the interface between the glove and the RFHCO suit more securely. Thomas left a widow and two young sons.

Erby Hepstall died a week and a half later, at the age of twenty-two, his lungs destroyed by oxidizer. His son had just turned two. A small tear in the left leg of Hepstall's RFHCO suit, about seven eighths of an inch long, had allowed oxidizer to enter it.

Carl Malinger had a stroke, went into a coma, suffered lung and kidney damage, lost the use of his left arm, and spent the next several months in the hospital. He'd enlisted to get training as an automobile mechanic, and
his mother later felt enormous anger at the Air Force. Its report on the accident said that Hepstall and Malinger had
failed to “comply with [Technical Order] 21M-LGM25C-2-12 which states ‘if disconnect starts to leak . . . screw disconnect to fully connected position immediately.'” The report suggested that Malinger—never trained for the task and working in a Titan II silo for the first time—was somehow to blame for what happened.

General Curtis LeMay had created an institutional culture at the Strategic Air Command that showed absolutely no tolerance for mistakes. People were held accountable not only for their behavior but for their bad luck. “
To err is human,” everyone at the command had been told, “to forgive is not SAC policy.”

•   •   •

B
LAMING
YOUNG
ENLISTED
MEN
for the accident at Rock, Kansas, didn't eliminate the problems with the Titan II. The Pentagon had announced in 1967 that the Titan II was no longer needed and would be decommissioned, with the first missiles coming off alert in 1971. But every year the Air Force successfully battled to keep the Titan II.
Its warhead was more than seven times more powerful than the warhead carried by the Minuteman II. The United States had about one thousand land-based missiles—and
the fifty-four Titan IIs represented roughly one third of
their total explosive force. SAC didn't want to lose all that megatonnage without getting new weapons to replace it. As the Titan II aged, however, its ability to reach the Soviet Union became more uncertain. The last test-launch of a Titan II occurred in 1976, and no more were planned, due to a shortage of missiles and parts.

When Senator Pryor and Skip Rutherford visited a Titan II site in Arkansas, the place looked impressive. But
one of Rutherford's confidential sources later told him that there'd been an oxidizer leak at a nearby launch complex that day—and that the vapor detectors in thirteen of the state's eighteen silos were broken. Pryor came up with a relatively inexpensive plan for protecting rural communities from fuel and oxidizer leaks at Titan II missile sites: install a siren, at every complex, that would blare whenever the crew turned on the red warning beacon topside. The siren could easily be mounted on the same pole. It would warn neighboring homes and farms of a leak. The Air Force opposed the idea, arguing that
a siren “might cause people to leave areas of safety and evacuate into or through areas containing propellant fumes.”
Colonel Richard D. Osborn told Pryor that during those rare occasions when civilians needed to be alerted, the combined efforts of Air Force personnel and local law enforcement officers would ensure public safety. Pryor nevertheless decided to seek funding for the sirens through an amendment to a Senate bill.

The Titan II missile wasn't the only Air Force weapon system having maintenance problems. Amid the defense cutbacks following the Vietnam War, the purchase of new planes and missiles had a much higher priority than buying spare parts for the old ones. During the late 1970s, on a typical day, anywhere from
one half to two thirds of the Air Force's F-15 fighters were grounded for mechanical reasons.
The Strategic Air Command had lost more than half of its personnel since 1961. Some of its B-52 bombers were twenty-five years old. And SAC's aura of invincibility had taken a beating. The highest-ranking officers in the Air Force tended to be “
bomber generals” who'd risen through the ranks at SAC—and many of the pilots who flew bombing missions in Vietnam resented their insistence on rigid, centralized control. Tactics designed for executing the SIOP proved ineffective during combat in Vietnam, where the targets were often mobile and
flying in a rigid formation could get you shot down. American pilots began to disobey orders, ignore their designated targets, bomb those that seemed more urgent, and lie about it in their reports.

Chuck Horner—who flew more than a hundred missions in Vietnam and later commanded the U.S. and allied air campaign during the first Gulf War—resented
the inflexible, “parent-child relationship” that SAC's bomber generals often demanded. He felt a tremendous anger, shared by many other young officers, about how the Air Force leadership had behaved during the Vietnam War:

I didn't hate them because they were dumb, I didn't hate them because they had spilled our blood for nothing, I hated them because of their arrogance . . . because they had convinced themselves that they actually knew what they were doing and that we were too minor to understand the “Big Picture.” I hated my own generals, because they covered up their own gutless inability to stand up to the political masters in Washington and say, “Enough. This is bullshit. Either we fight or we go home.”

Horner vowed that he would “
never again be a part of something so insane and foolish.” After the war, thousands of young officers left the Air Force, profoundly disillusioned. Many of those who stayed were determined to change things. And the influence of the Strategic Air Command gradually diminished, as a younger generation of “fighter generals,” who rejected centralization and standardization and rigid planning, who had firsthand experience in real combat and little interest in abstract theories about nuclear war, rose to power.

During the years following the Vietnam War, antimilitary sentiment in the United States became stronger, perhaps, than at any other time in the nation's history. Vietnam veterans were routinely depicted in books and films as racists, stoners, nutcases, and baby killers. Morale throughout the armed services suffered—and
illegal drug use soared. By 1980, according to the Pentagon's own surveys,
about 27 percent of all military personnel were using illegal drugs at least once a month. Marijuana was by far the
most popular drug, although heroin, cocaine, and LSD were being used, too. Among the armed services,
the Marines had the highest rate of drug use: about 36 percent regularly smoked pot.
About 32 percent of Navy personnel used marijuana at least once a month;
the proportion of Army personnel was about 28 percent.
The Air Force had the lowest rate, about 14 percent. It also had the most powerful warheads and bombs. The surveys by the Department of Defense most likely understated the actual amount of drug use.
Random urine tests of more than two thousand sailors at naval bases in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego, California, found that almost half had recently smoked pot. Although nuclear weapons and marijuana had recently become controversial subjects in American society, inspiring angry debates between liberals and conservatives, nobody argued that the two were a good combination.

Donald Meyer served as a corporal with the 74th United States Field Artillery Detachment in Germany during the early 1970s. His detachment kept Pershing missiles on alert, ready to fire within fifteen minutes. Each missile carried an atomic warhead ten to twenty times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Meyer told the
Milwaukee Journal
that almost every one of the more than two hundred men in his unit regularly smoked hashish. They were often high while handling secret documents and nuclear warheads. A survey found that
one out of every twelve members of the United States Army in Germany was smoking hashish every day. “
You get to know what you can handle,” Meyer said. “Too much hash and you would ruin a good thing.”

At Homestead Air Force Base in Florida,
thirty-five members of an Army unit were arrested for using and selling marijuana and LSD. The unit controlled the Nike Hercules antiaircraft missiles on the base, along with their nuclear warheads. The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway.
Nineteen members of an Army detachment were arrested on pot charges at a Nike Hercules base on Mount Gleason, overlooking Los Angeles. One of them had been caught drying a large amount of marijuana on land belonging to the U.S. Forest Service.
Three enlisted men at a Nike
Hercules base in San Rafael, California, were removed from guard duty for psychiatric reasons. One of them had been charged with pointing a loaded rifle at the head of a sergeant. Although illegal drugs were not involved in the case, the three men were allowed to guard the missiles, despite a history of psychiatric problems. The squadron was understaffed, and its commander feared that hippies—“
people from the Haight-Ashbury”—were trying to steal nuclear weapons.

More than one fourth of the crew on the USS
Nathan Hale
, a Polaris submarine with sixteen ballistic missiles, were investigated for illegal drug use. Eighteen of the thirty-eight seamen were cleared; the rest were discharged or removed from submarine duty.
A former crew member of the
Nathan Hale
told a reporter that hashish was often smoked when the sub was at sea.
The Polaris base at Holy Loch, Scotland, helped turn the Cowal Peninsula into a center for drug dealing in Great Britain.
Nine crew members of the USS
Casimir Pulaski
, a Polaris submarine, were convicted for smoking marijuana at sea. One of the submarine tenders that docked at the base, the USS
Canopus,
often carried nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. The widespread marijuana use among its crew earned the ship
a local nickname: the USS
Cannabis.