Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

AT THE ACCESS CONTROL POINT, Don Green suddenly appeared in a pickup truck. Green got out of the truck, looking distraught, and said that Roberts was missing, that he may have fallen into a deep hole. Green needed a new gas mask, he needed to go back to the complex and find Roberts. The others thought Green was delirious, but he felt like they just didn’t understand. His gas mask was clogged, he had to get a new one and find Roberts. Mueller gave Green a shot of Benadryl and persuaded him to sit down for a moment.

WALKING THROUGH THE COMPLEX, Sandaker felt scared. He’d been told to watch out for the warhead and its high explosives. Debris was scattered everywhere, and in the darkness you couldn’t tell what any of it was. The explosion had stripped the concrete off steel rebar, and the rebar had been twisted into all kinds of strange shapes, looming out of the smoke. Sandaker had worked at 4–7 many times, but now nothing seemed familiar. The RFHCO helmet prevented him from calling out for English and Livingston. Within minutes, he was lost.

ROBERTS COULDN’T CARRY LIVINGSTON anymore and put him on the ground.

Livingston pleaded with Roberts not to leave him.

“Look, we’re going to make it out of here,” Roberts said. “I’m going to have to carry you on my back.”

Roberts carried Livingston on his back for a while, but then had to put him down again, unable to carry him another step. Roberts said that he’d go find help and promised to come right back.

“Please don’t leave me,” Livingston said.

Roberts picked him up again and put him on his back.

SANDAKER WANDERED THROUGH THE COMPLEX, looking for the access portal, but couldn’t find it. He felt odd being lost in a place that he knew like the back of his hand. Sandaker spotted English, about thirty feet away. He was turning his flashlight on and off. That meant trouble.

English couldn’t walk any farther in the RFHCO suit. He was exhausted and signaled to Sandaker that he was running out of air.

They turned around and tried to find their way out.

ROBERTS FEARED HE WAS ABOUT to pass out. He put Livingston down near the fence and promised to come back for him. He made his way to the battered pickup near the gate and saw two men in the distance wearing RFHCO suits. He flashed the headlights and honked the horn, but they didn’t see him. And then Roberts saw another truck parked nearby. Someone was sitting in the front seat.

The door of the truck opened, and a man got out, with a flashlight. He was wearing a gas mask and a red bowling shirt.

Roberts thought, “Great.”

Rossborough and Roberts reentered the complex, found Livingston, picked him up, and carried him out. They carried him through bushes and around debris. It felt like running an obstacle course in the dark. They got tired and had to put Livingston down.

As Sandaker and English took off their RFHCOs, they saw Rossborough and Roberts about twenty yards away. They ran over to help, carried Livingston to the truck, and gently lowered him into the back. Sandaker rode with his friend, while the others sat in the cab.

Livingston asked Sandaker not to tell his mother what had happened.

“Please don’t tell my mother,” he said, again and again.

ABOUT AN HOUR after the explosion, Colonel Jones and the rest of the Disaster Response Force returned to the access control point. Jones had been listening to Colonel Morris on the radio and suddenly thought: if he sounds OK back there, what am I doing in Damascus?

Mueller did the best he could to treat Kennedy in the ambulance. Kennedy was pale and thirsty and having difficulty breathing. Mueller started him on an IV and gave him some medicine to prevent pulmonary edema — an excess of fluid in the lungs that could be caused by oxidizer exposure. Kennedy also had a big hole in his right leg. His long johns reeked of rocket fuel, and Mueller cut them off.

Livingston arrived in the back of the pickup, and Mueller examined him there. In some ways, Livingston seemed to be in better shape than Kennedy. His face wasn’t as pale, and he hadn’t passed out. But the wound in his abdomen was deep. Pieces of concrete were lodged in there, and you could see his intestines. Mueller wanted to give him an IV but couldn’t. The ambulance only had one.

Colonel Jones had already requested a helicopter to take Kennedy to the hospital. The command post in Little Rock said that the chopper was on its way. But there was no sign of it.

The helicopter had not yet departed from Little Rock Air Force Base. Its crew had been instructed to bring portable vapor detectors to 4–7. Nobody could find any, and the chopper sat there and waited, for more than half an hour, while people looked for the vapor detectors.

Jones couldn’t understand why the helicopter hadn’t arrived yet. Kennedy and Livingston were in rough shape, and the ambulance wasn’t equipped to deal with their injuries. Livingston needed an IV, right away. Jones told Colonel Morris that he was taking them to the hospital in Conway.

Hukle and Kennedy rode in the ambulance. Livingston remained in the back of the pickup truck with Sandaker, who kept him talking. And Colonel Jones led the way in a station wagon. The convoy had to drive slowly because Livingston was in so much pain.

The helicopter finally took off from Little Rock — without any vapor detectors, because none could be found. The pilot was told to meet the convoy at Launch Complex 374-6, near the town of Republican. But Jones and the others mistakenly drove past it. Instead they met the chopper at Launch Complex 374-5, outside Springhill. The chief of aerospace medicine at the base, another physician, and four medics immediately got to work on the injured men. Kennedy was given a shot of morphine, and Livingston finally got an IV. Sandaker said good-bye to them both, and the helicopter took off for Little Rock. It was five in the morning.

A couple of security police officers picked up Colonel Morris at the access control point and drove him to the hospital.

Colonel Jimmie Gray was the only person left at the site. He waited there, alone, as dawn approached, fires still burned, and the warhead lay somewhere in the dark.

At the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, Matthew Arnold was taught how to deactivate chemical and biological weapons. “Chlorine is your friend,” the instructor told the class. The principal ingredient in household bleach would render almost every deadly pathogen, nerve agent, and blister agent harmless. That’s good to know, Arnold thought. Although Redstone was an Army facility, he’d been sent there by the Air Force. The three-week course at Redstone was the first step toward becoming an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician. Students were no longer exposed to nerve gas and then told to inject themselves with atropine — an exercise to build confidence that the antidote would work during a chemical attack. Instead, they were shown footage of a goat being exposed to a nerve agent and given an injection. The goat lived. But the film and the lectures at Redstone suggested how dangerous the work of an EOD technician could be, and a number of people dropped out.

The attrition rate was even higher among those students who, like Arnold, reached the next step — seven months of training, six days a week, at the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School in Indian Head, Maryland. About one third of the students typically flunked out or quit, and only one fifth completed the course on his or her first try. The classes at Indian Head focused mainly on conventional weapons. EOD trainees were required to study every kind of ordnance used by every military in the world. The render safe procedures were similar for most munitions, regardless of their national origin: remove the fuze if it could easily be done, or just attach a small explosive charge to the weapon, retreat a safe distance, and blow it up.