Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Things must be pretty bad, Kennedy thought. He’d been in the Air Force for years, and this was the first time somebody had offered him a ride in a helicopter. He knew Charles Heineman, the PTS team chief working at 4–7 that day. Heineman was good, Heineman could tell the difference between fuel, smoke, and oxidizer. Maybe there was a fire in the silo. That would be incredible.

Kennedy put on his uniform, said good-bye to his family, and headed for the command post. He was a quality control evaluator for the 308th Missile Inspection and Maintenance Squadron. More important than his official title was a fact widely acknowledged in the 308th. Kennedy was the best missile mechanic at the base. He understood the Titan II propulsion system better than just about anyone else. He knew how to fix it. And he seemed to embody the swagger and the spirit of the PTS crews. Kennedy was tough, outspoken, and fearless. He was six foot five and powerfully built, a leader among the enlisted men who risked their lives every day in the silos. Commanding officers didn’t always like him. But they listened to him.

At Little Rock Air Force Base, Kennedy was briefed by Colonel John T. Moser, the wing commander, and Colonel James L. Morris, the head of the maintenance squadron. A large socket had been dropped in the silo, piercing the missile and causing a leak in the stage 1 fuel tank. The sprays were on, flooding the silo with water. The missile combat crew was trying to make sense of all the hazard lights flashing in the control center. The deputy commander, Al Childers, thought it was just a fuel leak. The missile systems analyst technician, Rodney Holder, thought there was a fire. The PTS team topside had reported seeing smoke — but then hurriedly left the scene and couldn’t be reached. Nobody knew where they were. Pressure in the stage 1 fuel tank was falling. Pressure in the stage 1 oxidizer tank was rising. One was threatening to collapse, the other to burst.

Kennedy was surprised to hear how quickly the pressure levels had changed in the hour or so since the socket was dropped. The stage 1 fuel tank was now at 2.2 psi, about one fifth of what it should be; the stage 1 oxidizer was at 18.8 psi, almost twice as high as it should be. He’d never seen pressure levels change that fast.

Colonel Morris was preparing to leave for 4–7 by helicopter and wanted Kennedy to join him. The two men weren’t particularly fond of each other. Morris was an officer in his midforties, cautious and by the book, just the sort of person that the PTS guys liked to ignore. He needed to know what was happening at the launch complex and thought Kennedy was the right man to find out. The Missile Potential Hazard Team had tentatively come up with a plan of action: enter the silo, determine the size of the hole in the missile, vent the fuel vapors, and try to stabilize the stage 1 fuel tank so that it wouldn’t collapse. Of course, none of that would be possible if the silo was on fire. Was there smoke drifting from the exhaust vents, fuel vapor, or both? That was the critical question. Morris and Kennedy left the command post, went to the flight line, climbed into a chopper, and took off.

Kennedy had never been in an Air Force helicopter. His job focused largely on machinery that was underground — and like most of the PTS guys, his career in missile maintenance had come as a surprise, not as the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. Kennedy was born and raised in South Portland, Maine. He played basketball in high school, graduated, got married, and worked as a deckhand on the Casco Bay Lines, a ferry service that linked Portland to neighboring islands. In 1976 he decided that being a deckhand just didn’t cut it anymore. He had a one-year-old daughter and another child on the way. He needed to earn more money, and his brother suggested joining the military. Kennedy met with recruiters from the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. He chose the Air Force because its basic training was the shortest.

After enlisting, Kennedy hoped to become an airplane mechanic stationed in Florida or California. Instead, he soon found himself learning about missile propellant transfer at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois. The training course did a fine job with the technical details of the missile system. But it didn’t give a sense of how dangerous the work could be. The Titan II mock-up at Chanute was loaded with water, not oxidizer or fuel, and accidental spills didn’t seem like a big deal. Kennedy learned about the risks through his on-the-job training with the 308th in Arkansas. During one of his first visits to a launch complex, the PTS team was doing a “recycle,” removing oxidizer from the missile. An enormous propane tank, known as a “burn bot,” sat near the silo door topside, burning excess propellant as it vented, roaring like a jet engine and shooting out a gust of flame. This sort of controlled burn was routine, like the flares at an oil field. Then the burn bot went out, the oxidizer leaked, a dirty orange cloud floated over the complex, and the sergeant beside Kennedy said, “You know that bullshit right there? You get that shit on your skin, it’ll turn to nitric acid.”

Kennedy thought, “Wow,” and watched with some concern as the cloud drifted over the control trailer and the rest of the PTS team continued to work, hardly noticing it. He felt like running for the hills. Clearly, the textbooks at Chanute didn’t tell you what really happened in the field. Kennedy soon realized there was the way you were supposed to do things — and the way things got done. RFHCO suits were hot and cumbersome, a real pain in the ass to wear — and if a maintenance task could be accomplished quickly and without an officer noticing, sometimes the suits weren’t worn. The PTS team would enter the blast lock, stash their RFHCOs against a blast door, and enter the silo unprotected. The risk seemed less important than avoiding the hassle. While disconnecting a vent hose in the silo, Kennedy once forgot to close a valve, inhaled some oxidizer, and coughed up nasty stuff for a week. On another occasion, oxidizer burned the skin off the top of his left hand. Working without a RFHCO violated a wide range of technical orders. But it forced you to think about the fuel and the oxidizer and the fine line between saving some time and doing something incredibly stupid.

Within a few years, Kennedy had become a PTS team chief. He loved the job and the responsibility that it brought. And he loved the Air Force. Where else could a twenty-five-year-old kid, without a college degree, be put in charge of complicated, hazardous, essential operations at a missile site worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The fact that a nuclear warhead was involved made the work seem even cooler. Over time, Kennedy had gained an appreciation for the Titan II, regarding it as a thing of beauty, temperamental but awe inspiring. He thought you had to treat the missile with respect, like you would a lady. Keeping the Titan IIs fueled and ready to go, ensuring the safety of his men — those were his priorities, and he enjoyed getting the work done.

The recycles were one of Kennedy’s favorite parts of the job. They took weeks to prepare. The weather had to be just right, with at least three knots of wind and the outdoor temperature rising, so that a leak wouldn’t linger over the complex. Once the valves were turned and the fuel or the oxidizer started to flow, the team chief was in charge of the operation, and the adrenaline kicked in. The danger was greatest when propellants were being loaded and off-loaded; that’s when something bad was most likely to happen, something unexpected and potentially catastrophic. It always felt good to finish a recycle, pack up the tools, load up the trucks, and send the PTS team home to Little Rock at the end of a long day.