Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Some of the missile combat crew commanders were a pleasure to work with, Kennedy thought, and some of them were real pricks — officers who liked to meddle with things they didn’t know anything about. The launch control center and the silo were only a few hundred feet apart, but the distance between the men who worked in them often felt like miles. Once, while Kennedy was learning the ropes, his team chief was criticized by a missile crew commander, over the radio, for skipping a few lines in a technical order. “Commander, if you want to tell me how to do my job,” the team chief replied, “then you get your ass off your chair, and you come and sit your ass in my chair.” Kennedy soon adopted a similar way of dealing with combat crew officers, most of whom seemed afraid of the propellants: just leave me alone, the work will get done the right way — and then I’ll get the hell off your launch complex.

Most of all, Kennedy valued the intense loyalty among the PTS crews, a bond strengthened by the stress and the dangers of the job. They looked out for each other. At the end of a late-night shift, Kennedy’s team members would sometimes flip a coin to see who’d babysit his kids. And then Kennedy’s wife would dress in fatigues and sneak onto the base to join everybody for midnight chow in the cafeteria. The PTS crews didn’t like it when someone couldn’t take a joke. They didn’t like it when someone couldn’t work well with others. And they found all kinds of unofficial ways to impose discipline. At one missile complex a PTS team waited until an airman with a bad attitude put on his RFHCO. Then they grabbed him, stuck a hose down the neck of his suit, filled the suit with cold water, and left him lying on the ground, shouting for help, unable to stand up or take the RFHCO off, rolling around and looking like a gigantic water balloon. He got the message.

For the past year, Kennedy had served as a quality control evaluator, a job that required him to visit all the launch complexes and make sure that the work was being done properly. He’d been out to 4–7 many times. As the helicopter approached it, the command post radioed the latest pressure levels: the stage 1 oxidizer tank had climbed to 23.4 psi, and the stage 1 fuel had fallen to –0.7. The fuel reading unnerved Kennedy. The negative pressure meant a vacuum was forming inside the tank that supported the rest of the missile. The stage 1 fuel tank was like a tin can with the air getting sucked out of it — and a ten-pound can sitting on top of it. First the tank would crumple, then it would collapse. Word that the missile crew had just evacuated the control center pissed him off. That was chickenshit, Kennedy thought. That would make everything a lot more difficult. They would have been safe and sound behind those blast doors.

The chopper pilot circled the complex, shining a spotlight toward the ground. Amid the darkness, Kennedy could see a thick, white cloud rising from the exhaust vents. He told Colonel Morris that the cloud looked like fuel vapor, not smoke. It was a fuel leak, Kennedy thought, not a fire. And that meant maybe, just maybe, they could find a way to fix it.

AROUND THE SAME TIME that Kennedy got a call from job control, Jim Sandaker got one, too. Sandaker was a twenty-one-year-old PTS technician with a wife and a baby daughter, and the call reached him at home on the base. Job control said there was a fuel leak at 4–7 and asked him to round up a bunch of other PTS guys to head out there. Sandaker hung up, told his wife, “Well, I got to go,” put on his uniform, and went to the barracks. He was good natured and well liked, low key and solid, a country boy from Evansville, Minnesota, who’d dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen. When he reached the barracks and asked for volunteers, saying that it was an emergency, nobody believed him. They all thought it was a prank.

“All right,” Sandaker said. “You call job control and ask them.”

Someone called and learned that Sandaker wasn’t kidding. Airmen started throwing on their uniforms and hurrying to the PTS shop, not because they had to go, but because it felt like the right thing to do. Their buddies at 4–7 needed help. PTS Team B was assembled from a makeshift group of volunteers, the guys who were gung ho. They gathered things that might be needed at the site: RFHCO suits, air packs, dewars filled with liquid air, tool kits, radios. Their team chief, Technical Sergeant Michael A. Hanson, told them to assume that nothing at 4–7 could be used and start from scratch. The PTS shop was a converted aircraft hangar, big enough to hold a few Titan IIs, with smaller rooms devoted to specialized tasks. The men of Team B loaded their gear onto half a dozen trucks, eager to leave, like reinforcements coming to the rescue.

In addition to the PTS team, a flatbed truck with about 450 gallons of bleach and a tractor trailer with about 5,000 gallons of mineral oil were sent to Damascus. The bleach could be used to neutralize rocket fuel and render it less explosive. The mineral oil, dumped by hose into the silo vents, might form a layer on top of the fuel, trapping the vapors. The “baby oil trailer,” as some people called it, was brand new — and nobody had ever tried using baby oil to prevent an explosion at a Titan II missile site.

Elsewhere at Little Rock Air Force Base, the Disaster Response Force was getting ready to depart. Its commander, Colonel William A. Jones, was also the base commander and head of the 314th Combat Support Group, a squadron of cargo planes stationed there. Jones was new to Little Rock, having arrived just two months earlier. He had not yet taken a disaster control course and didn’t have much experience with Titan II missiles. His cargo planes were part of the Military Airlift Command, the missiles were part of the Strategic Air Command — and although both commands shared the same base, their missions rarely intersected. The Disaster Response Force was supposed to handle any military emergency, large or small, that involved units at Little Rock. During his brief tenure as its commander, the only emergency that Jones had faced was a search for the missing tail gunner of a B-52 bomber. The tail gunner had ejected from the plane by mistake, afraid that it was about to crash. The B-52 landed safely, as did the tail gunner, whose parachute was easily spotted floating above the Arkansas River.

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.

SID KING 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.