Command and Control

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.