(1975, 545th Ordnance Company, nuclear site, West Germany)

The structure was built to withstand a nuclear explosion. Surrounding the site were tall trees, sidewalks leading to bunkers that held half a dozen nukes (see interlude for details). The trees and foliage were high enough that only a small aircraft about a hundred feet above the site could see it, and the German government prohibited allowing any flights over the site. The well-built, auburn-haired, blue-green-eyed, twenty-seven-year-old sergeant had just taken over another sergeant’s shift; he was in what was called ENREST (Nuclear Security, watchdogs). Every sergeant on site, who had a top-secret clearance, was put on the ENREST list, as were all officers with a top-secret clearance, it was a twenty-four-hour, once-a-month duty, and not even that sergeant or officer was about to leave the bunker area. At night, the doors were closed and bolted, the front doors, one to the bunker, the other to the ENREST room inside the bunker, where orders entered.

As Sergeant Chick Evens listened, he could hear the night winds over the bunker. At the same time, a five-ton truck could be heard bringing a new shift from the Military Police, who guarded the place twenty-four hours a day. He licked his lips, to moisten them, it was a very hot night, he took off his shirt, just his shirt, the fat captain, lay snoring on his iron cot on one side of the room, sitting on his iron cot on the other side of the room. The room was twelve feet by twelve feet. The young captain’s name was Horace Worme. The sergeant had seen his file and academic records, since he was the petty officer, in charge of the Nuclear Security Program Investigations, and often wondered how a captain could become a captain, with 90% of his semester grades “D “. I mean, he had more D’s than anything I’d ever known, not an A, not a B, a few C’s. He himself had gone to college and had a BA, and he’d gotten a D, and that was find fault.

Evens looked at the fat captain, there was no one else to watch, he was breathing hard, sweating and the wind continued to swirl over the structure, while his perspiration soaked the mattress. Then he got up and walked around, he never liked ENREST. He had told the Captain that one of them had to stay awake, watch the phones, the incoming data, read the printouts in case there was an alert. It was a two man control process but only one man needed to be awake at a time during the night hours but he also knew this captain never liked doing his duty he let the sergeants stay up all night while he slept, but Evens said no to this crap, he was going to do his duty, just like him.

He tried to wake up the captain at 2:00 am, to take over the night shift, his time was up, but the captain would not wake up. In fact, the Captain said, “Leave me alone, that’s a warrant sergeant!” And so the Sergeant lay face down on the cot, chin on the pillow, arms outstretched.

“That’s nonsense” he said aloud hoping the Captain would listen “you can’t expect him to take his turn too and read the data correctly”, the messages were coming from what was considered the European Central Command all the time. And it had to be translated, it was in code, and one man had to break a white seal, after reading the message and deciphering it, the other man would verify it and they would follow the procedure. If it was a red stamp, then it was for an alert, high priority, and would then move on to a second stamp if necessary. A white seal was less complicated. But often a white seal leads to a red seal, and that means war; and the Cold War, of course, was with the Russians. His premise was, if you went to the red seal, the nuclear stomachs (nuclear cylinders) – that’s what I called them – of the bombs needed to be sunk underground.

(Interlude: It’s hard to express the composition of a nuke and its destructive capabilities in a simple paragraph, and I’ve seen the inside of them, but let me put it in the most fundamental, if not simplified way: there are two parts to the nuke of the one I’m talking about, some have three parts, the secondary part of the nuke, about half a dozen of them were stored on site, this is the part that I saw, of a cylinder type design, bombs were from 9 to 50 megatons or plus, some were Titan II (ICBMs), the Titan fleet retired in 1988, the fireball from one such Titan missile was three miles in diameter, its destructive forces would likely destroy all structures within a ten-mile range, or three hundred square miles. One kiloton is equal to 1000 tons of TNT, kilotons are measured in thousands of tons, Hiroshima witnessed a 15 kiloton bomb, called ‘Little Boy’, and Nagasaki witnessed a 20 kiloton nuclear bomb called ‘Fat boy’, out there, while megatons are measured by millions of tons of TNT. The secondary part of the pump is the bottom; the primary is at the top. I don’t need to say more for this story.)

When the young sergeant awoke, it was still dark outside; he listened to an incoming message on the machine, printing it out for him to read and decode. He stood up, walked to the desk where the machine was spitting out paper and a message was being printed, he went to wake up the Captain and told him: “You have to decode the message, along with me. Or at least read it after decoding it” .

“No, you figure it out,” he said, “I’m tired.”

He began to decipher the message and went back to sleep, not reading it clearly. As was the Captain’s job; one looking over the shoulder of the other.

It was now 6:15 am and the phone rang. The sergeant passed it to Horace and said, “The major wants to talk to you for some reason.”

He stood by the phone, half dazed, the phone heavy in his right hand, “Yes, sir,” said the Captain, “what is it?”

Captain Worme, backed up like double lightning, grabbed the decoded message, “Didn’t you crack this last night?” he yelled at the sergeant.

“Of course I did,” the Sergeant said, the decoded part being right where the message you just picked up was.

“Hello,” the Captain said to the Major, “The Sergeant said he decoded the message.”

“Well, didn’t you read it?” the major yelled so loud that the sergeant could hear him.

“Yaaay! No, I guess not, why?” said the Captain.

“Because,” said the Major, “we are the only nuclear site; No, in fact, we’re the only place in all of Europe that’s not on alert, and the Colonel wants to know why our doors are wide open, like it’s a normal day. I want to see you in an hour and read that damn coded message and come back to me in five minutes.”

“So, Sergeant,” Captain Worme said to Evens, and he began to read the decrypted message, “it seems you decoded it correctly, why didn’t you wake me up and call an alert?”

“I woke you up and you gave me the order to leave you alone, after I told you that you needed to check the decoded message, like it’s supposed to, and you were insistent, and I was tired and fell asleep.”

“It was stupid not to follow the message!”

“Yes! Be careful, captain. I did my duty, and you did not do any duty, that can be called duty.”

After the Captain left the Major’s office, he stopped Sergeant Evens, “So what’s going on?” asked the sergeant.

“I’m sorry to inform you, I think there will be some charges against you maybe a court martial; too many things to cover up.” Now that the sergeant knew how he got over those “D’s” of his in college, he was a schemer.

“Well,” said the sergeant, “if I go down, so do you! Obviously they don’t know my side of the story; I’ll have to make a report sooner or later and I’ll let them know. Did they know it was you who gave me a Direct Order?” , to let you sleep?” (And the sergeant knew that a direct order, from a commissioned officer, should not conflict with established law, and it did.)

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“What is there to be sure of, did you tell them or not, and I guess you didn’t.”

I better go back there and fix this before it gets out of hand. He was funny, the Sergeant thought, not blinking, and he must have been testing the water to see if he took the blame.

“It’s very good, if you do, I’ll stay here for a while.”

When the Captain returned, everything was settled.

“We’re all soldiers,” the Captain said, “the thing to do is forget what happened today and not say a word to anyone about this sergeant, okay? If you let this leak, we’re all dead.” We were with an attack, alert, the Red Brigades, some anti-German group has tried to raid one of our nuclear sites, and an alert was called for that, and we screwed up. If they had come here to our site, only God knows what would have happened. The doors were wide open and they could have taken hostages.

“Yes,” said the sergeant (facing the now closed and secure doors), standing to his right. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Heard of what?” said the Captain. Again the sergeant thought of all those ‘D’s the captain had gotten.

“No one will ever hear of it, that’s what it is!” Said the Sergeant, then thought: ‘…someone could have died because of our negligence-‘ and he just wanted to get away from there.

Note: The 545th Ordnance Company was activated in 1942. In 1950, it was activated in Japan, and in 1959 it was active in West Germany, by Muenster-Dieburg; inactivated June 1992; area returned to Germany, in 1994. No: 715 1-24-2011)