You Might Want to Know - ICBMs Arriving - X. Down Into the Heart of It
IX. Down into the Heart of It
In early March 2013, I’m sitting in a rented mini-van parked in the lot at the Gate 1 entrance to F.E. Warren Air Force Base, outside Cheyenne, in the southeast corner of Wyoming, the site of one of the United States’ Intercontinental Ballistic Missile fields. It’s gray and cold out. The wind is blowing, no surprise there. In Cheyenne, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a tiger, and likely April as well. I know this from experience. I lived in Laramie, forty-five miles west of F. E. Warren, for twenty years while I was teaching at the University of Wyoming.
I’ve checked in at the guard shack and am waiting to be picked up by Lieutenant Keidrick Roy, a Missile Combat Crew Commander at F.E. Warren.
Lt. Roy is going to drive me and his wife Holly into the Minuteman ICBM missile field out east of Cheyenne and take us down into a Launch Control Center. Holly has never seen his workplace, I guess. I haven’t either, of course.
That’s the plan. It’s late though, past the time we said we would meet here at the gate. Something might have happened.
It can’t be the best time for Lt. Roy to take us out there to his workplace. I know this because while I wait, I’ve been reading a copy of the base newspaper I picked up in the guard shack, The Sentinel. It has a “commentary” from the colonel who is the base commander that talks about the “important preparations” that have begun for “our upcoming Defense Nuclear Surety Inspection (DNSI)/Air Force Nuclear Surety Inspection (NSI).” In this DNSI/NSI, the colonel explains, “120 inspectors” will be spending a week doing an intense inspection of…well…just about everything, it looks like. It’s something that happens every two years, he says. The colonel likens it to “our wing’s Superbowl.” It will give them, he says, a chance to “sharpen” and “polish” and “maximize” what he says they already do operationally every day. It will help them “renew and reaffirm that special trust and confidence bestowed by the American people.” “The Mighty Ninety is ‘All In,’” the colonel’s commentary concludes.
The Mighty Ninety is our 90th Missile Wing, based at F. E. Warren. We have two other Missile Wings now, the 341st at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, and the 91st at Minot AFB in North Dakota. Each of the three is in charge of one-hundred fifty of the Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles we keep on alert now. That’s a total of four-hundred fifty ICBMs, down from one-thousand fifty-four, our peak. The other two wings are also about to be inspected and their commanders are probably working on pep talks like this one, if they haven’t already delivered them.
F. E. Warren is a very old military base, established not long after our Civil War, in 1867, the same year that Cheyenne was founded. At the time F.E. Warren was a cavalry outpost named Fort Russell, established to protect workers on the Union Pacific from raids by Indians. In 1930, by which time the cavalry was no longer riding to the rescue, Fort Russell became F. E. Warren, named after a Wyoming Senator who had served for over thirty years and just retired from the Senate. During World War II, members of the Quartermaster Corps were trained at F. E. Warren. After World War II, F. E. Warren became one of the first bases for our newly created Air Force.
In 1960, F. E. Warren was where we had deployed our very first squadron of ICBMs, the Atlas Ds.
A few years back, Lt. Roy had been a student in a graduate course I taught at the University of Arizona in Classical Rhetorics. He had just graduated from the Air Force Academy and joined the Masters program we had created for graduates of our service academies. It was accelerated to allow them to complete the MA program in the shortened time the Air Force allowed them.
Lt. Roy was very smart and very together. At the Air Force Academy, he had studied postmodern theory, it seemed. It might surprise some people that you could get into that kind of thing at the Air Force Academy. It surprised me. In his final paper for the course in Classical Rhetorics, he brought it to bear nicely.
A couple of years after Lt. Roy finished his degree with us, I heard from him. He emailed that he was now a Missile Combat Crew Commander at F.E. Warren. The Missile Combat Crew Commander is the lead officer in an underground Launch Control Center. The second person in there--two officers in the Launch Control Centers at all times, by rule--is called the Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander.
Last January, I emailed Lt. Roy to ask if he could arrange for me to visit a Launch Control Center at F. E. Warren. During the time I lived in Laramie, before the Cold War ended, a visit like this probably couldn’t have been arranged. But by now, 2013, I learned, even Russians were visiting F.E. Warren on their tours of inspection under our treaties. They could come whenever they wanted to. They often came in July, Lt. Roy said, summer, and during Cheyenne’s famous Frontier Days. The Russians aren’t stupid, if you ever thought they were.
For me to visit a Launch Control Center, Lt. Roy would have to get permission from the Missile Flight Commander. He got it but I think it might not have been easy. The commander told him they were trying to limit visits, probably, I could see now, because they would be preparing for the inspection. But Lt. Roy did get the okay.
Hey, he’d studied Classical Rhetoric.
They would need a copy of my driver’s license and the last six digits of my social security number, Lt. Roy told me, so they could “build an authorization letter.” I sent along the requested items.
And that’s how I got here in the windy parking lot at Gate 1 for F. E. Warren Air Force Base, and it was getting late. I went back into the guard shack to see if I could get some help finding Lt. Roy. And there he was, in his olive-colored working uniform, as bright and trim as ever. It turned out he’d been parked at the other end of the lot for over an hour with his wife Holly. I felt bad about that. It’s alarming how you can think you’ve got a good plan, and things don’t work the way you wanted, sometimes for the silliest of reasons.
He’d told me it would take an hour and a half of driving out to get to the site. And of course another hour and a half back. With the inspection on the horizon, I was sure he didn’t have that kind of time. But you couldn’t tell he had been in any way discommoded.
I-80 passes right by the base. In a moment, we were on it, headed east, into the heart of the missile field.
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