Someone should have died (1975, 545th Artillery Company, Nuclear Site, West Germany)

(1975, 545th Artillery Company, Nuclear Site, West Germany)

The structure was built to withstand a nuclear explosion. Around the site were tall trees, sidewalks leading to bunkers that held half a dozen nukes (see interlude for details). The trees and foliage were tall enough that only a small plane about thirty meters above the site could see it, and the German government banned any flights over the site. The young, twenty-seven-year-old sergeant, well built, auburn hair, with teal eyes, had just taken over another shift as sergeant; he was in what was called ENREST (Nuclear Bail, Watchdogs). Every sergeant on the site, who had a top secret clearance, was included on the ENREST list, as were all officers with a top secret clearance, it was a twenty-four hour duty, once a month, and not even that neither sergeant nor officer were to leave the bunker area. At night the doors were locked and bolted, entrance doors, one to the bunker, the other to the ENREST room inside the bunker, where orders were entered.

As he listened, Sergeant Chick Evens could hear the night winds over the bunker. At the same time, he could hear a five-ton truck bringing a new shift from the Military Police, which was guarding the site twenty-four hours a day. He licked his lips, to moisten them, it was a very hot night, he took off his shirt, only his shirt on, the fat captain, lay snoring on his iron cot at one side of the room, sitting on his iron. crib, across the room. The room was ten feet by ten feet. The young captain was named Horace Worme. The sergeant had seen his file and his academic records, as he was the noncommissioned officer, in charge of the Investigations of the Nuclear Bail Program, and he often wondered how a captain could become a captain, with 90% of his semester grades “D “. I mean he had more “D” grades than anything else he had ever known, not an A, not a B, a few C. He had gone to college himself and had a bachelor’s degree, and had gotten a D, and that was a fault finding.

Evens watched the fat Captain, there was no one else to look at, he was breathing hard, he was sweating and the wind kept swirling over the structure, while his perspiration soaked the mattress. Then he got up and paced the track, 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 needs to be awake at a time during the night hours, but also knew that this captain never liked doing duty, he let the sergeants stay up all night while he slept, but Evens said no to this shit, he was going to do his duty, just like him.

He tried to wake 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, he’s a command sergeant!” And so the ugly sergeant face down on the cot, his chin on the pillow, his arms outstretched.

“It’s silly,” he said aloud hoping the Captain would hear “you can’t expect me to take your turn as well and read the data correctly”, they were getting messages from what was considered to be 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 verified it and they would follow the procedure. If it was a red stamp, then it was for an alert, high priority, and then it would move to a second stamp if necessary. A white stamp was less complicated. But often a white seal led to a red seal, and that meant war; and the Cold War, of course, was with the Russians. His premise was, if he was going to the red seal, the nuclear stomachs (nuclear cylinders) – that’s what I called them – of the bombs had to sink underground.

(Interlude: It is difficult to express the composition of a nuclear bomb and its destructive capacity in a simple paragraph, and I have seen the inside of them, but let me put it in the most fundamental way, if not too simplified: there are two parts of the nuclear bomb I’m talking about, some have three parts, the secondary part of the nuclear bomb, about half a dozen of them were stored on site, this is the part I saw, of a cylinder type design. bombs had between 9 and 50 megatons or more, some were Titan II (ICBM), the Titan fleet withdrew in 1988; the fireball from one of those Titan missiles, was three miles in diameter, its destructive forces would likely destroy all structures within a range of ten miles, or three hundred square miles. One kiloton equals 1000 tons of TNT, kilotons are measured in thousands of tons; Hiroshima witnessed a 15 kiloton bomb; called ‘Little Boy’, and Nagasaki witnessed a bomb n 20 kiloton nuclear called ‘Gordo’ over there; while, the megatons are insured by millions of tons of TNT. The secondary part of the pump is the lower part; the main one is at the top. I don’t need to say more for this story.)

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

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

He began to decode the message and went back to sleep without reading it clearly. As was the Captain’s job; one looking over the other’s shoulder.

It was now 6:15 am and the phone rang. The sergeant ran him over Horace and said, “Major wants to talk to you for some reason.”

He stood on the side of the phone, half stunned, the heavy phone in his right hand, “Yes sir,” said the Captain, “what is it?”

Captain Worme, recoiling like a double beam, grabbed the decoded message, “Didn’t you decode this last night?” He yelled at the sergeant.

“Of course I do,” said the Sergeant, the decoded part is right where the message he just received was.

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

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

“Yaaay! No, I guess I didn’t, why?” said the Captain.

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

“So Sergeant,” Captain Worme said to Evens, and began to read the decoded 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, you had to review the decoded message, as it was supposed to be, and you insisted, and I was tired, and I fell asleep.”

“It was stupid not to act on 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 regret to inform you, I think there will be some charges against him, perhaps a court martial; too much to cover up.” Now that the sergeant knew how he got over those “Ds” in college, he was a conspirator.

“Well,” said the sergeant, “if I come 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 inform them. 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 was).

“I’m not sure,” he said.

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

“You better get back in there and fix this before it gets out of hand.” Funny, the Sergeant thought, he didn’t blink, and he must have been testing the water to see if he was taking the blame.

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

When the Captain returned, everything was arranged.

“We are all soldiers,” said the Captain, “what you have to do is forget that it happened today and don’t 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 Brigade, some anti-German group has tried to attack one of our nuclear sites, and an alert was called for that, and we ruined it. If they had come here to our site, God only knows what would have happened. The doors were wide open, and they could have taken hostages. “

“Yes,” said the Sergeant (looking toward the now closed and secure doors), standing on his right side. “I never heard of that.”

“You heard of what?” said the Captain. Again, the sergeant thought of all those “Ds” the captain had received.

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

Note: The 545th Artillery 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 in June 1992; area returned to Germany in 1994. No: 715 1-24-2011)

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