Command and Control

PTS Team A was scheduled to pressurize the stage 2 oxidizer tank at the complex. The eight-man team was led by Senior Airman Charles T. Heineman, who would direct its work from the control center. Airmen David W. Aderhold, Eric Ayala, and Richard D. Willinghurst would remain topside to operate the nitrogen tank. Aderhold and Ayala would be in RFHCO suits. Airmen Roger A. Hamm and Gregory W. Lester would stay in the blast lock as backup to the men working in the silo, ready to put on their RFHCOs in an emergency. And Airmen David Powell and Jeffrey Plumb would enter the silo in RFHCOs, remove the pressure cap, and attach the nitrogen line.

Powell and Plumb hoped to get started on the missile early in the afternoon. But the work platforms wouldn’t descend from the silo walls. They were stuck in the upright position. A repair crew was working on them. Something was wrong with the hydraulics system, and troubleshooting with help from the tech manuals couldn’t fix it. The hassles continued to mount. The hydropneumatic accumulator was broken, and without it the platforms couldn’t be lowered — and the repair crew didn’t have the right parts. If pressure in the stage 2 oxidizer tank dropped any further, the missile would have to be taken off alert. SAC headquarters was never pleased when a missile went off alert. And so a helicopter was sent from Little Rock Air Force Base with the parts.

Meanwhile, Rodney Holder and Ron Fuller continued to go through the daily shift verification checklist, walking down the long corridor to the silo. The cableway was essentially a big steel pipe, braced with girders and springs, that stretched almost fifty yards from the blast lock to the silo. The floor was painted gray, the walls and ceilings turquoise. Bundles of pipes and cables snaked overhead and along both sides. It looked like the interior of a submarine that was somehow underground, not underwater. The silo’s nine levels were crammed with equipment, and the checklist there took about two hours to complete. It had hundreds of steps. Sometimes crews would cut corners to speed things up. They’d divide the labor — you check this air compressor, I’ll check that one — and violate the SAC two-man rule, roaming separately through the silo and comparing notes later. It was faster that way, the violation seemed trivial, and officers in the control center had no way of knowing what the enlisted men were doing in the silo. The television camera in the access portal, aimed at the entrapment area, was the only one in the complex. From the control center you couldn’t see what was happening in the cableways, the blast lock, the silo, or topside. There was no periscope. And one officer could not leave the other alone in the control center to check on what crew members were doing elsewhere. That would be a serious violation of the two-man rule.

Holder and Fuller did everything by the book that day. As members of an instructor crew, they took pride in being considered among the best at the job. A standardization-evaluation team was soon going to be judging their work, and Holder wanted a high score. Doing things properly added only fifteen minutes or so to the job. Before joining the Air Force he’d been a construction worker, building highway bridges in rural Arkansas. A career in the military hadn’t appealed to him, at first. His father was a former NFL player who joined the Naval Reserve during the Korean War and wound up spending more than two decades as a naval officer. Holder had attended grade schools in three different countries and high schools in four different states. At the age of nineteen, he liked doing construction work but worried about the future. The military promised a more interesting and rewarding life. Joining the Navy wasn’t an option; Holder got seasick too easily. So he joined the Air Force, eager to learn about missiles. Working on the Titan II had revealed that, deep down, he was a techno geek. Holder knew his way around the complex better than any of the other crew members. He not only knew what everything was, he could explain how it worked. On September 18, 1980, he was twenty-four years old and had been married for ten months.