Command and Control

After enlisting, Kennedy hoped to become an airplane mechanic stationed in Florida or California. Instead, he soon found himself learning about missile propellant transfer at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois. The training course did a fine job with the technical details of the missile system. But it didn’t give a sense of how dangerous the work could be. The Titan II mock-up at Chanute was loaded with water, not oxidizer or fuel, and accidental spills didn’t seem like a big deal. Kennedy learned about the risks through his on-the-job training with the 308th in Arkansas. During one of his first visits to a launch complex, the PTS team was doing a “recycle,” removing oxidizer from the missile. An enormous propane tank, known as a “burn bot,” sat near the silo door topside, burning excess propellant as it vented, roaring like a jet engine and shooting out a gust of flame. This sort of controlled burn was routine, like the flares at an oil field. Then the burn bot went out, the oxidizer leaked, a dirty orange cloud floated over the complex, and the sergeant beside Kennedy said, “You know that bullshit right there? You get that shit on your skin, it’ll turn to nitric acid.”

Kennedy thought, “Wow,” and watched with some concern as the cloud drifted over the control trailer and the rest of the PTS team continued to work, hardly noticing it. He felt like running for the hills. Clearly, the textbooks at Chanute didn’t tell you what really happened in the field. Kennedy soon realized there was the way you were supposed to do things — and the way things got done. RFHCO suits were hot and cumbersome, a real pain in the ass to wear — and if a maintenance task could be accomplished quickly and without an officer noticing, sometimes the suits weren’t worn. The PTS team would enter the blast lock, stash their RFHCOs against a blast door, and enter the silo unprotected. The risk seemed less important than avoiding the hassle. While disconnecting a vent hose in the silo, Kennedy once forgot to close a valve, inhaled some oxidizer, and coughed up nasty stuff for a week. On another occasion, oxidizer burned the skin off the top of his left hand. Working without a RFHCO violated a wide range of technical orders. But it forced you to think about the fuel and the oxidizer and the fine line between saving some time and doing something incredibly stupid.

Within a few years, Kennedy had become a PTS team chief. He loved the job and the responsibility that it brought. And he loved the Air Force. Where else could a twenty-five-year-old kid, without a college degree, be put in charge of complicated, hazardous, essential operations at a missile site worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The fact that a nuclear warhead was involved made the work seem even cooler. Over time, Kennedy had gained an appreciation for the Titan II, regarding it as a thing of beauty, temperamental but awe inspiring. He thought you had to treat the missile with respect, like you would a lady. Keeping the Titan IIs fueled and ready to go, ensuring the safety of his men — those were his priorities, and he enjoyed getting the work done.

The recycles were one of Kennedy’s favorite parts of the job. They took weeks to prepare. The weather had to be just right, with at least three knots of wind and the outdoor temperature rising, so that a leak wouldn’t linger over the complex. Once the valves were turned and the fuel or the oxidizer started to flow, the team chief was in charge of the operation, and the adrenaline kicked in. The danger was greatest when propellants were being loaded and off-loaded; that’s when something bad was most likely to happen, something unexpected and potentially catastrophic. It always felt good to finish a recycle, pack up the tools, load up the trucks, and send the PTS team home to Little Rock at the end of a long day.

Some of the missile combat crew commanders were a pleasure to work with, Kennedy thought, and some of them were real pricks — officers who liked to meddle with things they didn’t know anything about. The launch control center and the silo were only a few hundred feet apart, but the distance between the men who worked in them often felt like miles. Once, while Kennedy was learning the ropes, his team chief was criticized by a missile crew commander, over the radio, for skipping a few lines in a technical order. “Commander, if you want to tell me how to do my job,” the team chief replied, “then you get your ass off your chair, and you come and sit your ass in my chair.” Kennedy soon adopted a similar way of dealing with combat crew officers, most of whom seemed afraid of the propellants: just leave me alone, the work will get done the right way — and then I’ll get the hell off your launch complex.