Tag Archives: Defense Nuclear Agency

1972 January: Transition to Seneca Army Depot

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Getting to and learning about SEAD. Continue reading →

My recollections of the period between my departure from SBNM and my arrival at SEAD are very sketchy. Someone on the base in Albuquerque must have helped with the travel arrangements. I am pretty certain that I did not bring my golf clubs, my stereo and speakers, my album collection, and other bulky items to SEAD. So, they must have been shipped to my parents in Leawood, KS. I assume that before I left I was also debriefed, which is the Army’s way of saying that I was warned me not to tell any communists about any of the mission-critical classified information and activities that I saw at SBNM.1

I flew from the Sunport to KC, spent a few days with my family, and then on January 10 I flew to Rochester, NY, which is as close as you can get to SEAD using commercial aircraft. I don’t remember any of that.

201The one thing that I clearly remember is that I was handed my own personnel file (called a 201) and told to hand it over when I arrived at my new post. This amazed me. If they let me do this, it seemed likely that each person who was relocated must have been entrusted with his own 201 file. I immediately looked through mine to find the letter of commendation from the base commander prainsing the heroic acts performed by me and my clipboard during the harrowing Siege of Sandia Base that is described here. I found it. What if there had been a letter of reprimand? I could conceivably have received one for my run-in with Capt. Creedon or my attire at the base EM committee meetings (both described here). Could I have just removed derogatory items at will? I don’t see why not. Computerized records were not yet ubiquitous. Paper still ruled.

Roch_SEADThe instructions on my orders indicated that after my plane landed I should board a bus for Canandaigua, NY. When I arrived at the bus station there, I was still thirty miles or so away from SEAD, which is located near Romulus, a bump in the road between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake. I have no clear recollection as to how I made the last leg of the journey. I remember that there was no snow on the ground as we approached the base, but it had started to snow before I exited from the bus, van, car, or truck that brought me. Soon it was coming down hard. Incidentally there was snow on the ground all the way to the day that I left, April 10.

You can just drive in now, but the barriers were always down when SEAD was still operational. At least two MPs with rifles manned the main gate.

I remember that the main gate seemed to have a much more serious security detail than at SBNM. The MPs were armed with M16s, and they stopped every vehicle. There were three sets of fences; one was topped by rows of barbed wire and one electrified. At SBNM we ordinarily just waved everyone in.

Someone showed me to my room. The barracks were not nearly as opulent as the ones at SBNM. Every room had two occupants. My roommate was from Texas. I don’t remember his name—in fact, I only remember the name of one person whom I encountered in my three months at SEAD. This failing astounds me. I usually remember names.

He was a little shorter (in height, not less time remaining) than I was, but he was powerfully built. I later learned that he was the high school state champion weightlifter in his weight class. He had a temper, too. I gave him a wide berth.

I asked him if they had regular room inspections. He said that there were inspections, but they were not very common. So, I just piled all my stuff in my locker and locked it. I didn’t make my bed every morning either. My lack of standards for orderliness became a sore point with him. He might have resented the fact that I was so short (in the Army sense), too.

The next morning I was interviewed by a female2 civilian in the MP office. This was something of a surprise to me. SEAD had a lot of civilian employees. SBNM did too, but there they almost all worked for Sandia Labs doing God knows what. Civilians at SEAD were hired for jobs that I would have expected military personnel to do at SBNM.

I handed my personnel folder to the lady who was interviewing me. She was shocked and disgusted when she discovered that I only had eighty-eight days before I ETSed. “April 10! What are we supposed to do with you for less than three months?” I had no answer. They decided to assign me to help with paperwork at the Intelligence Office, which required a walk of a block or two from the barracks. I never worked even one day as an MP at SEAD, but I still stayed in the MP barracks.

The commanding officer of the 295th MP company was Capt. D’Aprix. He gave a security briefing to a handful of newbies. Some might have been civilians. Some might have come from SBNM.

The first sergeant of the company (always called “Top”) may also have been there. If he said anything, it did not impress me enough to stay in my memory.

What could graduates of this institution be working on at SEAD?

Capt. D’Aprix emphasized that security was everyone’s responsibility at SEAD. A “depot” in military terminology is a place to store something. He said that “special” weapons were stored there. The actual nature of the weapons was—and still is!—highly classified, and we were not allowed to disclose what kind they were. He did not mention it, but the units of the soldiers who worked on SEAD were not classified. All the MPs and all the technicians who maintained the weapons wore patches with mushroom clouds on their sleeves identifying them as belonging to the Defense Nuclear Agency. The technicians all came from SBNM, an open base. The building in which they were trained displayed the words “DEFENSE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCHOOL” in letters that were more than a foot high. Anyone who could not figure out what kind of weapons were in the depot was too stupid to be dangerous.

We were also told to be on the lookout for card-carrying communists and other shady characters who were interested in what went on at SEAD. It was not feasible for all areas to be guarded all the time. Therefore, the MPs patrolled the entire base (or at least the part within the fences), and the ever-changing routes that they employed were TOP SECRET. So, if we were in a bar or other establishment in one of the neighboring towns, we needed to keep our guard up and our mouths shut.

I was there in the winter. Unless a relative has died, absolutely no one goes to this part of the Finger Lakes in the winter. I guarantee that if any unfamiliar people appeared in Romulus (population about 4,000), they would be noticed by everyone immediately. I suspected as much even on that first day, but I later became certain.

I found the following interesting write-up at https://www.senecawhitedeer.org/index.cfm?Page=Military%20History.

This is a recent satellite image of the entire SEAD complex, which has pretty much gone to SEED since the Army abandoned it in 2000.

In the mid 1950s the north end of the Depot property was transformed into a special weapons area. These special weapons areas (19 in total in the United States) were designated as “Qs”. Becoming a Q area represented the highest security levels known at that time because their mission was to house atomic weapons which indeed were very special weapons.

The Q was built over two years and consisted of about one square mile of area, eventually resulting in 64 igloos, some of them atomic bomb blast resistant. The Q had its own security force, specially trained Military Police who patrolled the Q 24 hours a day. The Q area had a triple wall fence surrounding it, with the middle fence being electrified at 4800 volts. No one was allowed inside the Q without a heavily armed MP escort.

Although the Army still does not acknowledge that storage of atomic weapons occurred within the Seneca Depot, other documents found by SWD suggest that the Seneca Army Depot was the US Army’s largest arsenal of atomic weapons and the second largest atomic stockpile in the entire United States. Besides atomic bombs, the Depot also housed atomic artillery shells for Atomic Annie, a long range artillery gun only fired once in Nevada.

Today, the Q is peaceful once again, this time being leased by Finger Lakes Technologies Group, as it recycles some of the igloos for secure document storage.

I never heard anyone talk about the Q area. I had no idea that there was anything else on the base besides the part that we patrolled.

After the base closed in 2000, a group of locals developed really ambitious plans to make it profitable, but very little came of it. The place is now a veritable wasteland.

Not in this man’s army.

1. In point of fact, the only thing that I did or saw that required a clearance was the night that I stood watch on Manzano Base. The irony is that at that time my clearance had not yet arrived. I described this incident here.

2. There were no female MPs in the Army in my day. This was the only part of the first half of the movie Stripes that I found outrageously discordant with my experience. Women were, in fact, allowed to become MPs in 1975, and the movie was made in 1981. So, I guess that inclusion of the MP babes was vaguely plausible. That they were attracted to two middle-aged (Bill Murray was 31 at the time, and Harold Ramis was 37) layabouts is questionable.

However, the entire second half of the film featuring the “Urban Assault Vehicle” was, of course, preposterous.

1971 March-December: Military Life in Albuquerque

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Background information. Continue reading →

Climate: New Mexico is a very big state, and most of it is desert. Albuquerque, its largest city and by far the most developed area in the state, averages only 9.5 inches of rain per year! When I arrived in Albuquerque there had been no measurable precipitation in eight months.

On most days it was sunny and windy with very low humidity. One day the wind was blowing so hard on the golf course that balls that had come to a stop on the green were subsequently blown down to the fringe. Rain does not come to New Mexico often, but when it does, it usually arrives via a tremendous storm that deposits copious amounts of water for a short time.

DesertGrass or almost any vegetation can grow there, but it must be watered every day. If not, the land will quickly revert to the desert scrub that people in those days called “mesa’. It was more like very rough sand than dirt. A few native plants can survive in it. Golf balls hit beyond the rough that was watered every day ended up on the mesa. Hitting the ball out of the mesa is possible, but one’s clubs get badly scratched very quickly.

StormDuring a storm it becomes evident that some parts of the sand are not packed as tightly as they appeared. Rivulets, called wadis, can suddenly appear out of nowhere. One on the southeast side of Sandia Base was several feet deep, and it appeared repeatedly during my sojourn there. During dry periods the land looked flat.

When I first arrived, I felt that I could understand why pioneers came to New Mexico, but I could not understand why they stopped there. However, by the time that I left I did not find the adjustments as burdensome as they initially seemed. Exercising outdoors required a few precautions to avoid sunburn and dehydration. Since these were necessary all year long, most people became used to them. The big plus was that outdoor events can be planned with little worry of the weather. Home games of the Albuquerque Dodgers are seldom rained out. For me the summer weather was like KC but more so. I did not really experience one, but I suspect that the winters were a good deal milder than those in KC.

PentagonMorale: The climate in the Pentagon in 1971 was stormy all year. Morale in the armed forces, especially the Army, was the lowest ever. The War in Vietnam was supposedly “winding down,” and the Army was told that in 1971 and future years fewer troops would be allowed. Early in the year the details of the “Reduction in Force” were still being worked out. Rumors abounded, but a persistent one, which turned out to be true, was that all draftees would have their active duty requirement shortened by from two years to only eighteen months. In addition a lot fewer men (and, of course, no women) were drafted in 1971 than in 1970.

The Army realized that recruitment had become very difficult, and most of the draftees were terrible soldiers. In MP units like ours, half of the enlisted men had as much education as the officers and much more than the NCOs1. Furthermore, these draftees had spent the last several years on college campuses that encouraged freedom of expression, critical thinking, and creativity. No one gave them orders in college, and they resented the Army’s insistence on mindless obedience.

The Army had tried to go a little easier on the recruits. For example, the hated inspections were much less frequent. My friends and I certainly were treated better than enlisted men were a few years earlier. I can’t say that we were very appreciative. We still felt like prisoners.

In the end the Army decided to take the drastic steps of abandoning the draft, releasing draftees from commitments, and starting over with an all-volunteer force. There were a few gung ho guys in MPCO SBNM, but no enlisted man with whom I worked, with the exception perhaps of Russ Eakle, was happy with his condition. For most of us the enemy was Nixon and the stupid federal government. Its proxies were the lifers. Furthermore, reducing the amount of senseless activities aimed at instilling discipline had the unintended effect of provoking resentment in the very guys that had played by the rules that were openly subverted by arrogant newcomers.

An Army colonel described it pretty well. “Today, the NCOs—the lifers—have been made strangers in their own home, the regular service, by the collective malevolence, recalcitrance, and cleverness of college-educated draftees who have outflanked the traditional NCO hierarchy and created a privates’ power structure with more influence on the Army of today than its sergeants major.”2

NunsIt was bad. I have always told people that the Army in which I served could not have defeated the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The Army had traditionally engendered cameraderie in its troops by instilling devotion to the unit. Guys did not fight and die for the flag or for some obscure policy goal or even to stop a heinous dictator. They fought for the other guys in their unit because they all had endured hardship together. In contrast, there was no esprit de corps at all in my unit. Nearly all of the enlisted men knew at all times exactly how many days they had left in active duty. They bragged about it to those with higher numbers.

Only a few guys were complete jerks about it. The rest of us did what was necessary to get the job done. However, if someone with a higher rank made us go through hoops for no good reason, we did what we could to make his life miserable.

The Navy, Air Force, and Marines were a little different. The active duty commitment for an enlistee was four years as opposed to the three years required for those who enlisted in the Army and two years for draftees. So, most of the enlistees in the four-year services must have had some interest in either pursuing a military career or an interest in using the service as an aid to a civilian career.

Most guys in the Army have very little contact with people in the other services. SBNM was unusual in that my friends and I dealt with people from other services on a daily basis. We considered all of them as lifers unless there was evidence to the contrary. I considered Dave Madden and Dean Ahrendt, the two Air Force sergeants3 that I worked with after the merger, as regular guys, but to me every other zoomer was a lifer.

Security: What about the hundreds of people who worked in top secret jobs at Sandia Labs? They might as well have been on the moon. We had no dealings with them whatever. We did have to work with a few civilian SBNM employees, but they were special cases with clearly defined rules. They had no authority over us, and we had very little authority over them.

TSAll of the guys in the four police platoons at SBNM had undergone FBI top secret security checks called BIs4. I don’t know about the guys in the other platoons; nobody talked about it. I don’t think that the Security Police on Kirtland required clearances at the time of the merger. For some reason my clearance came later than the ones for the other guys with whom I trained, but I definitely had it long before the merger.

In the ten months I was at the base, we never had any contact with any material that was classified. In theory no one without a clearance was allowed on Manzano Base, but our only duty there was to sit in the guard shack on midnight shifts. If we had needed to respond to an event at Sandia Labs or the Nuclear Weapons School, we might have needed the clearances.

Socializing with the locals: Finally, the proximity of Albuquerque needs to be emphasized. The MPCO building was within easy walking distance of the gate, and on the other side of the gate was Albuquerque. Quite a few guys had cars. When we were not on duty our activities were not restricted. We were allowed to participate in just about everything available in the city that was both the largest city in New Mexico and the home of a major university. Some guys even lived near the campus.

JTWe were NOT, however, part of the community. We all5 had military haircuts. In 1971 we were clearly marked as outsiders at any university event or anything that was aimed at people our age, such as the Jethro Tull/Mott the Hoople concert. I knew of no one who socialized with UNM students or, for that matter, teachers.

1. NCO stands for non-commissioned officer, which in the army essentially means the sergeants. Since it is somewhat unusual for someone to become a sergeant in one’s first hitch, most NCO’s have reupped (no one I knew ever said “reenlisted”) at least once and are therefore considered lifers.

Heinl2. Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. “The Collapse of the Armed Forces”, Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971. He died in 1979.

3. The ranks in the Air Force are similar to those of the Army. A sergeant in the Air Force in those days wore three stripes as does a sergeant in the Army. However, the pay-grade of the AF sergeant is E-4; the Army sergeant is an E-5. This seems to have been changed. An E-4 in the Air Force is now called a senior airman. There is no rank called sergeant.

4. BI stands for Background Information. FBI agents were sent supposedly around to interview some of our contacts. No one ever told me or my parents that they talked with an FBI agent about me.

5. The unbelievable exception was Doc Malloy, but to my knowledge he did not hang around with anyone from UNM.