Early in the summer of 1961 I was between jobs and camped on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska, killing time, waiting for a forest fire to start. Emergency firefighters get paid only when they work, so I wanted to stick by the telephone. Gerry Miller had the answer as to how we could make some money until the fire season began. He had snagged a short job at Eielson Air Force Base and needed a pump operator/hose handler, and since this gig would take only a couple of days, I agreed to help him.

The job consisted of Gerry’s cleaning and repairing a device that cleared the water intake on a power plant’s cooling pond. One morning I drove up to the main gate and, after our foreman showed some papers to the guard, we were authorized to go inside. This place was (and still is) a Strategic Air Command base, a taking-off .md landing place for bombers destined for Eastern Russia should World War III become reality. There were “weather planes” with dull black paint jobs hidden away in the hangars.

We bounced along in the boss’s pickup on the base’s main road, which paralleled the several-mile-long landing strip. Then I slowed the pickup because we were overtaking a lumber carrier that took up the middle of the road. Lumber carriers look something like a table on four wheels. While the vehicle is a clumsy arrangement and can’t move fast, it’s useful for picking up lumber, plank by plank, loading wood onto a flat-bed truck, and then unloading at the job site. This morning it was carrying not lumber but something long and round like a propane tank, and that’s what we guessed it was until the canvas slipped to the side and we could see the blunt end of an H-bomb.

Now, we’d always known that this was what this place was about. As I think back, it was what the country was about in those years. Directly after high school, I had enrolled at a college in a Texas Panhandle town known for its cotton and oil, for being the forty-fifth target in the event of a nuclear war, and for its football team, the distinctions listed in order of importance. And in that summer of’ 61, I’d look up at the contrails of our planes flying high and fast, west toward the Bering Strait and wonder if this was the beginning of the Real One. The formation would split, then split again, like figure skaters do. It all must have looked beautiful on a Russian radar screen. Just practicing.

I thought about these things, while the bomb rocked a little in its carriage beneath the lumber carrier. A week or two later, I hitched a ride from Fairbanks out to our campsite. The driver felt like talking. He had a part-time job in town but in real life he assembled and disassembled the bombs at Eielson.