THE GUINEAPIGS OF CAMP DESERT ROCK
Rosenberg, Howard L.
The guinea pigs of Camp Desert Rock Atomic 'stress tests' for unwitting soldiers Howard L. Rosenberg When Russell Jack Dann wheeled through the huge double doors of the House Interstate and...
...It was a bumpy trip which, by August 31, had become routine for him...
...North and east, toward the test site at Yucca Flats, the mountains were closer, but not as high...
...So, it was up to Russell Dann in that hearing room, and he was ready...
...The Energy Department continues to explode atomic devices underground in Nevada...
...The researchers decided that the paratroopers should watch the Smoky blast anyway...
...The flash of the fireball, "as bright as a thousand suns," mercifully lasted only a few seconds...
...The troops arrived at Camp Desert Rock the evening of August 12...
...The blast vented through the desert floor and a radioactive cloud unexpectedly rose 20,000 feet into the air...
...A two-hour indoctrination lecture on atomic weapons followed the exam...
...More than 58,000 military personnel passed through Camp Desert Rock over the years...
...The "correct" answer was "immediately afterward...
...The highest ground was distant to the south and west, beyond the jutting peaks, where the Colorado River winds its way below Lake Mead...
...shot Owens, a 9.7-kiloton device on July 25...
...Coe originally contacted his hometown Congressman, Dr...
...The last part of the three-pronged exercise was the resupply of the task force by air, and evacuation of the troops...
...The troopers were issued radiation film badges, but no special protective clothing, goggles, or respirators...
...These Globemasters were huge planes, capable of carrying 300 combat-ready men along with their equipment and vehicles...
...His widow Nancy softly lamented, "They were promised check-ups...
...The HumRRO team consisted of a group of George Washington University-sponsored psychologists who were contracted by the Pentagon to help train Army troops for nuclear war...
...Dann heard the geiger counter start clicking rapidly when the technician reached him...
...Some of the men found later that their exposed skin had been burned a bright pink, as if they'd just stepped out on a sunny day after a winter's hibernation...
...Within three years of his discharge, Dann began experiencing severe dizzy spells...
...The Army's own report reveals that the major purpose of the exercise was public relations...
...They just never followed up on these thousands and thousands of men, and now they are dying...
...The two Congressmen also joined forces to protect the integrity of an epidemiological study of the Smoky soldiers being conducted by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta...
...But the psychologists of HumRRO were thwarted again by Smoky...
...Throughout the Nevada testing of the 1950s, the AEC and the Pentagon were embroiled in a dispute over which agency should determine what precautions were to be taken to guard against dangerous radiation exposure...
...Every other time Dann had boarded a C-124, he had jumped out the back door with a parachute on his back...
...Their mission that morning was to establish a secure landing zone and guide in the helos carrying the troopers of the Twelfth Infantry...
...Because the troopers used in Galileo were already veterans of a previous atomic blast, the data gathered that day were invalid, and the psychologists' experiment with the green-clad guinea pigs was inconclusive...
...Attached to the task force were two helicopter battalions from Fort Benning, Georgia, an elite Pathfinder team drawn from the ranks of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, and a platoon of the Queen's Own Rifles from Calgary, Canada...
...Time was running out for the psychologists, and their planned tests for Smoky now seemed futile...
...It marked the first time that Dann had ever boarded a C-124 with a "round trip ticket...
...Tossing aside any notion of partisan politics, Carter, the ranking minority member, and the subcommittee chair'Tim Lee Carter vows to continue his advocacy...
...The Eighty-second Airborne troops on the hillside nearest the blast took a head count and started toward ground zero at a rout step, each man moving independently through the choking dust...
...The flight to Indian Springs Air Force Base was strange, too...
...The retired Army sergeant filed a claim for benefits with the Veterans Administration (VA) and was denied...
...The wind had shifted and the AEC scientists warned that the trenches would probably be heavily contaminated with fallout...
...the day of Smoky, Corporal Russell Dann was jarred awake when the unit's bugler crawled down from the bunk above him...
...His hair and teeth fell out and he lost the hearing in his left ear...
...The troopers were back at Camp Desert Rock in time for lunch...
...He tried unsuccessfully to locate a duplicate copy of his medical records both before and after he retired from the Army after twenty-three years in 1969...
...As their truck reached a point four or five miles short of their goal, Auxire was alarmed to see his portable dosimeter recording dangerously high levels of radiation...
...As he donned his fatigues, Dann made a mental note to repair the rips and tears his uniform had suffered after endless hours of crawling under strands of wire strung across the rocky desert floor...
...Cooper had already shipped out for Fort Bragg...
...Finally, to help lift the sagging morale of the paratroopers, the infiltration course was cut to fifteen yards...
...According to the Army's after-action report the following November, the purpose of the infantry troop test at Smoky was "to portray to the public the Army at its best employing ROOD (pentomic) organization in operations under atomic warfare conditions...
...The wind was blowing at fourteen knots when Dann and the other paratroopers marched from their trucks to a flat expanse of desert only about two miles west of ground zero...
...Cooper was a career Army man, a soldier's soldier...
...Most of the men were non-commissioned officers who were expected to execute orders without any backtalk...
...Every time a shot was delayed, the Army commanders were forced to revise their exercise plans and switch the sites of radar installations, communications positions, and observer trenches...
...They ordered the soldiers to hunker down in the open and wait for the blast...
...Five minutes later, Donald Coe and the other troops of Task Force Warrior moved from their trenches and marched toward the waiting helicopters, a brisk fifteen-minute walk away...
...Within an hour the Pathfinders reported that the landing zone was radiologically safe and the first sortie of helicopters rose into the thick cloud of dust that still hovered over the battlefield like a pall...
...Some of the men grew a bit apprehensive when they saw the nearness of the 700-foot-tall detonating tower, which was spotlighted "like a giant Christmas tree," an estimated three to four thousand yards away...
...The contamination was duly noted in his permanent Army medical record at the time...
...Fallout precluded the use of the planned obstacle course...
...These facilities, located in quonset huts and prefabricated buildings around the camp, rang up more than $100,000 in business throughout the summer of 1957...
...and instinctively Dann flattened himself on the ground...
...Four minutes after the detonation, Hensley started the truck's engine and began leading the convoy toward ground zero at top speed...
...man, Florida Democrat Paul Rogers, have called many Pentagon and Energy Department officials on the Congressional carpet...
...Dosimetry and radiation badges at Smoky were crude, at best...
...The psychologists were careful to explain the "correct" answers to questions previously asked...
...Russell Dann was discharged honorably from the Army six months after Smoky...
...The security classification of some of the documents has been downgraded...
...The soldiers realized that they would be watching the blast from an unprotected position...
...After the Army's first Desert Rock maneuver in 1951, private Pentagon consultants complained of the AEC's severe restrictions...
...helicopters landed, the infantrymen piled out and moved toward their objectives...
...When the shock wave passed over the huddled troops, one of the HumRRO researchers blew his whistle and the test began...
...Around 2 A.M...
...This information is restricted on the basis of "national security...
...Then the troopers were to sweep a dummy minefield, navigate a combat obstacle course through contaminated terrain, and heave a dummy grenade at a target...
...The evidence he needs must come from incomplete records kept by the Pentagon and Department of Energy...
...Almost two thousand letters have poured in...
...By 9:15 it was all over and the troops headed back to the landing zone for pick-up...
...The bugler was on his way to sound reveille, and Dann assumed that the blast, which had been postponed interminably, was probably a "go" for this morning...
...The troops of the Twelfth also received seventeen hours of instruction on the proper way to board and debark helicopters...
...Who would believe that for the sake of a psychological stress test, Russell Dann was marched to a remote desert hilltop and ordered to watch while an atomic device four times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was detonated less than two miles away...
...They took his life...
...Already, Carter has convinced the VA to award Donald Coe a disability pension...
...Like the other veterans of atomic blasts, he is trying to convince the Veterans Administration that his disease is connected to irradiation of his body on Japtan Island...
...The Pentagon is still the organization's prime source of contract work...
...At Smoky, the Twelfth Infantry had a major role to play...
...Paul Cooper showed leukemia symptoms as early as 1968, four years before he retired from the Army...
...They maneuvered across the desert, attacking objectives, and heaving dummy grenades at imaginary foes...
...When they arrived, they found the deserted trenches caved in...
...HumRRO researchers had begun arriving three weeks earlier to help set the stage...
...Of the total, 1,750 have reported some form of cancer...
...The soldiers found themselves sprawled like rag dolls, fifteen to twenty feet from where they had been crouching only moments before...
...Others are not so forgiving...
...on September 2, eighty of the paratroopers were ordered into the desert once again to witness the detonation of an eleven-kiloton device called Galileo...
...Though Paul Cooper and Russell Dann didn't know it when they volunteered for Camp Desert Rock, they were slated to be guinea pigs for the HumRRO project...
...At least 2,200 men were known to be present at Smoky, though after a year's search, fewer than 500 have been found...
...True to his Hippocratic Oath to relieve human suffering, the gentle, ambling country doctor has been a driving force behind the Health and Environment Subcommittee's probe of the health effects of low level ionizing radiation...
...Officially, Kelly's film badge showed a dose of only 3.445 rems, but National Cancer Institute Director Arthur Upton has admitted that Kelly could have received a lot more from breathing fallout and drinking contaminated water...
...The readings recorded by many film badges taken from soldiers who had traversed the contaminated area were inexplicably low...
...And they were outfitted in protective clothing...
...Donald Coe was aboard another truck heading for Yucca Flats that morning...
...The Pathfinders are paratroopers specially trained in infiltration techniques and radio-and-communication skills...
...Again the psychologists had to change their plans...
...The former Army major finally got a copy of the missing file last year, and though the document included his medical history all the way back to World War II, the one page containing the medical notation of radiation exposure was mysteriously absent...
...The wind shifted at the last moment and dumped a cloud of fallout on Kingsbury and other observers in the trenches...
...He is enmeshed in bureaucratic red tape...
...Donald Coe didn't make it to testify at the Smoky hearings either...
...Their mission was to lead a convoy of AEC vehicles toward the test site and retrieve instruments that had been left at various distances from ground zero to record radiation levels...
...The normal incidence of leukemia among males aged forty to forty-four is only 4.1 per 100,000...
...Reveille was normally at 5:30 A.M...
...He had to crane his neck to peer past the wall of reporters and photographers that surged around his wheelchair...
...Fifteen minutes after Smoky blew, a helicopter carrying the Task Force Warrior Pathfinders of the Eighty-second Airborne lifted off and headed for a landing zone within a few hundred yards of ground zero...
...Two-and-a-half miles beyond the post gate was Camp Mercury, a smaller group of temporary buildings housing the AEC personnel...
...First one shock wave, then another and a mountainous tidal wave of dust, dirt, and rock moving at a speed of eighty-three miles per hour scattered the soldiers on the hillside as if they were bowling pins...
...He simply wonders why there were never follow-up checks on the men who were exposed to radiation...
...When they weren't at Yucca Flats, the infantrymen spent their time preparing for the troop assaults scheduled for Smoky...
...After all, nobody had ever believed his Buck Rogers Story before, except for his wife Marjorie and a few paratroopers like himself, in whom he had confided during some long, wistful nights of story-swapping...
...Though he had planned a career in the Army, Dann was disenchanted after his experiences in Nevada...
...The former sergeant has formed a group called the National Association of Atomic Veterans...
...The psychologists still wanted to see exactly how the troops' performance would be affected by the sight of their first atomic blast...
...He just wanted to get his point across and be on his way back home to Albert Lea, Minnesota...
...He was the non- commissioned- officer- in-charge of an inter-service squad of men assigned to the island for what the Army called "Operation Hardtack...
...He didn't know that soldiers were conducting maneuvers at Smoky...
...During that year, on twenty-two occasions, the men were mustered to watch atomic bombs exploded in barges, on other nearby islands, or in the still waters of the lagoon...
...Now, doctors at the VA hospital in Wood, Wisconsin, suspect he has leukemia...
...Kingsbury saw the notation at least fifteen times before his records were lost while he was stationed in the" Dominican Republic in 1965...
...In desperation, he told of the VA's denial in a newspaper story in April 1977...
...Army was in a great transition...
...Some of the men gathered brush and lit fires to take the chill out of the pre-dawn air...
...Again, the "correct" answer was "immediately afterward...
...ninety-eight in the South Pacific, and the rest at the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Test Site (now under the control of the Department of Energy...
...At an elevation of 3,200 feet, the camp was surrounded by mountains...
...Carter and Rogers successfully blocked attempts by the Pentagon and the Energy Department to gain control of the CDC study earlier this year...
...Several buildings had been constructed for the maneuvers and obsolete World War II-vintage trucks, jeeps, guns, and tanks littered the battlefield...
...As far as the HumRRO researchers were concerned, once the carbine-equipped troops lost their atomic innocence by being witnesses at Franklin Prime, they were no longer useful for the planned stress evaluation tests...
...In late November 1976, a former CDC physician epidemiologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Salt Lake City learned of Paul Cooper's case and alerted his old colleagues back in Atlanta...
...The Army had dug more than a hundred different "enemy emplacements" to monitor the effect of the blast on military equipment...
...Army radiation technicians collected the men's film badges and passed a geiger counter over them as they climbed aboard the trucks...
...More than 19,000 civilians were housed at Camp Mercury during the period of atmospheric testing in Nevada...
...When Cooper died, he left a wife and three children ranging in age from eleven to fifteen...
...Dann wasn't interested in putting on a show...
...Then, while he was waiting to board the C-124 Globe-master at Pope Air Force Base, he was asked to fill out a next-of-kin-notifica-tion — a procedure called for only if a soldier was going on a hazardous mission from which he might not return...
...At exactly 5:30 A.M., the AEC scientists twenty miles away sent an electronic signal to the bomb, and Smoky lived up to its name...
...The morning of the hearings, Cooper was lying in a hospital bed near his Elk City, Idaho, home, his body racked with the pain of acute myelogenous leukemia...
...But also like his fellow atomic veterans, the burden of proof rests with Kelly...
...He heard a voice from the hilltop bellow "Hit it...
...In December 1970, scientists miscalculated during the explosition of an underground bomb called Baneberry...
...Not surprisingly, few were persuaded by the psychologists to revise the "wrong" answers they had already given in response to the loaded questions...
...The AEC series of shots was code-named "Operation PLUMBBOB...
...Because troops were permitted to move across contaminated terrain in single file only when led by an AEC monitor, the military maneuvers were considered "unrealistic...
...Kelly and the others wore film badges, but only for five of the twelve months they were on the island...
...Because the dust limited visibility, the chopper pilots had to throttle back their machines as they flew the eight miles toward the landing zone...
...The rest stood around grumbling about all the radiation safety regulations that had been violated...
...And some of the supposedly "hand-picked men" had to be issued security clearances right on the spot...
...The camp was a typical Army village, lying in a broad arid valley sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas on a spur three miles from U.S...
...They still didn't know how well the men would perform their tasks after a nuclear blast...
...That ruled them out for the rifle disassembly-reassembly test...
...Since then, after painstaking research combing Army files and death certificates, the CDC's Dr...
...They were carried to a hillside northeast of the trenches and unloaded again...
...But the lessons have not been learned...
...All the detailed plans and orders for military activities during PLUMBBOB needed one week's prior approval by the AEC scientists...
...Security at the camp was tight...
...As of last spring, the Pentagon Smoky hotline received phone calls from more than 20,000 veterans of atmospheric tests...
...The original HumRRO plan called for the soldiers to fieldstrip their M-l rifles and reassemble them within five minutes of the detonation...
...Only a few troopers got them...
...They were wearing white coveralls taped at the wrists and ankles, gloves, boots, goggles, and respirators...
...Two of the heroic guards and one other worker among the eighty-six subsequently died of leukemia...
...Yet, that report also notes that all planned Army maneuvers had to be cleared a week in advance with the AEC director at Camp Mercury...
...At all the previous shots, Coe had simply been an observer...
...Kingsbury is now the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veteran's Affairs, and is plagued with skin cancer...
...Then the researchers planned to compare the soldiers' performance with statistics compiled during training exercises before the blast...
...Thousands of radiation exposure records are missing...
...The disembodied voice of the loudspeaker monotonously droned out the last seconds of the countdown...
...So, at 1:30 A.M...
...the detonation of a forty-eight-kiloton device called Smoky helped the sun blast the night into day...
...Paul Cooper couldn't come, though without him much of the story of Smoky would remain a mystery...
...At 5:40 A.M...
...As the The atomic veterans For 360 days in the late 1950s, Army Sergeant Orville Kelly called Japtan Island in the South Pacific's Eniwetok Atoll home...
...They walked for nearly an hour...
...Glyn Caldwell has identified eight leukemia cases among Smoky soldiers...
...Auxire is now director of Health Physics at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory...
...A week later, the agency belatedly granted Cooper full disability compensation, but it never admitted any connection between his terminal illness and Smoky...
...By the time of Smoky, the Army had its own poorly trained radiological safety technicians deciding whether or not an area was too heavily contaminated for troop movements...
...In the desert, water was, of course, at a premium...
...One Army general bitterly criticized the operations for being "tailored in the form of a demonstration for observers and the press...
...He signaled Hensley to turn back and the men beat a hasty retreat...
...Tim Lee Carter, in 1976 about getting the Veterans Administration to recognize that his chronic back trouble was related to a skiing accident he suffered while stationed in Germany with the Army...
...they wanted to see...
...The task force from Fort Bragg carrying Russell Dann and Paul Cooper was code-named "Big Bang...
...Donald Coe and his fellow infantrymen charged through the heavily contaminated area, within yards of the bomb's crater, heaving grenades into the demolished buildings and rusty tanks...
...Physician/Congressman Tim Lee Carter has championed the Smoky veterans' cause since his constituent Donald Coe first came to him for help...
...But he was present the morning of the Smoky blast, a private first class with the Twelfth Infantry Battalion...
...During Smoky, the HumRRO scientists hoped to test the ability of the paratroopers to perform three pre-rehearsed tasks immediately following the explosion...
...Because fallout was expected on the position they originally planned to occupy, the infantrymen were trucked to a new group of trenches hastily dug about five miles from ground zero...
...Smoky stands out in Aux-ire's mind as the only shot where radiation levels were so high that AEC scientists couldn't retrieve their instruments for several days after the blast...
...Now, the CDC researchers are finding that the cancer rate among the Smoky men is twice that of other men in the same age group...
...With other Hardtack survivors and men who watched Smoky, Doppler, and dozens of other blasts, Kelly shares sources of information and mutual experiences...
...So these men were excused from any further HumRRO tests at subsequent shots...
...Dann suspected they were behind the constant repetition of the field exercises...
...Smoky was the next to the last atomic shot made during the PLUMBBOB series involving military personnel, and it was for this explosion that the Army laid its most detailed plans...
...The convoy carrying the Eighty-second reached their assigned Smoky trenches 4,500 yards south of ground zero about the same time...
...The guinea pigs of Camp Desert Rock Atomic 'stress tests' for unwitting soldiers Howard L. Rosenberg When Russell Jack Dann wheeled through the huge double doors of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee hearing room on a cold January morning last year, the first thing he thought was that the place was too damned crowded...
...The agency even allowed the United Kingdom to explode a bomb there last year...
...If they had looked they would have found that Paul had leukemia when it was still in its chronic stage...
...He is forty-two years old...
...Many details still remain closely guarded secrets, including the chemical make-up of the bombs themselves...
...Within a month of the Smoky hearings, Cooper would be dead at the age of forty-four...
...The atmosphere on the hillside that morning could only be described as pandemonium...
...Two days after they arrived, the troops got their first briefing on the overall battle plan for the Smoky assault, nicknamed Operation Hill and Dale...
...Finally, hairy cell leukemia was diagnosed in December 1976...
...If he had, Auxire says he would have done everything he could to stop it...
...After the lecture, the HumRRO psychologists distributed an examination, asking, among other things: 1fWould radiation from an A-bomb explosion make men in foxholes one-and-a-half miles away permanently sterile...
...The HumRRO researchers took a head count and realized that nineteen of the ninety-nine paratroopers scheduled for '. . . it's just the same as it they'd shot him...
...The post had about 150 buildings, an airstrip, motor pool, library, medical center, post office, volleyball court, two Softball fields, an officer's club, and a non-commissioned officer's club...
...One-hundred-eighty-four of the devices were detonated in the atmosphere...
...Within a thousand-yard radius of ground zero, the earth was scorched black and the pungent aroma of burned vegetation turned more than a few stomachs...
...Taylor wanted the Army to move toward a five-unit "pentomic" system that called for a wide dispersal of troops to lessen the odds they would all be wiped out by a single, well-aimed A-bomb...
...From what Dann had seen of pentomic warfare, it was just one big SNAFU (situation normal, all fouled up...
...Official records show Donald Coe had nosebleeds and other signs of radiation sickness while he was still at Camp Desert Rock...
...During the summer of 1957, twenty-three atomic devices were fired off for the benefit of AEC scientists who were experimenting with the latest doomsday machinery and collecting detailed data on the effect of atomic weapons on structures and equipment...
...Though Dann and Cooper shielded their tyes, both men recalled seeing theii own bones, as if the flesh had melted away...
...The shadowy roadways of Camp Desert Rock were illuminated by only a few firelights shining down from the portals of quonset huts...
...Donald Coe was a private first class with the Twelfth at the time of Smoky...
...Even the passage of twenty-one years couldn't dull the vivid recollections the blast of Smoky had etched deeply in his memory...
...But within a few minutes, Dann, Cooper, and the others were ordered to reboard the trucks...
...AEC policemen patrolled the camp perimeter and stood guard at office doors...
...After Cooper learned he had leukemia, he told his doctors about witnessing an atomic test in Nevada...
...After surveying the mangled machinery and reaching a point within 170 yards of the vaporized tower, the paratroopers reformed and marched toward the trenches they had originally planned to occupy...
...On the hilltop a communications squad was setting up a hasty public address system so the soldiers could hear the countdown...
...It was a fruitless search...
...Camp Desert Rock was the Army base of operations during the atmospheric testing in Nevada...
...He cursed under his breath the white-coated scientists who stood around with their clipboards and 'It is one of the great ironies . . . that the cure for the disease can also be its cause' stop-watches, timing every action of the troops...
...Then, the skeptical soldiers were tested once again to see how much they had believed of their indoctrination...
...Meanwhile, Russell Dann and thousands like him wait...
...Dann walked along that morning, remembering the events of the past few weeks which had led him to Nevada...
...The agency denied that claim, saying Coe's service records contained no reference to radiation exposure or treatment of radiation sickness...
...Still, this was the Army of 1957...
...Radiation is a well-known triggering mechanism for a variety of cancers...
...The robust lowan has used his reprieve from the disease's deadly onslaught to embark on a project designed to help not only himself, but other forgotten soldiers who served as atomic guinea pigs...
...Leaving Fort Bragg, he was issued an M-l rifle, but his military specialty called for an M-1 carbine...
...Tim Lee Carter vows to continue his advocacy on their behalf...
...Before his twenty years in the Army were up in 1972, Cooper had become a Green Beret, pulled two tours of combat in Vietnam, and received the Soldier's Medal, the Army's second highest award, for pulling three men from a crashed helicopter in imminent danger of exploding...
...It is one of the great ironies of the atomic age that the cure for the disease can also be its cause...
...Only a few of the men bothered to disassemble their rifles in the heavy dust...
...According to official Army records, by the time Smoky rolled around, Coe had already been an observer at shot Kepler, a ten-kiloton device exploded on July 24...
...The Smoky battle plan called for troops to dig protective trenches five-and-a-half to six feet deep within four hours, using only the equipment they would normally have in the field...
...Then a task force was to be moved by helicopter in order to seize an objective...
...He still works as a psychological consultant for the Pentagon, though he is no longer with HumRRO...
...this test had failed to return from a twenty-four-hour pass to Las Vegas...
...They thought the troops would find the experience beneficial...
...I feel it's just the same as if they'd shot him...
...Eighty-six workers were treated for excessive radiation exposure...
...Then, the technician dusted off' Damn's boots with a whisk broom, and that was the extent of the decontamination effort...
...This task force, code-named "Warrior," was made up mostly of troops from the First Battle Group of the Twelfth Infantry Battalion from Fort Lewis, Washington...
...PLUMBBOB provided the Army with the opportunity to put the pet pentomic theory to the test, with actual maneuvers by battle groups immediately after the detonation of a nuclear device...
...There was also a beer hall for the lower ranks, a barber shop, dry cleaning and laundry concessions, and a general store...
...Though the men were cautioned against eating the irradiated fish from the lagoon, they were allowed to swim in it, and drink the distilled lagoon water...
...This time, he carried only his duffel bag...
...A fall from Ms balcony during a dizzy spell left Dann a quad-raplegic in 1974...
...Nothing about this operation had been right from day one...
...Thirteen guards, setting aside their own safety, frantically evacuated the camp...
...The epidemiologists expected to find no more than two...
...During the next few weeks there were more delays...
...Boyd Mathers was one of the psychologists at Galileo...
...At the time, the U.S...
...Within an hour the stress tests were over and the men boarded trucks for their final trip to Camp Desert Rock...
...AH water for both camps had to be trucked in from Indian Springs Air Force Base twenty-one miles away...
...However, unfavorable wind conditions made it impossible for the troops to occupy their trenches 4,500 yards from ground zero...
...Just before midnight on August 30, the HumRRO team learned that Smoky was a "go" for the next morning...
...Robert Kingsbury was a young Army captain when he watched the detonation of shot Kepler...
...As the days passed, the HumRRO operational plans changed as problems arose...
...Seven miles away, thirty-one-year-old AEC scientist John Auxire and technician P.N...
...Russell Dann and Paul Cooper were with another group of soldiers from the Eighty-second Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina...
...and Franklin Prime, fired off the day before...
...Today Kelly has been diagnosed as suffering from lymphocytic lymphoma...
...Currently, Kelly's disease seems to be in remission, though there is no cure...
...Even though much more is known today about the health effects of radiation exposure than in 1957, the AEC's own scientists at the time knew belter 1'nan to approach ground zero after Smokv...
...When Dann finally got back to Camp Desert Rock, the loss of the steel helmet cost him $3.20 for a replacement...
...Dann's steel helmet was blown from his head, and as he picked himself up off the ground, he tried to spot it amidst the swirling cloud of dust that enveloped the entire area...
...whether we'd walk around with our heads up our asses, or puke and fall down' IfAfter an A-bomb is exploded 2,000 feet above the ground, how soon would it be safe to walk through ground zero...
...Dann faced down the hill and sank to his right knee...
...But because the course was strewn with rocks, the troops were ripping fatigues and skinning knees and elbows...
...Japtan had a desalinization plant for distilling the lagoon water, since there were no natural freshwater springs...
...As Dann recalled later, "All they wanted to see was whether we'd walk around with our heads up our asses, or puke and fall down...
...Then, terra firma itself began to shake...
...The cloud drifted over a nearby worker's camp...
...A parade of prestigious scientists testified at the Smoky hearings that there can be no doubt that excessive radiation exposure of the soldiers could have caused their leukemia...
...Cradling the M-l rifle in his left elbow, his right forearm protecting his eyes, Dann tucked his chin down and waited...
...shot Stokes, a nineteen-kiloton device on August 23...
...He can be contacted through: National Association of Atomic Veterans 1109 Franklin Street Burlington, Iowa 52601 — H.L.R...
...But, slight fluctuations in windspeed and ambient temperature foiled their plans again and again...
...As he moved down the congested aisle toward the witness table, Darin's eyes surveyed the mahogany-paneled room, taking in the elevated double tier of benches behind which sat the members of Congress, the chairs for a hundred or so spectators with standing room only, and to his right, television cameras nestled on their dollies amid an array of lights that burned down from a forest of high, metal stands...
...The "correct" answer, according to the HumRRO researchers, was an emphatic "no...
...Much of the narrative that follows has been pieced together through extensive interviews with the participants and the review of voluminous secret Pentagon reports...
...However, Kingsbury, like Russell Dann, has no unkind words for the Army both men love...
...By three o'clock the morning of Smoky, the paratroopers from the Eight-second were loaded aboard Army five-ton trucks and heading across the desert in a convoy...
...He was ordered to remove his field jacket and shake it out...
...Donald Coe was in a trench again, about five miles from the bomb...
...Why then, were the soldiers permitted to maneuver through highly contaminated areas...
...In 1961, Dann learned that he could father no children due to a low sperm count...
...Galileo was detonated...
...Today, HumRRO is a private, non-profit consulting firm headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia...
...Some of the Eighty-second Airborne troopers were equipped with carbines...
...The badges weren't capable of monitoring either neutron radiation or the plutonium-bred alpha emitters which the soldiers presumably breathed...
...General Maxwell Taylor had convinced President Eisenhower that the advent of atomic weapons rendered the Army's traditional battlefield tactics obsolete...
...The men knew they would have only seconds to grab their instruments and get out before they were contaminated...
...But these men were already deeply tanned after weeks of desert maneuvers...
...Not surprisingly, Mathers reported that the troops' proficiency in the rifle-disassembly test was "reduced after the blast...
...The pain, of course, could have been an early sign of leukemia, but Coe's physicians didn't suspect it at the time...
...Originally, for example, the infiltration course required the troops to crawl for a total distance of forty-five yards...
...Barney" Hensley watched the Smoky blast from the cab of their Army two-and-a-half-ton truck...
...Quoting Abraham Lincoln's compassionate adage that "we must care for those who have borne the battle and for their widows and their orphans," Dr...
...They have assailed the generals, admirals, and bureaucrats with pointed questions about the disappearance of medical records, the laxity of radiation safety, and the suppression of scientific research linking low level radiation, in amounts previously thought harmless, to increased incidence of leukemia and cancer...
...Coe immediately told his doctors about his presence at atomic tests in the 1950s and filed an initial claim with the VA for service-connected benefits...
...So, when Smoky was postponed again, these troops were trucked twenty-five miles to Yucca Flats to watch the detonation of a small, 4.7-kiloton device called Franklin Prime, two-and-a-half miles away...
...These men were assigned to be test subjects for the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO...
...After an A-bomb is exploded 2,000 feet above the ground, how soon would it be safe to drink water from open tanks one mile away...
...The AEC controlled the PLUMBBOB series, but the Army received permission to conduct exercises, so long as the troops didn't interfere with the scientists' projects...
...Their stress tests were postponed until the next scheduled shot, Galileo...
...As the pupils in his eyes began recovering from the intense light, Dann could hear the low ominous roar of the blast rumbling toward him over the flats...
...Dann was there...
...He was fogged in at Nashville airport...
...Though Army engineers sank a well to 1,200 feet, it was dry...
...A staff sergeant with the Eighty-second Airborne at the time of Smoky, he was already a Korean combat veteran...
...It will take at least a year for the Pentagon to compile the data on servicemen exposed to radiation, and at least another year to analyze the data...
...The Pentagon estimates that between 250,000 and 300,000 American soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and civilians were exposed to radiation during 192 nuclear bomb tests between 1946 and the atmospheric test ban treaty of 1963...
...As he waited his turn to go before Howard L. Rosenberg is a free-lance writer based in Washington, D. C. the microphones, Dann knew that he was the only former enlisted man who had made it to Washington to tell about his experiences during those cool dawning hours of August 31, 1957, when at 5:30 a.m...
Vol. 43 • June 1979 • No. 6
