by Karen Piper
China Lake became a family-friendly environment by aggressively promoting activities such as church ice cream socials, Disney movie screenings, and the base’s endless “hobby clubs.” There was “Pebble Pups” (I joined), “Rock Hounds” (my sister joined), “Toastmasters” (my mom joined), and “The Wildflower Club” (we all joined). There were also clubs for fencing, four-wheel driving, scuba diving, Ping-Pong, square dancing, watercolor painting, junior rifle, and many more. Christine and I chose the rock clubs because they met in the Quonset huts across the street from our duplex on Rowe Street. There, we learned to polish and grind desert rocks and slice geodes, making them perfect for our wall shelves.
But it turned out the best idea for keeping women in town was simply to hire them. The navy began to advertise a class called “Housewife to Draftsman in Only Twelve Weeks” in the local Rocketeer in 1951. Over time, this turned into a quota system for hiring women on the base. So when my mom suddenly said, “I need to get out of the house, Earl. I’m going crazy at home,” we all knew what that meant.
My mom wasn’t happy if she wasn’t working; she had always meant to return to work at some point.
“Hm . . .” My dad thought aloud for a moment. “Okay, you could give it a try. You might have a shot.”
“But I would hate to leave the kids alone after school,” she said. “Do you really think that’s okay?”
“We’ll be all right,” I quickly replied. “Christine can watch me.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“We can get a babysitter, Mary,” my dad offered instead.
So, just like that, my mom disappeared. She had outstrategized us, getting a job in a section of the base called “Area E,” short for “Experimental Air Center,” where my sister and I were not allowed to go. Her division was Electronics Warfare. She told us only that rattlesnakes liked to sun themselves on the long airstrip there, which had been built for the B-29 bomber to carry the atom bomb. Overnight, we were a triangle that had imploded. The weapons were her new babies, not us, and one big family probably stood over and looked down at the weapons, smiling and holding hands.
I wanted her back waiting at home to see if we lived or died in the desert.
My mom was assigned to Code 35203 as a “math aid,” but all I knew was that she worked with the Gerber photoplotter, a machine that etches computer-drawn circuit board designs onto negatives. I only knew this because, when I called her at work, the secretary would often say, “She’s with the Gerber now.” Not me. The Gerber was in a darkroom where she could not be disturbed.
What I did not know was what she did in there. Only later did I find out that through a side door she would feed the Gerber negative paper. Then its innards would slowly digest it, spitting out drawings etched with a xenon lamp. It took around ten hours. After the negative was done, it was passed to the photo lab for processing, then glued to a sheet of copper and placed in a chemical vat that would eat away everything but the etched design. The final product was installed in the missile’s nose, then taken to the desert for tests. My mom’s boss designed the circuit boards. My mom programmed the Gerber with Xs and Ys.
Together, they built the brains that made the missiles run.
Sometimes her secretary would say, “She can’t come to the phone. She’s in the darkroom, plotting.” At first, I thought she was plotting against our neighbors or the Southern Baptists, but later she told me she was making photoplots, which was all she ever said about work. I would picture my mom with stacks of giant blueprints in front of her or negatives hung on ropes with clothespins. In my imagination, she was always in a dimly lit basement. A scary basement without a phone.
It was only when I got to visit my mom for Open House Day that I realized this was not the case. Open House Day was a yearly event in which families were allowed to visit even the secret parts of the base. It took place on Armed Forces Day, which should have been called “Children’s Day” since it was really for the kids. It started with a Kiwanis Club pancake breakfast in the parking lot, followed by a long drive through two extra gates to get to my mom’s office.
My mom’s building was next to Skytop, where they tested missile motors by holding them upside down and letting their engines roar. On the outside, her building was government gray and square, like any other, but inside it looked like a hospital where an epidemic had broken out. There were white, antiseptic-looking machines and people walking around in long white doctor coats with goggles on. Some also had headphones on. We walked by the big, humming machines while I gaped.
To my left, I briefly glimpsed a room lined with scary-looking teal blue spikes hanging from the ceiling. It looked like the kind of torture chamber where the walls are lined with nails and gradually squeeze the person inside to death, like what my dad had read to me from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” But my mother herded us by as though it were all normal. “That’s the photoplotter,” she said, pointing out a machine tucked into its own separate room with an open door.
So that’s where she hides from me, I thought. But my mom kept walking.
She led us down a white hallway to her office—a closet-sized room full of desktop computers, some dusty and half-forgotten and others brand-new. Even the wall seemed to be a large computer processor, covered in reels and slots and knobs. It looked like a cluttered control room on the starship Enterprise. On her desk was a microscope like the one she once used to look at giardia in stool samples, but bigger.
My mom pointed at the microscope and said cheerily, “Hey, take a look in there and see what your mother does for a living!”
All I saw was a trail of snail slime on a negative. “Yuck,” I exclaimed.
“That’s for the circuit board,” she said, sounding suddenly defensive. To me, it was not a fancy missile mounted on a velvet wall like my dad had at the entrance to his office at Michelson Laboratory, which everyone called “Mike Lab.” It was just snail doodle.
I looked again and said, “It looks like scribbling. Can we go back to that room with blue spikes?”
“Oh, here I’ll show you,” she said, and then ran out of the room, returning with a square brass chip. “See, look at that. From the negative, which you’ve been looking at through the lens, we make these chips.”
I still did not see what it had to do with missiles, which were fast and sleek. She tried to explain: “See, this computer chip goes into a missile and tells it where to go.”
“Oh,” I said, putting the chip down.
“Well, it beats working with stool samples.” She laughed and turned away.
All I wanted to know was what was in the room with the blue spikes. So I inched out of her office, hoping she would not notice if I moved really slow. As she talked to Christine, who was taking a proper scientific interest, I made it down the hallway to take a peek at the walls lined with three-foot-long Styrofoam spikes painted blue. Everything seemed modeled after Star Trek here.
My mom was behind me in a moment.
“What’s in this weird blue room?” I asked, half-scared.
“Oh, that’s the anechoic chamber,” she said, flicking her hand at it as if it were an annoyance. “There’s no sound or echo in there when the door is shut.”
There was a suspended walkway extending into the center, and even the backside of the door was covered in blue spikes. “Can we go inside?” I asked.
Not waiting for an answer, I darted forward, wanting to be surrounded by spikes and silence.
“Don’t go in there!” my mom yelled, running after me, but I made it inside long enough to notice the sound being sucked out of me.
“It’s not safe right now.” My mom grabbed me and pulled me back. “There’s a problem with the heat melting the glue that holds the spikes to the ceiling and they’re as sharp as a knife. You could get hurt.”
“But what’s it for?” I asked from a safe distance wit
hin my mom’s certain hands.
“That’s where the scientists test the circuitry, to be sure that radio and sound signals won’t interfere with the missile design.”
“Is that why my ears felt funny?” I asked.
“Karen, you shouldn’t have gone in there,” she said, shaking her head.
“Karen likes to cause trouble,” my sister said in her missy-know-it-all voice while standing next to my dad. “You shouldn’t have gone inside. Anyone would know that.”
I stuck my tongue out at her.
Then my mom brightened up. “The guys sometimes put people in there for fun and shut the door.” She laughed. “You need sound to balance, so people fall over when they close the door. But now it’s broken.”
“Well, I hope they don’t fix it,” I said, feeling that old claustrophobic panic sweep over me again. “Or they might throw me in there next year.”
“They might,” my mom acknowledged matter-of-factly.
I was relieved to leave her world behind and head to Hangar 3, where China Lake’s Search and Rescue Team was supposed to be. They were the people who rescued stranded, lost, and injured hikers in the Sierras. They rescued so many people that I once assumed that was why there needed to be a navy base out here in the desert. People would fall off cliffs in the Sierras and then get picked up and dusted off by Search and Rescue and have their pictures taken for the Rocketeer. We would laugh at all the stupid tourists, but only if they lived, of course. It was amazing how many different ways people could find to kill themselves in the Sierras. Cliff falls, lightning, getting lost. Those mountains just devoured people. There was an old stone hut on the top of Mount Whitney that people would run to during a storm and get hit by lightning since it was the highest point. Search and Rescue’s job was to stop all that. I adored them and thought that one day I would marry one of them.
In Hangar 3, Search and Rescue had set up a climbing wall to teach people how to climb Mt. Whitney from the hard side. They tied me onto a rope and promised to rescue me if I fell. That was their job, so I was not too scared. After that, they taught me how to bring the dead rubber lady back to life with CPR and mouth-to-mouth. Both inside the hangar and out on the airfield, there were of course all the missiles and planes displayed too. I got to climb into the cockpit of an A-4 Skyhawk to have my picture taken.
There was even a boy from Burroughs High School in a bamboo Vietcong tiger cage in Hangar 3. The sign explained that these were used to torture people in Vietnam who were too big to fit inside comfortably. They were meant for tigers. The boy from Burroughs was sitting in there as his reward for building the best tiger cage. He did not look that comfortable, so I guess it was working.
“Why is he in a bamboo cage, Mommy?”
“Because that’s what happens in Vietnam.”
“What is Vietnam?”
“It’s a country we’re at war with.”
“Why are we at war?”
“Because they do bad things like put men in cages.”
“But didn’t we put him in that cage?”
“It’s just an example, Karen, of what they do. You ask too many questions.”
After the tiger cage and the anechoic chamber, I started to think something strange was going on at the base. There were torture machines everywhere.
Finally, it was time to go home. I got a bracelet inscribed with a POW’s name on the way out and was told I had to wear it until he was found or released. When I lost the bracelet in the desert, I was convinced that one POW never came home because of me. But I had learned a lot about war that day and about what moms do in the military. I had climbed the climbing wall and seen a tiger cage. So I was not willing to say I wish I had never gone there, gotten that bracelet, and maybe killed that POW.
Chapter Eight
Missiles and Aliens
I hate to say it, Mary, but Jim believes in UFOs,” my dad said as soon as he walked through the front door. Our ears always perked up like happy puppies when we heard his distinctive door-handle rattle. He was sure and brisk with the way he put in the key and turned the handle. The hanging lamp swung a little from the way that only he would close the door. The heat blast followed a little behind him that summer when I was eight years old.
“Wow!” Christine and I barked in glee. “Cool!” We rushed into the kitchen to hear all the details.
That was to be the beginning of the long hot days full of UFOs and Cambodians. It was a confusing time. All evening long the TV played news about President Richard Nixon, who had been caught wiretapping reporters’ phones and burglarizing buildings to get information on the people who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, and there was a front-page New York Times story about him secretly bombing Cambodia. He had kept this bombing so secret that even the U.S. Air Force pilots who had dropped the bombs had to maintain a “dual reporting” system, writing down Vietnamese targets to give to the press and secret Cambodian ones for Nixon. But when burglars were captured breaking into Democratic National Campaign headquarters, ordered by Nixon to get dirt on his opponents, Congress finally had had enough. This led to the Watergate hearings, which ultimately ended Nixon’s presidency. But it went on for years.
“No, they must have dropped those bombs in Cambodia by accident,” my dad said to the TV when the scandal first broke. “People don’t understand. That’s how war is. The pilots probably went off course.” People get lost, my dad said. He had been lost during World War II, so he knew.
I did not know what Cambodia was, but I knew when my dad was upset because he would start pacing in the living room, throwing his change purse up and down, one of those black, oval plastic purses that opens when you squeeze it on the ends. It took a long time for him to get to that point. First, there would be the sound of jangling coins in his pocket, starting slowly but then increasing in rhythmic intensity. Then he would start walking. It was as though he wanted to say something but would walk instead, furrowing his brow until his purse came out with a life of its own and started flying. As my dad tensed up, so did we. We waited for what came next.
Christine and I would try to look around him when he walked in front of the TV. She had her yellow beanbag chair, and I had my white one, and we sat there in our thrones while our heads bobbed like pendulums. We had given up asking him not to walk in front of the TV. The darker path in the carpet showed that he could not stop. My dad, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger were all upset that summer—the latter two because they had been caught and my dad because Nixon was being impeached. My dad trusted Nixon.
On July 31, 1973, Congressman Robert Drinan introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Nixon on the grounds that he had secretly ordered the bombing of Cambodia for fourteen months in 1969–1970. These bombing raids, which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers, also left thousands of bomb craters in Cambodia. In turn, these craters had been discovered by a New York Times correspondent who broke the story. I am not sure how Nixon thought he could get away with it since there was no way to hide all those bomb craters. Unlike China Lake, Cambodia could not be fenced in. Someone was eventually bound to visit.
Robert Drinan testified, “I learned on that day that President Nixon had misled me and misled the entire nation.” It was the third attempt to impeach Nixon in that summer after the Watergate hearings—but only by Democrats. Meanwhile, Nixon was secretly fuming, as he complained to his national security adviser, “Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard one hundred times.”
Luckily, my dad’s office mate, Jim Jarkovich, had a bigger problem for us to worry about: UFOs. I had met Mr. Jarkovich at my dad’s office once and thought of him as someone who did not notice kids. Technically, I was not supposed to go there since I did not have a badge, but security was lax and children were allowed to wande
r in and out as long as the guards knew them. My mom would sometimes take me to my dad’s office and let me run in to get him after work.
In the lobby of Mike Lab was a welcoming room full of missiles. Since it was for visitors to the lab, the furniture was better than everywhere else. It had plush blue carpeting, big mahogany chairs with padded seats, and different kinds of missiles lining the wall. They were mounted like fine jewels on velvet backdrops, each with its own special light so it glowed. That was where we brought visitors who wanted to buy them. Next to each missile, there was a small screen and a red button that would start a video, showing it in flight.
Past the lobby was a guard behind a nice mahogany desk at the entrance to the hallways. He knew me and let me run right by. Mike Lab lost its velvety showcase charm past the guard. It was a large gray concrete building with seemingly endless additions tacked on over the years. Wandering the maze inside, I passed “Hazardous Materials” signs where chemicals were planted like minefields for kids.
The office that my dad shared with Mr. Jarkovich was drab and small, with matching gray and white linoleum on both the desktop and the floor, a tall gray metal bookcase that separated Jarkovich from my dad, and a giant school clock hanging over them both, ticking loudly. The documents on their desks were kept in colored folders that were blue (“Classified”), yellow (“Secret”), or red (“Top Secret”). If I interrupted my dad, he would stuff some papers into a red or yellow folder. Everything, including the pens, was stamped “U.S. Government Property.” The branch and division heads got better offices, “executive” versions with wooden desks and padding for their chairs, but my dad and Mr. Jarkovich were doomed to standard gray metal forever. They were not “go-getters.”