by Karen Piper
Bleachers await him, full of women in pearls and pith helmets next to men in suits, all facing an empty desert that will soon be full of exploding weapons. At a podium in front, a man says into a microphone, “The events to follow illustrate weapons in various stages of development and tests. Like parents bracing themselves for the possible embarrassment of a child’s first recital, we continue.”
Then the weapons begin to fly in all their Technicolor glory. Those fifteen-year-old chopped-down sycamore trees had earlier been propped back up as a mock Vietnamese forest, and when a Helicopter Trap Weapon is dropped on them, they lie down like rays around a sun. A helicopter lands in the middle. People cheer. Then Mk 81 bombs create little mushroom clouds that race across the desert floor. Cluster bombs spew shrapnel, breaking red balloons tied to the earth that are meant to represent soldiers. Napalm, also designed at China Lake, lights up the desert in a fireball. It is a symphony of fire timed beautifully to music. How could he not be impressed? Even William Porter, our friend and church deacon, got to shake Kennedy’s hand. He had designed the Shrike missile, named for a bird that impales its victims and hangs their bodies on barbed-wire fences.
Finally, a Walleye missile, which is TV camera guided, is aimed straight for the president. It is the grand finale. The camera in the nose scans the terrain, looking for a target match, in this case President Kennedy. On a TV screen mounted by his chair, the President is supposed to see himself on TV. See himself as a target. Then the missile is supposed to veer away from him, right on schedule.
It might sound shocking to aim a missile at the president’s head, but China Lakers were like the Merry Pranksters of weapons. They liked those kinds of jokes and tricks. For instance, a favorite gag was to hand a visiting dignitary or defense contractor a cigarette before taking him into a room to see the Sidewinder. The Sidewinder nose would be propped on a stand with the rotating glass tracker at the tip pointed into the center of the room. Since the missile is drawn to heat like a snake, it would start tracking the visitor when he walked in. Sometimes engineers would paint the missile nose like an eyeball, which would follow the visitor around the room. The visitor may have nearly had a heart attack, but everyone else had a good laugh. So it made sense they would point a missile at President Kennedy too.
But Kennedy did not jump, or laugh, as he was supposed to. When he was directed to look at the TV screen by his chair to see the Walleye missile photographing him, locking in on him, he merely looked confused. Reportedly, he simply said, “I can’t say I recognized myself. I don’t quite understand the joke.”
Soon after the show ended, rumors began to fly that Kennedy looked worn out and had a headache. One person said he “looked like he was tired, wished he didn’t have to do this, and wanted a good beer or a shot of whiskey.” He asked if he could lie down for a while, so the navy rounded up all the neighborhood dogs to keep them from barking while he slept.
Finally, Kennedy got up and ended his visit with a one-minute speech in which he said it was nice to see all the healthy-looking children in California. He always liked the children. Then he said, “I cannot think of a prouder occupation when asked what our occupation may be than to say, ‘I serve the United States of America.’” This is the part that everyone quotes, but it is not the most important part.
Kennedy was driven away down Blandy Avenue, named after the man in charge of the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests. Admiral Blandy once defended his actions amid antinuclear protests by saying, “I am not an atomic playboy, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.” Kennedy was a playboy, though he denied it too. Women could tell, even in China Lake. They threw themselves at his car as he drove away, trying to stop him from leaving.
Here is where I always pause the tape, because Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental starts to look so familiar—especially if I run it in slow motion. It looks so vulnerable, so open to attack. It is the car that I cannot look away from. It is the same car he rode in five months later in Dallas. It has five Secret Service agents jogging by its side, as they would do when it drove by the Texas School Book Depository. These men do not try to stop the women jumping from the crowd. One lands right on the hood of his car. Kennedy raises his hand to his neck instinctively, trying to block her. She says she only wants a handshake.
I wonder how they got that car to China Lake. I wonder how they got it back to Dallas.
Then he is gone, out the main gate, never to return.
Three days after his visit, Kennedy gave a speech at the American University. “World peace,” he began. “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.” Instead, he explained, “I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
In nearly every speech until his death, Kennedy spoke of peace with a newfound passion and sureness. Then, one day in October, he devised a plan to remove all seventeen thousand U.S. combat troops from Vietnam within two years. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who heartily agreed, made the announcement the same day.
One month later, Kennedy was dead. My mom said she kept thinking about little Jack at the time, who was slightly older than my sister. “It would have been so terrible to be left with a child that age,” my mom said.
President Lyndon Johnson, who immediately succeeded Kennedy, had other things on his mind. He called Robert McNamara and said, “I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise, and I just sat silent.” His voice sounds defensive as if he wants to show who is in charge. “We have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom,” he said. “We could pull out of there, the dominoes would fall, and that part of the world would go to Communists.” We would stay in Vietnam.
There was nothing that Robert McNamara could say in response. He had a new boss.
Over sixteen thousand American soldiers would die in one year: 1968.
When is the moment you could have stopped the roll from happening, set out on the right path, corrected course? When is that moment you could have kept it all from going crazy? Was it then?
Robert McNamara’s new boss deployed the Sidewinder to Vietnam.
I arrived in China Lake just in time for post-Vietnam syndrome, now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, when people began to notice that returning veterans startled too easily. They dreamed of being back in the jungle, gasped for breath, drank, reached for a gun, killed themselves. The world was filling up with the falling-apart. Meanwhile, the United States was developing its own syndrome, called “Vietnam syndrome,” not to be confused with “post-Vietnam syndrome.” It meant we secretly thought we were losers and were vaguely depressed. We felt lost, with no sense of purpose or pride.
While doctors said the only cure for post-Vietnam syndrome was talking about the war, the only cure for “Vietnam syndrome” was Ronald Reagan. I was ready for the Reagan cure. Ten years after our first fateful drive down Blandy Avenue, when I was about to turn sixteen, I was praying for Reagan to win. I needed that Gipper to save me, to save us all from ourselves. To Make America Great Again. I did not realize then that my fate would become entwined with his in ways no one could have predicted. I only knew that my whole life was ahead of me. Reagan was my future. We would be winners together.
PART TWO
A Teenage Weaponeer
Missile Guidebook:
Refuse to be its victim. It will want you to think you are subject to its will. You are not. You are more powerful than a missile, which can only erase life and stories. You can create life and tell stories, stories t
hat are true.
Chapter Fourteen
The Chosin Few
Unless it falls on a Sunday, my birthday is always Inauguration Day. Eras change with me. Presidents come and go. I often feel lost in the shuffle between then and now, on a day when people cheer or cry, but never about me. My birthday is a lesson in my own insignificance.
Only one birthday was different: January 20, 1981. It was Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day and also my sixteenth birthday. All the powers of the universe seemed to confer and agree that the best presents would be saved for me. The day was a spectacle I would never forget. A brass band played, the U.S. Capitol was draped with giant American flags, and Nancy Reagan changed clothes sixteen times. My dad and I stood in the living room, too excited to sit down, watching the TV. Our heavy blue drapes blocked the sun as in a movie theater, but the movie on this screen was Freedom. Reagan said that Americans would do “whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.” Us.
Then he said the unimaginable. He thanked our veterans who had served “halfway around the world,” on “the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam.” Just like that, he had broken the curse of the Vietnam vets. Our Vietnam veterans were heroes now, not forgotten, not spat upon, not sad anymore. My dad teared up, as he always did during a sappy movie.
After Reagan was sworn in and walked away to trumpets blaring, NBC said the unimaginable too. “The hostages are free,” Tom Brokaw announced minutes later. “The hostages are free,” he repeated, perhaps not believing it himself. For the last 444 days, a number that everyone knew by heart, the United States had watched on pins and needles for news of fifty-two American embassy workers who had been held hostage by Islamists in Iran. The days dragged on like a ticking time bomb as the new number was posted every night on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Four hundred forty-four.
Suddenly, the clock had stopped. I looked at my dad in surprise. The wells in his eyes began to flow over. Spontaneously, we hugged each other.
“There’s your birthday present, Karen,” he said.
I replied, “This is the best day of my life.” We usually hugged only before or after extended absences and even then with an agreed-upon formality, like presidents shaking hands.
Now a new era had begun. I was sixteen, had a public school boyfriend, and could finally drive. I could also start working on the base that summer, as did most teenagers in Ridgecrest. At my high school, where you worked at your own pace, you could graduate whenever you finished the twelfth grade PACEs. I later met a woman named BethAnn who finished all her PACES in the fourth grade. She had to go to public school after that since she could not go to college at age ten. I would finish only a year early, but it still felt like an accomplishment. Little did I know then the trouble my public school boyfriend would cause, how he would make my dad turn on me. That moment of freedom and celebration, with my dad’s hand lingering on my shoulder, even after the hug, would soon turn into a cold hard yank of shame.
* * *
—
My boyfriend, Phil, was James Bond dreamy, with thick, black, feathered hair and a secret agent coolness. I think he actually wanted to be James Bond, since he made me watch all the movies and had memorized all of his lines. I thought the movies were silly, especially the girls, but still liked having a Bond boyfriend. He was even learning to speak Russian so he could join the CIA.
Since I met him at church, my parents did not seem to mind that he was from Burroughs High School. His sister was even friends with my sister. One day, Christine handed me a checklist in church from him. It read, “What is your favorite color?” and had a blank line for me to fill in. “What is your favorite movie? What is your favorite animal?” I must have answered everything correctly, because the following Sunday he came over to my family pew to ask me to go to John’s Pizza with him.
By then my sister was going out with a boy who sat four cubicles down from her at ICS. They had gone to a PACE Bowl together, a Jeopardy!-type game in which you compete against ACE kids from across the country. They came back practically engaged. The bowl was in North Carolina, and she got to wear her own clothes while testing her memory of the PACEs on the show. Though she did not win, she came back in love with cool, tall Mitch. Practical, good, marriage-material Mitch. She was starting her senior year in the fall and would be working in base Inventory for the summer, which meant she would have a laser scanner for counting everything, a special base driver’s license, and the freedom to roam all over the base. By then, she was also a cheerleader, and even though their outfits had to reach their knees and they were not allowed to jump too high, it meant she hung out with the “cool kids,” all five of them. She no longer seemed afraid of even swats. She was that popular. I was not, but I at least had Lorinda.
I went to work on my first day that summer hoping I would get a good manila envelope, one with a “Secret” badge and a work assignment in a remote location. Summer employees had to line up in the gymnasium on their first day, as if registering for college or a conference, to get their manila envelope. When I opened my envelope and pulled out all the paperwork, I sadly found I would be stuck in Building KB-2122, catty-corner to Mike Lab. Payroll. It was a two-story square cinder-block affair with only one entrance, like a payroll fort but with no money. Only pay stubs. It did not even have windows. On top of that, my badge was blue for “Classified” while my sister’s was “Secret.”
Later that night, I complained about my job assignment to my boyfriend Phil while we were in the desert. There, with the excuse of driving into the desert to watch the stars, we had been slowly inching closer and closer to horizontal in the back of his Toyota Corolla station wagon. He said suddenly, “Think of the base as the Force.” He stroked my arm gently. “So even if you’re not a Jedi warrior, you’re still fighting against Evil.” It helped put everything back in perspective. “You have the Force with you.” We lived in Stars Wars then.
“Fighting against the Evil Empire,” I added. In that moment, I felt so proud to have a Han Solo boyfriend, even though he insisted he was Luke Skywalker, that I kissed him a little longer than I should have. In fact, I kept kissing him even as we pulled up to my house, not wanting to go inside.
That was when I felt the yank. In an instant, the passenger door had opened and a hand reached in and grabbed me. I barely had time to see who it was before I realized I was being dragged into my house. I tried to remember how horizontal I had been before that door had opened.
Inside, my dad dropped my arm and left me standing in the living room, shutting his bedroom door more loudly than usual. I stood there, frozen, then wavered on my feet a bit. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I started to cry.
Soon I found myself at the end of my parents’ bed, peering into the blackness where they were supposed to be. “We . . . we . . . were . . . just . . . making . . . out,” I said between sobs. I did not want to turn on the light to reveal my shame. Nothing moved except my lungs, gasping for air.
Silence. I cried myself into exhaustion and went to bed.
Only years later did my mom tell me the reason for their silence, the source of our miscommunication. They thought “making out” meant the same thing as “making love.” They lay there in shock, worried I might be pregnant, not knowing what to say. Not knowing who I was. At my church and school, if girls got pregnant, they simply disappeared and were never spoken of again. I think they went to live with a distant relative to avoid shaming their parents, or something. No one ever explained. Even the pastor’s daughter got sent away like that. Maybe my parents were afraid I would be sent away too.
In the morning, we pretended the previous night had not happened. It was better that way. My dad went to the blond wooden cereal cupboard, grabbed a bowl, and sat down on the couch to eat. Each of us mimicked his actions in turn, perching in front of the TV for the morning news, bowls in hand.
But that evening, my dad called Phil and scheduled a “talk.”
* * *
—
In the meantime, I had one window in my office in Payroll. It looked out over an inner courtyard, consisting of only a cement slab with a picnic table where no one ever sat. I was filling in for the division head secretary, who had taken ill, though no one told me with what. “Just answer the phone,” my new boss said. “You can let the paperwork pile up.” Then he shut the door to his adjoining office, as my dad had done with his bedroom door, and was gone. I hardly ever saw him that summer. I can’t even remember what he looked like.
All summer long, I answered the phone, “Division Five, Payroll, this is Karen.” Then I pushed a button and transferred the call to my boss’s line, telling him who was on the phone. Sometimes he asked me to take a message on the special base message pads, with carbon copies for evidence.
Between calls, I studied the payroll forms, which looked pretty simple. Since everyone at the same “G” level made the same amount of money, it was easy to figure out everyone’s salary on the base. People were all labeled G-1 to G-15 depending on the number of years they had worked and their yearly evaluations. No one made much money compared with the defense contractors, but I was certainly at the bottom: G-1. A little better than minimum wage. My dad was a G-13. I wondered if there were some top secret Gs that we never heard about. Probably. Did they have pay stubs filled out in invisible ink?
Other than that, all there was to do was watch the hallways, which were more like prison walkways over the empty inner courtyard. People’s office doors would open and close and a Payroll parade would go by each day while we watched through our courtyard-facing windows. It felt like being back in the cubicle. There were painted tan metal doors opening, step-step-step, then closing behind another mouse hole in this building. Gradually, I noticed that one man’s door, across the courtyard, never seemed to open.