A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  I got so used to my solitude that when Larry first walked through my door, it felt like an invasion. He had a spiffy U.S. Marine Corps uniform on. I had only seen marines guarding things like the main gate or base theater, so I could not understand why they needed him in Payroll. He was about fifty years old, with cocoa-brown skin and a close-shaven head, and he even walked like a marine. Perfect.

  “You the new girl?” he asked, then introduced himself. “Larry, at your service, ma’am.”

  No one had ever called me ma’am.

  It took a while to get used to Larry’s visits, but then I started to enjoy them. He would walk up and plop himself in the room’s only other chair, acting as if it were his own living room, even when he had nothing to say. My nervousness never seemed to make him nervous, like it did with other people. He just stayed.

  Eventually, I asked him about the closed door across the hallway. “What’s up with that guy?” I pointed at his door. “I’ve never seen him.”

  “Oh, he’s seventy-four years old,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “Is he sick?” I asked.

  “No, but he puts his head on his desk and sleeps.” He laughed. “All day. That’s one tired old man.” No one said anything for a moment. I was thinking we were lucky to have base jobs because no one would fire that old man, no matter how long he slept. They would find him dead in there first, which was one of the benefits of working in Defense.

  * * *

  —

  Back at home, the “man-to-man talk” with Phil was soon approaching. I had no idea what “man-to-man” meant but was determined to find out, no matter how risky it might be. I hid a cassette player under the china cabinet in the piano room and pushed “record” before Phil was due to arrive. I knew they would talk in there, beyond the white sliding door in the room with only the stereo and upright piano. It held the Bill Gaither, Mary Poppins, and My Fair Lady records and was the room for listening. The big red button like a piano key went down with a loud click before I darted out.

  Phil looked nervous but charming as ever when he arrived, as though he might start speaking Russian just to impress my dad. I hoped he wouldn’t. Whatever they said, behind that closed door, may well have been Russian to me. I needed to know what the country of men said.

  When the sliding door with the indented brass button handle finally opened, I studied their faces. Phil had the same expression he’d had when he’d walked in, smiling and nervous. He shook my father’s hand and left without saying a word to me.

  “I’m glad that’s settled,” he said to my dad before he left.

  After that, the only problem was retrieving the tape recorder. It was almost dinnertime, when everyone hung around the kitchen, waiting for their TV dinners to come out of the oven, covered in aluminum foil. There was no way I could get in there without being noticed.

  When we sat down under the hanging lamp, in a dining room offset from the kitchen, we began our ritual silent dinner. You could hear the silverware scraping on my sister’s teeth, and my mother said, “Stop scraping your teeth!” She had braces by then so maybe couldn’t help it. I was listening to the clock tick, hoping dinner would soon be over, preparing for the worst.

  Click went the tape recorder in the other room as it reached the end of the tape. It was a click so loud that we all just looked at each other for a while, before my dad bolted out of his chair like a rocket.

  He came back from the piano room with the cassette and, as before, headed to his bedroom and shut the door. “What did you do, Karen?” my mom asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  When he did not return, we all knew he was erasing, which you could do only by holding down the red (record) button and black (play) button at the same time. It took over an hour. Meanwhile, the three of us kept eating in straitjacket silence until my mom got up to clean off the table.

  My sister sniggered.

  At work, I was glad to find out that Larry’s stories were much worse than mine. His eyes would always drift back in time like my dad’s, but his went to Korea. “Korea?” I said when he first mentioned the place. “I didn’t know there was a war there.”

  “Yeah, most people don’t,” he replied. “People can only remember one war back, not two. Korea was before Vietnam.”

  “What did you do there?” I asked.

  “I was one of the Chosin Few,” he said. I assumed he meant the Chosen Few from the Bible: Jews. Or was it Christians? I could never remember exactly which was which. But it was the People of God.

  “Many are called, but few are chosen.” I nodded sympathetically, as Christians do when they recognize each other.

  “Wha’?” He burst out laughing, slapping his thighs as he bent over and laughed from the belly.

  “No, we held the Chosin Reservoir. In Korea!” he sputtered between laughs. “I’m talking about war, girl, not God and Heaven.”

  “Oh.” I blushed, looking down.

  “It was more like Hell, I think,” he continued. “But a frozen kind. Everything was frozen there—the lake, our food, even our fingers and toes started turning black over time. We were surrounded for over a month. Lost two of them.” He picked up his boot and pointed at his toes, as if I could see through his boots.

  “I didn’t know Korea was cold,” I interrupted. I thought it was jungle.

  “Boy, that’s the coldest I’ve ever been,” he went on in his pleasant, happy lilt that showed he was not from California, where we talked fast and flat. “American planes would fly over to drop napalm on the Chinese, and I’d be jealous!” he joked. “They looked so warm. You’d see them jumping up on fire and running away. And their horses on fire too. Only the ones on fire would move, see. Then we could shoot them.”

  I tried to picture burning horses, but nothing came.

  “A bunch of our men went AWOL, even though there was nowhere to go except out onto the frozen reservoir. It was either freeze or get shot or burned up.”

  “So how’d you get out alive?” I asked.

  “They called it ‘Home by Christmas.’” He chuckled. “Funny name. Don’t it make you think of a Bing Crosby song? Operation Home by Christmas. But it worked. We got home, but we lost thirteen hundred on the way.”

  “That’s a lot,” I exclaimed.

  “Sure was. We had to walk and walk with guys dropping all around. Shot. Stupid pilots even napalmed our two lead companies by mistake. Burned those guys right up. We attached the frozen bodies to ropes, and dragged them out like a sled. Everyone had a body to pull. But that’s the motto of the marines, did you know that?”

  “No man left behind!” I burst out proudly. This was the first time I had associated war with bodies: burning, frozen, toeless bodies. Bodies like mine, but without toes. Bodies on fire.

  * * *

  —

  That summer, without knowing it, my mother taught me something about war too. We were watching NBC Nightly News when “Breaking News” flashed on the screen, and then Tom Brokaw said, “Two U.S. Navy jets, following what is being called an unprovoked attack, knocked down two Libyan fighter planes.” Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi had shot at our F-14 Tomcats while they were in his Gulf of Sidra.

  Both Libyan pilots had ejected, and NBC showed an artist’s rendition of the attack, since it was not filmed. In the last drawing, a Libyan pilot raised his hand from the ocean, clearly trying not to drown. “There is no sign of the other pilot,” Tom Brokaw said seriously. “Only one parachute was deployed.”

  That was when my mom began to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, surprised.

  “Those are our missiles,” she said. “I don’t like to see people die.” I stared at her silently, afraid to draw attention to her few tears, worried that this might cause more tears, worried they might never stop.

  At work, people started wearing buttons that rea
d “U.S. 2, Libya 0.” I heard they sold out at the armaments museum in one day. The mood was overwhelmingly celebratory, but I was left wondering why everyone was happy while my mom was sad. My mom’s tears had confused me, each one bringing with it a moment of doubt that made me who I am today. They were tears of sorrow for a real human being, not an enemy. That was the summer I learned from Larry and my mom that war had people in it.

  Did Ronald Reagan know that?

  Before that, wars were memos or math equations to me. I studied memos in the “to do” file for the unnamed sick woman while waiting for the phone to ring. Nothing on those memos meant much to me, written in cryptic acronyms such as FA-18, Mk 46, and ASROC. Only the format was familiar.

  At the top of the letterhead was the navy seal, an American eagle clutching a sword with an anchor instead of a tip, and then the heading to the right: “Department of the Navy, Naval Weapons Center, China Lake.” The memos were always cluttered with dashes, slashes, and dots separating acronyms. In the upper right, a line read “IN REPLY REFER TO.” Then the abbreviations started. There was “38501/STM:msa” and, beneath that, “Reg 385-872-81.” This part I knew: 38501 was the code number; STM was the author, Sam T. Morton; :msa was the typist, Mary Stuart Allen. Then the code number again, the letter number, and the year.

  Was there more to war than the way the wind looked on blue graph paper, and the acronyms, and the walks on a Cornish beach following the stars? I was growing up.

  * * *

  —

  “Want to get milk?” my dad said to me one night, after all the drama and erasures. This meant he wanted to walk to Albertsons, two blocks away, in the cool desert evening. With me.

  “Sure,” I said, hoping for a détente. As we walked, I noticed how similar our gait was, like toy soldiers in our rigidity. I tried to mimic his paces. All those late night walks in Cornwall, navigating through the stars, were being passed from him to me right then.

  Then he did his “Cherrrhem, cherrrhem . . . ,” clearing his throat. I waited for what came next.

  “They’re faking the missile tests,” he said.

  “What tests?” I asked. This was not what I had expected at all. The air was hot and dark, but with enough of a wind to make you feel alive. The Albertsons sign was a lighthouse at the end of a desert walk.

  “The missile tests,” he replied. “They’re editing the tapes so it looks like they hit their targets.”

  “How can they do that?”

  “All you have to do is cut the part where it starts to spin,” he replied. “They dumb it down.”

  “But why would they do that?” But he did not answer.

  Then he said quietly, “If they send those missiles to the field, they will hit the wrong targets.” It was not within me to understand any of this. All I knew was that my dad was agitated by it, but the weight between us lifted a little when we spoke. I knew not to push him, reveling in the fact that he had confided that much. So he did care. I purred like a cat inside. As we finally entered the store—a beam of bright light blaring out the door into the dark desert—he even turned to me and smiled, if only just a little.

  * * *

  —

  At the bottom of the memos at work was the “Copy to:” line on the left, followed by code numbers lined up flush, one on top of the other. The smallest and most important number was at the top. For instance, 38 (Department) would be on top, then 385 (Division) beneath that, then 38501 (Branch). Next to each number was a line for initials from the code head. As the numbers got smaller, they went all the way up to the top of the navy, but not to the president, who did not have a code. Or if he did, it was a secret one, written in invisible ink. Some memos must have gone to Reagan, who was commander in chief after all. But he was not in the “Copy to:” line.

  That summer, the codes were, starting at the bottom: my boss, his boss, the technical director Burrell Hays, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Melvyn Paisley, and finally Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. Then they stopped. If I had been able to type that summer, I would still only be “:klp” at the bottom. You could not expect anyone to think about me.

  I sometimes wished I knew what the memos meant, but I was too low level for anyone to explain. “Need to know.” Payroll dealt with all the JOs, meaning we got a glimpse into all the projects happening on the base and how the money was allocated. But I got to read only the unclassified memos, the ones that were lying around any-which-where though signed in the same way as the top secret ones. There were stamps for the people at the top so their hands would not get too tired from having to sign everything. Their secretaries also signed for them.

  That summer, there was no way I could have known that second-to-the-top Melvyn Paisley was in a heated battle with third-to-the-top Burrell Hays. To me, Burrell Hays was a picture on the cover of the weekly Rocketeer, where he looked squeezably soft, with balding reddish-brown hair, large square wire-rimmed glasses, and the standard base attire of short-sleeved button-down shirt and polyester pants.

  His signature was a stamp.

  Only later would I discover that Melvyn Paisley, a bar-brawling, red-headed short Irishman who slept with or married all of his secretaries, was taking kickbacks from defense contractors such as Northrop and Lockheed—his own chosen few—in exchange for handing them weapons contracts. Those contractors did not want to waste time on writing bids. They wanted their money now. Paisley wanted his money too. He went on lavish ski trips in Europe and commandeered trains for football teams so he could party with them.

  Only Hays got in the way. When Hays refused to go along with this corrupt scheme, Paisley tried to drop him from the projects. Eventually, he tried to shut down all of China Lake, thinking government-paid scientists were getting in the way of his plans. Little did I know those feet darting down hallways and code lines wrangling and twisting with each other might be in crisis that summer. It was all top secret. I certainly did not need to know.

  Only Reagan needed to know, and he denied he knew anything at all. People magazine finally broke the story, writing, “Paisley, four times married, sometimes boasted of his sexual conquests like an ace counting kills. But now the devil-may-care pilot is running into flak. The recently disclosed federal investigation into Pentagon corruption, Operation Ill Wind, threatens to blow Paisley no good. The two-year probe has focused on alleged bribery, bid rigging and conspiracy among Pentagon procurement officials, weapons contractors and the consultants who bring them together.” In the end, nineteen corporations were charged with crimes. Paisley went to jail.

  But that summer, all those memo wars were just getting started. They would go on for years, while all that mattered to me was getting back in my dad’s good graces. It was a short walk to his office, so I went to eat lunch with him one day. When he saw me, he stood up and said, “Ah, time for lunch?” We took our brown lunch sacks, each packed on our own but both with an apple and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, to the cafeteria while Mr. Jarkovich ate at his desk in the days before he disappeared.

  Some days, my sister would suddenly burst into my office, smiling with vitality from the desert, a sudden contrast to my gray life. She would talk about counting weapons, computers, and extra chairs, then dart off as fast as she had appeared. After she left, I would go back to my memos or to waiting for the seventy-four-year-old man to come out of his office across the courtyard. (He never did.)

  At least I had Larry. It was the summer of Larry and pay chits and making out in the desert and meteor showers and Star Wars. Sometimes I thought about going to college but was not quite sure why I would. I did not want to be an engineer and did not know what else there was to do.

  * * *

  —

  Then one day Larry disappeared without even saying goodbye. Marines can do that. I only hoped he was not sent someplace cold or someplace that required all his toes. Sadly, he was not there for my last day at Pa
yroll, when the branch gave me a fancy leather briefcase as a going-away present. It was the executive version, stamped “U.S. Government.” “It’s for college,” my boss said, even though I still had one year left at ICS. I had never had anything so beautiful, so adult, as that briefcase. “Don’t tell anyone we gave you this,” he continued. “We’re not really supposed to give away government supplies.”

  That briefcase helped me decide to go to college. I became determined to head off into the horizon, ready or not, like all those faulty weapons. Of course, my parents had always expected this; they had worked long and hard just so I could do this. But I could have gone to the community college on the hill, as my sister had done. They would have been happy with that, even preferred it. Suddenly I did not want to. I wanted to get out of town one day and experience something new: a real city.

  Before my dad grabbed me from that car, I had felt perfectly innocent because I knew I was not having sex. But then that hand reached in from someplace far away, maybe from pre-Christian dad. I wanted never to feel its touch again. After that evening, even though I was still “with” Phil and he said everything went fine, we grew more distant. Maybe I did not want a Bond man, a China Lake man, after all. But it was more than that. China Lake, which I had thought was the safest place in the world, was starting to feel less safe to me. It was upsetting my mom and dad. Cracks were opening up, which I did not understand, cracks to another world, like my great-grandpa had said. The roots were taking hold. I wanted to see what was through those cracks. Maybe there was something more authentically safe out there, not bombs-and-missiles safe. I had a need to know.

  Today, I still sometimes think of Larry, who made me feel safe despite his tales of danger. He made me feel at home with war. He taught me how it felt. Maybe he had come to China Lake to test the ASROC missile, or work with test pilots, or maybe he was sent to Payroll just to rescue me. Only later did it occur to me that while I had been feeling sorry for Larry about Korea, he may have actually been feeling sorry for me. He was one of the Chosin Few, leaving No Man Behind. Even me.