AIM-9 Explodes on the Test Stand

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AIM-9 Sidewinder missile fired from an F/A-18C

My job in the Air Force was Aging and Surveillance Testing of missiles--everything from the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile all the way up to the Minuteman ICBM.

In my Air Force service between 1972 and 75, I never got closer to Viet Nam than the western desert of Utah, but test firing missiles can be dangerous.  My first brush with missile-induced death only caused minor, temporary hair loss.  The second was a lot worse, but more on that later.

On a warm, spring Friday in 1973, we were scheduled to fire 20 AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles in a test stand.  The missile test area was in the northwest corner of Hill Air Force Base, three miles from main base and the airfield. It was also out of the flight path of the two runways, since we could occasionally send up clouds of smoke from test firings that changed from burn to explosion.  Today was one of those days. 

Weeks before the test, we received a shipment of AIM-9s randomly selected by lot number.  We then froze the missiles in a large freezer. We shook them on a vibration table that was a huge 300,000-Watt speaker driver.  We simulated various stratospheric heights in the altitude chamber, then finally took the stressed missiles, bolted them to a test stand, attached accelerometers, and fired them.

On a good day we could fire one every ten minutes, allowing for burn time and time for the spent missile and for spinning the big screws that locked the missile into the test stand. By the time of this test, I had been on the fire crew of several batches of AIM-9s. 

The crew leader was Staff Sergeant John Pachuca.  He would retire the following year with 20 years of service. Hill was his only duty station in more than a decade. In the 60s, missile testing consolidated at Hill. Several other sergeants planned on retiring at Hill.  But this stable environment also meant that promotions were few and far between, so Big John Pachuca would retire a staff sergeant. Before he retired, my muscular Mexican-American crew chief would save my life.  

After each missile was fired, we counted to ten in a ditch several yards away from the concrete test stand. I waited in the trench till the noise stopped, and then vaulted the wall to switch the missile. Two of us ran to the stand and unscrewed the clamps while two more grabbed the next missile.  We used asbestos gloves to carry away the casing of the spent missile. 

The stand was covered with a shelter made from perforated steel planking or PSP. They were more the sheets were ten feet long, fifteen inches wide and weighed more 66 pounds. They were designed to be temporary runways during World War II, but were also great as temporary roadways or to make a cover that allowed smoke to blow through. PSP sheets are full of holes.

Since it was Friday, we all wanted to get done, so we sprinted to get the fired missile out of the stand and the next missile locked in.  When a missile fires, it roars for several seconds then the sound dies away. Each missile has a unique burn time and part of the test was recording that burn time.  Burn time was not my part of the test. The test went well in the morning, but after lunch a few glitches with electronic equipment slowed us down. We wanted to get done and have a weekend off, so we moved as fast as we could bolting the missiles to the stand, then removing the fired missile.  After three firings in the afternoon we had a rhythm again.  The fourth missile fired and burned, but the burn time was about two seconds too short.  I started to vault the wall then suddenly flipped backwards. I thought the top of my head was being torn off. 

I started yelling with pain and swinging wildly. I shut up when I saw the flash of the entire test pad blowing apart.  I looked up and saw a sheet of PSP fly over the ditch we were in. If I had been standing above the ditch, the ten-foot steel sheet would have cut me in half.  John Pachuca had grabbed my by the hair—which was three inches long and barely in Air Force regulations—and thrown me back in the ditch. He knew the burn was too short and heard the sputter before the missile exploded. 

Inside the missile, the propellant cracked during the freezing and shaking. The air gap caused the propellant to stop burning, but then heat in the casing caused the remaining propellant to heat and sizzle.

Then the AIM9 blew up on the pad.

I was lying on back in the ditch with the big sergeant in the white overalls on top of me.  My head hurt for days. Until sundown and much of the next day we cleaned up what we could of the mess. Engineering teams had to rebuild the test stand.  We continued the test the following week.  The test site had another pad because when missiles go high order they blow up everything around them.

The next time a missile test went wrong I wasn’t so lucky. 

Tanks from Inside, Tanks from Outside: The Huge Difference

The podcast Sectarian Review just did an episode on Philip Roth. It included a passage from American Pastoral using a military tank as a metaphor.  It made me realize how different it is to be outside a tank than inside.

It is very different to see a dragon than to be a dragon.  I was a U.S. Army tank commander trained at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1975. The following year I waited for World War III to start, looking across the east-west border in Fulda.  Tactically, most of what we knew about our own tanks and those of our enemies came from the devastation of Israeli armor at the outset of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the subsequent destruction of Arab armor after the initial shock and loss.

Tanks, like mythic dragons, are terrifying to those outside. But on the inside they are the target everyone wants to kill.  In 1973, lone Egyptian infantrymen with Soviet "Sagger" missiles more than a mile away could and did kill Israeli tanks.  In Cold War West Germany, we looked across the border in Fulda and saw a vast Army of tanks, men with missiles, helicopters, fighters and artillery arrayed to kill us.  No one I knew thought we were the terror of the battlefield.

It just reminded me the experience of literature, of all art, is different depending on the experience of the reader.  Armor crewmen, tank commanders especially, see the modern battlefield as a massive "kill the tank" game.  Some of the most fearsome weapons to our enemies in the current wars were designed as tank killers then used on other targets.  The A-10 Warthog, the most nearly perfect ground attack aircraft in history, was designed around it's tank killer gun.  The Apache helicopter has the same design concept--kill tanks with Hellfire missiles and it amazing chain gun.  As it turns out if you can kill a tank you can kill other targets.  There are youtube videos of Apache helicopters vs. Toyota pickups filled with terrorists caught in the open.  The outcome is always the same: Apache 1 Toyota 0.

Anyway, Roth was right to see the modern dragon as terrifying from the outside.  But we who are inside the dragon, who see out of our dragon eyes, know the terrors both of seeing a dragon and being a dragon.

My New Breakfast Club--Jewish Draft-Era Veterans

In November of last year, I started going to the Wednesday morning Minyan prayer group at a synagogue in Lancaster City--Congregation Shaarai Shomayim. After Minyan, several of the men in the group meet at a local restaurant north of the city, Olde Hickory Grille. I joined them.

The month before, I met with the Rabbi of the Synagogue, Jack Paskoff. In the wake of the White Supremacist and Nazi rally that ended in murder, I feared anti-Semitism getting worse, especially after the President said these racists were "fine people."

One friend said, "You should see a Rabbi."

Another said, "You should see my Rabbi."

I met with Rabbi Paskoff. He invited me to come to services and hoped it would help me find peace.

The next week I went to Friday evening Sabbath service. When I got up to leave a man named Rick walked up to me and introduced himself. He asked, "Are you a cop or a soldier?" I said soldier. He was both. A retired police officer and a retired Army Command Sergeant's Major. His wife Kathy is also former military, serving as a Medic in the 80s and 90s.

Rick invited me to Minyan the following Wednesday.  At the breakfast, Rick introduced me to the other four men at the table. During breakfast, I realized that four of us served during the draft.  Rick was too young for the draft but was a Gulf War veteran and had served in many conflicts from the early 80s to the Iraq War.  The only guy who did not serve was in ROTC after the draft and decided he did not want to complete the program. Five of the six of us are veterans. I did not expect that.

The oldest veteran, Herb, had served before the Vietnam War as a cook, roughly the same time that Elvis Pressley was in the Army.  The other two were reservists who served during the Vietnam War, but were not sent to the war.

Over the last several months of going to the breakfast every other week or so, I have met a few more veterans who are members of the congregation.

I did not go to the prayer group expecting to find a veteran's group.  All of my work experience after the Vietnam War said that middle class men from the northeast did not serve.  I met one veteran in fifty in the white collar jobs I held from the mid-80s to my retirement three years ago.

Each of the men in the Breakfast Club told a funny story about how strange the Army was for them and how glad they were to be discharged.  Which is how most people feel about the Army. Rick and I are the only members of the group who ever wear an Army t-shirt.

This week three of the veterans--Rick, David and Harvey--were at one end of the table talking intensely about congregational business. Jim and I at the other end of the table talked about documentaries and podcasts. Jim said he was nearly out of memory on his phone.  I showed him how to free up some storage on his 5-year-old iPhone so he would have room for podcasts.

At this weekly breakfast, I almost felt as if I entered a time machine.  I was sitting with a group who meets every week because they have faith in common and they are nearly all veterans.  My Dad's generation had that experience. If a dozen men got together to go bowling or to coach football, the majority would be veterans. And like the men who served during World War II, we seldom talk about the Army, except to make jokes.