On watch at atomic history

By TOM BERG

THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

HUNTINGTON BEACH - It was 50 years ago this month the two men defied death in the Nevada desert.

One hour before dawn, the young Marines were placed in an open trench, then ordered to kneel and cover their eyes.

Three miles away, what would be the largest atomic device detonated over U.S. soil was about to explode. Test shot Hood was five times greater than the bomb that killed 90,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. And no one was sure what would happen this close to ground zero.

The blast blew doors off hinges 14 miles away, rattled homes all the way to Santa Ana and was seen by pilots near Hawaii. And that's not all.

“It was the dirtiest test stateside in terms of radiation fallout,” says R.J. Ritter, national commander of the National Association of Atomic Veterans. “And they walked about 2,200 Marines right into ground zero.”

This included the two men in the closest trench. One was Gary King, now 70, of Huntington Beach, a rough-and-tough Marine who still calls the blast “no big deal.” The other was a former Santa Ana Marine, who saw it quite differently. Darel Brower's memoirs, posted online, describe the eerie pre-dawn silence, the panicky Marines, the silvery-white explosion and the trek through 100-degree heat to ground zero with no masks.
When King read this, he tried to e-mail his former platoon mate. It bounced back. Then he tried to phone, but there was no listing.

He knew they'd both survived the blast 50 years ago. He was left to wonder if they'd both survived the fallout.

BOMB PARTIES

In retrospect, the audacity of 1957's Operation Plumbbob was stunning: a series of 29 aboveground atomic explosions witnessed at close range by 18,000 men testing their ability to fight on a nuclear battlefield.

Planes flew through radioactive clouds. Marines marched through radioactive sand. Paratroopers jumped through radioactive skies. Assaults were launched. Objectives taken. The military measured blast effects on pigs, dogs, rabbits, mannequins, tanks, trucks and the psyches of men witnessing unparalleled power.

Sixty-five miles south, Las Vegas was measuring how to cash in on the mushroom-cloud spectacle with “dawn bomb parties” on hotel rooftops.

Knowledge of radiation was still in its infancy.

“At the time, we were all very cavalier about it,” says King, whose specialty was atomic, biological and chemical warfare. “Nobody really talked about radiation too much. It wasn't a big thing. From the military standpoint, an A-bomb was nothing more than a high-explosive bomb.”

Both King and Brower had to monitor radiation at three detonations: Priscilla, Diablo and Hood. Their observations could not be any more different.

“People ask, ‘Weren't you scared?' ” King says. “The answer is no. We were macho. It was just another assignment.”

Marines climbed out of trenches after each blast and smoked, he says. Or ate. Or napped.

“Most ignored the devices,” he says.

Brower was positioned several miles from the blast, facing away so as not to go blind. He describes the 37-kiloton Priscilla test this way:

“I'm not sure anyone was breathing, as it surely could have been heard,” he wrote. “When the count went from 10 to zero, everything lost its color, including the olive, drab truck parked in front of us. It all turned brilliant silver-white. The air around us was alive with the sizzling and crackling of electrical charges. My neck, which was the only thing exposed to the light, felt as if someone was holding a blowtorch to it.”

A few days later, both men were brought to the trenches for Diablo. It would prove stranger than Priscilla.

Countdown to nothing

Before you're sent to the bottom of a 6-foot-deep trench, three miles from an atomic explosion, you get a warning to close your eyes tight and place an arm in front of them. If they open, you may go blind. You are also warned that if you lift a finger in the air, it will be scorched.

So when the loudspeakers count down – 3, 2, 1, 0 … – and nothing explodes, what should you do?

“No one dared move,” wrote Brower. “For close to 20 minutes we held those positions.”

Legs went numb. Expletives were shouted. Men feared crawling out of the trenches, but Diablo was a dud. Eventually, they were ordered up and trucked away. For King and Brower, that left only the granddaddy of atmospheric tests, the 74-kiloton Hood.

About it they would later agree on something. With eyes clenched tight, kneeling at the bottom of a trench, they both saw the same thing at detonation – the bones in their arms.

21 Cancers

We'll never know what Marine Maj. Charles Broudy saw in the trenches when Hood exploded. Or what he breathed when he marched – like King and Brower – to ground zero. He died of lymphoma in 1977.

We do know that the Veterans Administration denied him benefits, saying he couldn't prove he was there. And that his widow later showed he received more than 5,000 times the 13-millirad dose the government said his film badge read.

Broudy's widow Pat Broudy, 83, of Dana Point, fought an 11-year battle to help win benefits for atomic veterans, who now can claim relief for 21 kinds of cancers.

For many, however, it's too little, too late.

“Most of our guys are old,” she says. “And they don't have the fight or will or knowledge to confront our government agencies anymore.”

The number of living atomic veterans is hard to place. But the National Association of Atomic Veterans estimates that more than 900,000 men and women took part in about 1,000 nuclear tests from 1945 to 1992. And more than 140,000 may have suffered cancer or other illnesses as a result.

So far King is not among them.

“I have prostate cancer, but it's not attributed to that,” says the still macho Marine. “It's because I'm 70 years old. All men get it.”

Which leaves us wondering about his old battalion-mate Darel Brower, whose memoirs prompted King to reflect on the nuclear war games they played 50 years ago. What about him?

Godlike and demonic

Darel Brower, it turns out, is 76 and living in Jacksonville, N.C.

“For an old duff, I'm in good shape,” he says, suffering only heartburn and a slight heart arrhythmia.

The blasts remain vivid in his mind: The greens and blues, the beautiful hues glowing around the fireball, once he could look up, were both godlike and demonic.

That is the lesson he took from those long-ago tests.

“We are definitely part of something deeper,” he says, as if he were still in that trench. “And we are very fragile.”

 

This was found at The Orange County Register.

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