I was a little blindsided by my change of fate. If they'd asked my friends or family "Hey, do you think this guy should guard nuclear missiles?" not one of them would've said that was a good idea. Hell, if they'd asked me, I would've told them it was a worse idea than storing beer in the freezer. The Army had faith, though. Sweet, misplaced faith.

I guess I somehow proved that I could blow things up better than my peers, so I was appointed the Emergency Destruction NCO. In the event that our site needed to be evacuated, I was responsible for destroying the ten nuclear warheads. My job was to make sure my guys got out all of their shaped charges, strapped them to the missiles, ran detonation cords across everything else useful, and then set a time fuse. Detonating missiles like that doesn't lead to a nuclear yield -- the actual mushroom cloud explosion needs to be specially triggered.

In the space of six months, I had gone from an anarchist skater punk to an Official Destroyer of Nuclear Missiles on the front lines of the Cold War. Even repeated viewings of Red Dawn had not prepared me for this.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Or how boot camp wasn't neatly contained in a four-minute montage.

After practicing at the range, the Sergeant came over and said, "Hey guys, just wanted to make sure you knew that they check your belongings with dogs when they ship your stuff back to the States."

"Yeah, to make sure we don't have drugs, right?"

"Nope! They look for ammo and explosives, too. And I'm guessing by the pale looks on your faces that you didn't know that."

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It was better than going pale from extreme blood loss later on.

So we brought our secret stash of C-4 down range and burned it. It turns out C-4 burns like Sterno. As that story clearly illustrated, the people in charge of guarding nuclear strongholds are as wildly inept as anybody else (perhaps more so).

But hey, it could've been worse. We could've been on drugs, like the guys we were replacing. The MPs were specifically there to take over from a bunch of infantry guys who'd gotten kicked out for doing drugs on duty. Remember that their duty was "guarding the most terrifying destructive devices in human history." That wasn't an isolated incident, either. An Air Force probe implicated multiple missile workers, and even convicted one launch officer, for the use of "synthetic drugs, ecstasy and amphetamines."

United States Army
"The fins feel soooo good on my skin."

Yeah, it's probably about time you bought one of those thick old-timey school desks and start seeing how quickly you can hide under it.

The first time I saw a nuclear missile was awe-inspiring. The first time I saw the equipment and security framework designed to keep it safe was ... is "awe-despiring" a word?

The alarm was nothing but a push-button door contact. You could've bypassed the mechanical security measures guarding our nuclear missile base with a single power drill. But that's why we need those super complex launch codes, right? Turns out that the codes during my whole deployment may have been "A0000 B0000."

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That's the kind of code an idiot would have on their luggage.

My first shift was during an inspection to get our nuclear license, which was performed every two years. My job was basically to stand guard by one of those missiles with a radio. So I'm hanging out next to the possible Doom of Man when, suddenly, they call me on the radio and ask me to read my IM93 -- the Individual Use Radiation Meter.

Department of the Army
It doubles as a pen that doesn't work.

I checked mine and noticed it was reading really high. Like, Ninja-Turtle-origin-story high. I radioed this back to the Sergeant, certain I could feel my organs a'tumoring, and he said ... nothing. Eventually, he told me they were busy and I'd have to wait. An hour passed, all the while I was presumably getting dosed with mega-cancer, and no one did anything. Then the Sergeant came out in full rad-gear, read my meter, yelled "FUCK," and then took off running with my radiation detector. No other words. No explanation.

Another hour went by and still nothing. Finally, the missile went back in the bunker and some technicians came over. I told one what happened. He started laughing through his mask. "No, you've got one of the broke ones!" It turns out they were just trying to stay one step ahead of the inspectors, so none of them would see that we were using broken equipment.

Richard Law
Be all your busted, rusted, outdated, cheaply-made tools will let you be.

This was a long time ago, sure, but if you think the attitude is a problem of the past, here's a recent article about how the crews for 450 of our ICBMs had one fucking wrench between them with which to attach warheads to their missiles. They simply shipped that lone wrench from base to base via FedEx. Hope they sprung for lost package insurance. What's the estimated value of "an un-nuked world," by the way?

The RF was dispatched again, but they didn't find anything. About an hour after they left, the sedan came back and the local police sent their helicopter out. They also found nothing. That night, we were doing our interior patrol and we heard three gunshots. Everything went quiet, then we heard somebody moving in the corn field surrounding our base. The next day, we patrolled outside the wire. At the wood line, we found a newly set-up deer stand facing the missile site. Anyone in that stand had a clear shot of our emergency response doors.

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"Operation Enduring Bambi"

To this day, I don't know what that was all about. It could've been a test by our own guys. It might have been a Soviet probe. Or it may have been a really confused but persistent deer hunter with impeccable fashion sense.