UP AT JOINT T. VANDEKAMP AIR FORCE BASE, Ed was managing to hide the weakened side of his body by inserting himself into binocular duty, thereby avoiding any of the choppy ship responsibilities visible to him from where he sat. All he needed to do after pulling his uniform on and arriving to the checkpoint was sit his bottom tight on an Air Force-issue fold out chair, slip his thongs on and keep an eye on the water for any sign of invaders, less foreign than domestic.    The launch was scheduled to take place at complex 576B about an hour before sunset. 576B was about a thousand yards from where Ed was postioned and the chances of any protesters, naked hippy or not, was slim to nil. Besides, no one really cared much about these launches anymore and those who did had lost the necesary pirate urge to storm beachheads like Vandekamp’s as they had in the past.    The rocket was of the Lariat Series, the last program just before the Star Wars proposal firmly kicked in. Although National Security Decision Directive #85 was announced to a doe-eyed nation of growing debtors on the evening of March 23, 1983, the Lariat Series of rockets in many ways resembled the goals of the Star Wars program, or as it was formally known, The Strategic Defense Initiative. The Lariat premise was a simple enough one in regards to an anti-ballistic missile defense system. If and when enemy missiles were detected—fired from either submarines or the opponent’s home turf—a Lariat would be fired from any U.S. military installation in the world or, likewise, naval submarine. The Lariat, traveling in groups of up to ten to twenty, would travel into the atmosphere to meet the incoming enemy missiles. At that point, the Lariat’s nose cone would deploy its twenty-one tungsten wire lariats, each with a retractable noose designed to lasso the noses and bodies of the opposing missiles. The engines of the Lariat were massive and many thought it likely that a Lariat might be able to net up to five or six missiles in its wiring and actually carry them for some time back to where they came. At the very least, enough wire and noose would be spread around to confound the trajectories of the incoming, tangling the lot and pulling them out of the sky and into the ocean. Success or failure of the mission would be monitored by the transmitter placed in the nose of the Lariat, sending directional imformation to AWACS flying in the area who then passed it back to Command Center, etc.    Unfortunately for the Lariat program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, was taking over. Zeus, Nike, Thor, Titan, Atlas, Minuteman, the Lariat had come from a long line of well thought out and finely crafted mythological weapons’ programs designed to enculturate the basest of tendancies and waste the maximum amount of talent. Think Werner Von Braun and his brother.    Today’s launching was aimed for the Kwajelein Atoll down in the South Pacific, just on the other side of the International Date Line, which was well within the Lariat’s 4800 mile range. Kwajelein, its native name meaning “abundance of material and spiritual blessing,” was one of those beautiful little places in the Pacific where white-shirted, blue-tied, hardworking men in gray flannel Bermudas traded their way in with glass beads, baseball gloves and outboard motors—not to mention kicking the shit out of the Japanese just a couple decades back. It was, in fact, November 21, 1963 that the last proa or lo-cal, traditional boat was constructed. From then on the outboard was king and the Little America they had constructed sat in wait with its radios, radars, Halloween pregnancies and Autumn bicycles for each of the many missile-types that over the years came howling out of the virgin sky to kerplunk in local waters. Ed looked at his watch. Launch time was getting closer. He scanned the horizon again with the binocs. For the last three hours he had been intermittedly scanning the horizon and keeping time on the edge of the fold-out chair, tapping a 4/4 foot, sometimes breaking the time up into threes, sixes, twelves but counting each four. He realized after doing this for awhile that he much preferred the Coast Guard-issue fold-outs to the Air Force-issue. Not only did the Coast Guard-issue have that nice puffy air and spongue cushion on the seat but the edge of the rim was deeper, the metal thinner and so the chair resonated more when the hand hit it, slapping and popping conga-style.    Earlier in the day, Ed had been out on a security detail a few coves over where they were thinking of building a new launch pad and he had seen something very interesting. As part of the project plan and assessment by the Air Force, an Environmental Impact Report was being prepared and as part of the report a team of county archealogists were digging test pits and taking soil samples. One of the pits had yielded some familiar looking rocks and smaller bits. The rocks were egg-shaped, the smaller bits made of bone, longish and pointy. One of the archealogiests, a woman with short, cropped, dyed orange hair, told Ed that the rocks were grinding stones, the bone pieces needles and egg-shaped ones charmstones—charmstones, she explained, being like good luck charms. They were, she confirmed, Fornioleño. She let Ed look into the pit they had dug and there he saw the rib cages and backbones. At that moment he thought of Jack. “That Jack,” he shook his head. “I shoulda never . . .”    The walkie-talkie gave a lound squelch and Ed jumped out of his daydream, answering back.    “This is fifty-six seven B, Westside. Over”    “Fifty-six seven B West, prepare your bodily fluids for launch. Countdown is set to begin in one minute. Over.”    “ ’Zat you, Harry?” Ed said. “Well, roger to you. Fifty-six, seven B West. Out.”    Ed sat straight in the chair, propped the binoculars on the bridge of his nose and began scanning the horizon as the sound of various loudspeakers honked at one another across the hundreds of acres of clear coastal plain.

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Copyright © 2005, The El Fornio Historical Society
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