An obituary in the July 11 issue of the Tribune really revived memories of a local veteran who inspired a book, a television film, and testified at a Congressional committee hearing.

Friday, July 30, 1999

An obituary in the July 11 issue of the Tribune really revived memories of a local veteran who inspired a book, a television film, and testified at a Congressional committee hearing. His name was Russell Jack Dann. He died at the age of 62 on Friday, July 9, 1999, at the Albert Lea Medical Center.

My first real contact with Russ came in 1988 when I wrote four articles about him for the Tribune. There was another article about his involvement with the film, &uot;Nightbreaker,&uot; in 1989, plus a special column in 1996.

Russ was one of the most interesting persons I ever met, and a veteran with a really different life story.

Now, what follows in this and several more columns is based in part on my previous articles and interviews with Russ. The intention is to salute this veteran and to enhance what was printed in his obituary.

Russell Jack Dann, the atomic soldier from Albert Lea, guided his wheelchair into a crowded Congressional hearing room 21 years ago to testify about military nuclear experiments in the Nevada desert north of Las Vegas.

In January 1978, the former U.S. Army corporal who grew up in Nashua, Iowa, told the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee about his experiences as one of 170 volunteer paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division who had been sent to Nevada as part of a psychological stress test. Someone in the Army’s command structure wanted to see how combat soldiers from an elite unit would preform in an atomic war situation.

In the summer of 1957, Corporal Dann was assigned to Task Force Big Bang. This provisional unit was flown from Ft. Bragg, N.C., to southern Nevada to participate is a series of atomic bomb tests called Operation Plumbbob. The intent of one of the experiments was to place the paratroopers as close to ground zero as possible and see how well soldiers could perform their missions after an atomic blast.

Dann told the committee how his unit was taken to an unprotected hillside early on the morning of Aug. 31, 1957, and ordered to stay in place as an atomic device called Smoky, four times as powerful as the bomb that devastated Hiroshima, was detonated on a tower a little less than 2 1/2 miles away.

According to Dann, the awesome sight of the mushroom cloud rising into the sky was quickly followed by a series of powerful shock waves which tumbled the troops all over the hillside. The result was pandemonium and a loss of most of the carefully planned maneuvers intended to move the soldiers into the blast area. Later the airborne troopers were marched to within 170 yards of the atomized tower to observe the damage caused by the nuclear explosion.

The day after the Smoky blast, the paratroopers were allowed to visit the attractions of Las Vegas. However, later that evening, the loudspeakers in the city’s clubs announced that all 82nd Airborne personnel were to report back immediately to Camp Desert Rock, Nev. The psychologists with the Army’s Human Resources Research Office were determined to do more testing with the next atomic test. Thus, Dann participated in a second nuclear blast called Galileo. This bomb was less powerful than Smoky and about equal to the Hiroshima device, so the troops were moved to within two miles of the source of the atomic radiation.

The second series of experiments seemed to satisfy the Army’s psychologists and the troops were flown back to their base in North Carolina.

Dann told me in 1988 interview, &uot;We never did know if those two bombs were plutonium or uranium.&uot;

One of the investigative reporters at the hearing was Howard L. Rosenberg. In 1978, he was working as a part of the news team with Jack Anderson’s &uot;Washington Merry-Go-Round&uot; column, and was well known for his expertise on nuclear power and the problems the military and the Atomic Energy Commission were having with the long-term hazards of radiation.

Rosenberg listened as the only former enlisted man at the special hearing told his story. He felt there was more to Dann’s narrative, and this could become the basis for a book.

Next week’s column will be based on that book, &uot;Atomic Soldiers.&uot;