Column: Maybe the only guns we need never will go off

Published 10:37 am Friday, May 30, 2008

By David Behling, Paths to Peace

I clambered up the concrete wall in front of me, clinging to the rusted metal ladder as I moved higher and higher. At the top I could see the gray battlements of Fort Worden stretched out on all sides, nearly covering the top of the hill: the turrets for the smaller cannons, the massive pedestals for the main guns, the doors into the warren of rooms and tunnels underneath. When the main guns were here, the firing of their 20-inch barrels broke windows in nearby towns.

The guns hidden behind these gray walls could fire on ships in the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, even ones more than 20 miles away, but were only ever fired during target practice. For more than 50 years, soldiers standing where I was standing had been ready to fight and die. A few hundred of them did die, but not in battle; they died of influenza, from accidents or suicides.

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These powerful guns and their thousands of human tenders didn&8217;t sink a single enemy warship. They didn&8217;t even see the Japanese submarines that got as far as the wharves and docks of Seattle and Tacoma during World War II.

Today, even the echoes of the practice sessions have blown away, replaced by the rustling of sea breezes in the treetops. Sunlight and rain fall on a lush forest. Since the base was shut down, spruce, cedar and madrona trees have grown up among the walls; flowers and shrubs cover some of the concrete, nature reclaiming what we had borrowed. Today, this place is peaceful, but not because humans made it so.

As I left the battlements behind me and walked back down the hill, a face appeared in my memories, the face of a guy I&8217;ll call Mike, one of the adults who helped with youth activities at my church down in Tucson, Ariz. From a kid&8217;s perspective, Mike was cool. He took us camping, and played Frisbee tag with us. Although he and his wife had been married for many years, they didn&8217;t have any children. When we asked him when they were going to have kids of their own, he&8217;d smile or shrug and change the subject.

Part of each week, Mike sat in a room, a hundred feet under the desert, tending the Titan missiles that were scattered around the edge of Tucson, waiting for the signal from Washington that would open the heavy doors of the silo and send nuclear destruction flaming into the sky. He knew that pushing that button meant that the city a hundred feet above him, the city where his wife was waiting for him to come home, where the youth he inspired were looking forward to the next youth gathering, would soon be vaporized into fiery radioactive dust.

Because of the Titan silos, nobody in Tucson with any common sense believed we would survive a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, but Mike was one of the few that had an intimate relationship with those weapons. Sometimes, in my imagination, I pictured him sitting for hours with his finger hovering over that trigger. But he sat waiting for orders that never came. Those missiles were never fired, not even for target practice.

The silos in the desert are gone now, except for one which was left behind as a reminder of those dark years on the brink of nuclear destruction. Once, on a tour, I learned all sorts of interesting things, like how Mike would have worn a sidearm in case he had to kill the other soldier down there with him, because he had gone mad or refused to fire the missile when the order came. Mike would have known the other soldier carried a sidearm for the same reason.

The silo in the desert doesn&8217;t possess the tranquility of the battlements on the hill. Maybe someday it will, and visitors will be able to look down into its missile chamber and watch the desert reclaim what we only borrowed, walk through the fields of poppies and blooming cacti surrounding it, sit in the shade of Mesquite trees breaking up the concrete. Maybe someday, the only guns we have will be the ones that didn&8217;t go off.

David Rask Behling is a member of Freeborn County Paths to Peace.