Bob Peurifoy was fast asleep when he got the call. A Titan II just blew up in Arkansas, Stan Spray told him. There was a lot of confusion about the details — and no word on the warhead. Of course, it hadn’t detonated full scale. If it had, much of Arkansas would be gone. An Accident Response Group was being assembled, and they wanted Peurifoy to be part of it. A plane would soon land at Kirtland Air Force Base to take him and the rest of the group to Little Rock. Peurifoy got out of bed, thinking about that warhead.
The decision to evacuate the missile site was made by Colonel William Jones, the commander not only of Little Rock Air Force Base but also of its Disaster Response Force. He didn’t have any authority at Launch Complex 374-7 until a disaster occurred. The explosion qualified as one, and Jones briefly conferred with Richard English, the chief of the Disaster Preparedness Division, about what to do. They both thought that everyone at the launch complex was dead and that the air drifting toward Highway 65 was probably full of toxic fumes. Jones knew very little about Titan II missiles and their propellants. He belonged to the Military Airlift Command, which flew transport planes, not the Strategic Air Command.
“Evacuate, evacuate,” English shouted repeatedly, over the loudspeaker of the mobile command post.
Members of the Disaster Response Force were among the first to leave the scene of the disaster.
Michael Mazzaro, the missile crew commander at 4–7, was resting in the back of the ambulance when the missile blew up. Al Childers, the deputy commander, sat beside Ronald Fuller, the missile facilities technician, in the security police pickup that had carried them away from the complex hours before. The truck was parked at the entry control point, about thirty feet down the access road from Highway 65. They were listening to Livingston and Kennedy on the radio. Rodney Holder, the crew’s missile systems analyst technician, was in a truck a few hundred feet closer to the launch complex. None of them thought that the missile was about to explode. Holder hoped that somebody would arrive the next morning, figure out what to do, and fix the problem. They were just sitting there, waiting for that somebody to arrive.
Childers was surprised by the bright white flash. The sun seemed to have appeared in the sky. He knew the warhead hadn’t detonated — and yet, somehow, felt it had.
Fuller opened the door and dove into a ditch.
Holder saw the flash and ducked, heard things hitting the truck, waited a few seconds, took a deep breath, and found it remarkable that he was still alive. Then he got out of the truck and ran toward the highway.
Childers, Holder, and Fuller bumped into one another at the back of the security police pickup. They’d all had the same thought, at the same time: grab the gas mask that you wore out of the launch complex. But the masks were gone, and security police officers were now wearing them. The missile crew members climbed into the backseat of the truck, as the loudspeaker called for everyone to evacuate. Sergeant Thomas Brocksmith, who’d picked them up after they left the control center, got into the driver’s seat. The sky had turned deep red, and Holder worried that a cloud of oxidizer was about to engulf them.
“I need to get the hell out of here before the oxidizer starts falling,” Holder thought. “Everybody at the complex is dead, and Rodney has no need to be here.”
Vehicles were pulling out haphazardly, people were running around in the dark, the evacuation seemed chaotic, and Childers became worried that someone might get hurt. He got out of the pickup truck to direct traffic. It was a thoughtful, well-intended thing to do. Brocksmith drove off without him. Cars and trucks sped past him. Everyone ignored him, and yet somehow nobody got hurt.
About fifty Air Force officers and airmen were at the Titan II site when the missile exploded. Most of them drove to Damascus at high speed. But none of the PTS crew members left. Jim Sandaker had started the night at the barracks, recruiting volunteers to help save the missile. He expressed the PTS point of view, bluntly, when an officer told him to evacuate.
“Screw you,” Sandaker said. “I’m not leaving until I have my friends or their bodies.”
Outside the water treatment building, Major Wallace and Sergeant James hid beneath one of the light-all units after the missile blew. As rocks and concrete and little pieces of molten steel landed all around them, James thought: I just want everything to stop falling. The debris lacerated one of his elbows, burned the other, and tore up his left leg. But James was able to stand, and Wallace helped him put on a gas mask. Wallace hadn’t even been scratched. They both wondered what had happened to Silas Spann, who’d been a few feet away from them, seconds before. Now there wasn’t a trace of him.
