After telling the truckers in Bee Branch to hit the road, Sheriff Anglin got back into his squad car and drove south on Highway 65 toward Damascus. He wanted to make sure that everybody within five miles of the silo had been evacuated. He stopped at a roadblock north of Launch Complex 374-7. The security police manning it were wearing gas masks.
“Hey, I need one of them masks,” Anglin said.
“Oh, you don’t need a mask,” one of the officers replied, his voice muffled by the mask.
“Well, give me yours, if you don’t need it.”
Neither of them gave Anglin a gas mask, and he headed toward Damascus without one.
The chaos of the early-morning hours extended to the management of roadblocks. The Air Force had no legal authority to decide who could or couldn’t drive on Arkansas roads. But SAC’s failure to confer with state and local officials left a crucial question unanswered — who was in charge? At a roadblock south of 4–7, Air Force security officers refused to let journalists pass. Correspondents from the major television networks had arrived to cover the story, along with radio and newspaper reporters. Sheriff Anglin overruled the Air Force and allowed the media to park on the shoulder of Highway 65, across from the access road to the missile site. It was public property. Not long afterward a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat was stopped at the same roadblock by Air Force security officers and told that he couldn’t drive any farther. The reporter pointed out that his newspaper’s competitors had just been allowed up the road — and then drove around the roadblock without permission and headed toward 4–7, ignoring the soldiers with M-16s. An Air Force security truck pursued him at high speed but gave up the chase. And the correspondent for the Democrat joined the crowd of journalists near the access road, who were shouting questions at every Air Force vehicle that entered or left the site.
After loading the wounded onto helicopters, Richard English and Colonel William Jones returned to 4–7. A convoy from Little Rock Air Force Base soon met them there. It brought specialized equipment and personnel that the Disaster Response Force lacked: portable vapor detectors, radiation detectors, bunny suits, fire trucks, firefighters, and an EOD unit.
A two-man radiation team traveled by helicopter to Launch Complex 374-6 and got a ride from a security police officer to 4–7, about ten miles away. Wearing protective gear, they walked down the access road in the dark, carrying alpha, beta, and gamma ray detectors. They went as far as the low hill overlooking the complex, found no evidence of radioactivity — a good sign — and walked back to the access control point near Highway 65.
English put on a bunny suit and prepared to search for the warhead. The suit was a lot lighter than the RFHCO he’d worn to find Livingston. English thought that he’d seen the warhead during one of his trips onto the complex. His second in command at Disaster Preparedness, Sergeant Franklin Moses, and the members of the EOD unit suited up, too. The half dozen members of the initial reconnaissance team, led by English, waited for permission from SAC headquarters to look for the weapon. The word came from Omaha: they could enter the complex at first light.
Rodney Holder was still wearing the T-shirt and old pants he’d put on to take a nap, just before the Klaxons sounded at 4–7. Almost twelve hours had passed since then, and it felt like a long night. Now Holder and Ron Fuller were sitting on the access road to Launch Complex 4–6, outside the town of Republican. They’d hitched a ride from a security police officer at the grocery store in Damascus, hoping to get back to the base in Little Rock. But the officer had gone to 4–6 to pick up a two-man radiation team. And the helicopter had taken off from 4–6 without waiting for Holder and Fuller. The chopper’s departure left them with a couple of options. They could return to the scene of the accident with the radiation team — or stay on the access road at 4–6. The security officer lent Holder his coat and drove off. It was still dark, and the two men sat in the road, exhausted, waiting for someone to give them a ride.
