At the Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock, doctors tried to save the lives of Jeff Kennedy and David Livingston. The two were put into the intensive care unit, placed on ventilators, and given high doses of corticosteroids. Oxidizer released by the blast had induced a dangerous form of respiratory distress. Both of the men were now suffering from pulmonary edema, as fluid filled their lungs. Kennedy’s wife left their children with a friend and rushed to the hospital. A young woman came to see Livingston as well, telling one doctor that she was his wife, another that she was his sister. Colonel Michael J. Robertson — the chief of aerospace medicine at the base who’d treated the injured airmen aboard the helicopter — didn’t care who she was. He was just glad that Livingston had someone there. The worst effects of the oxidizer would usually appear about five hours after exposure. Like the phosgene gas used as a chemical weapon during the First World War, the oxidizer could kill you in an extremely unpleasant way. It was known as “dry land drowning.”
Matthew Arnold had been fast asleep when the phone rang at about half past three in the morning. The caller told him to report to the base: his EOD unit was heading into the field. The call came at a bad time. Arnold and his wife had just moved into a new apartment in Shreveport, and they’d stayed up late moving boxes. He’d gotten only a few hours of sleep. The place was full of boxes that still needed to be unpacked, and he didn’t feel like going to work at three in the morning. When Arnold arrived at Barksdale, his squadron commander said that they were going to Arkansas — and nothing more. As the unit loaded its gear into a couple of pickup trucks and prepared to leave, Arnold felt guilty about leaving his wife to deal with the mess at home. He wouldn’t be able to call her, tell her where he was going, or let her know how long he’d be gone.
The EOD team at Barksdale was part of the Strategic Air Command, and it responded to every accident involving SAC nuclear weapons in the eastern half of the United States. During Arnold’s two and a half years as an EOD technician, the unit had spent most of its time on mundane assignments. When unexploded ordnance was found in the marshes surrounding the air base, his EOD squad would defuse it. Every so often, when a plane crashed, they’d render safe the bombs, starter cartridges, flare packages, rounds of ammunition, and ejection-seat rocket motors found in the wreckage. And when nothing else was happening, they’d practice taking apart and reassembling dummy weapons. But on a few occasions, Arnold responded to accidents that involved the real thing.
Twice at Barksdale, a load cart collapsed while transporting a rotary launcher full of Short-Range Attack Missiles. Each launcher held eight SRAMs, and the load carts had telescoping arms to lift the missiles into the bomb bay of a B-52. During both accidents, the telescoping arms broke, dropping the rotary launcher and the SRAMs about five feet to the ground. At least two warheads and half a dozen missiles were damaged. A manufacturing defect or corrosion seemed the most likely explanation for the collapse of the telescoping arms. But an Air Force investigation later found a different cause: maintenance crews had been goofing around with the load carts, out of sheer boredom, and using them to lift B-52 bombers off the ground.
In April 1979, Arnold’s unit responded to a nuclear weapon accident a few miles north of Fort Worth, Texas. The accident was considered serious enough to require their presence urgently, in the middle of the night, and so they flew there in the only aircraft that was available: the base commander’s KC-135. The big jet was a lot plusher than the planes that usually carried Arnold’s team. At Carswell Air Force Base, someone on a loading crew had ignored a tech order and pulled a handle too hard in the cockpit of a B-52. Instead of opening the bomb bay doors, he’d inadvertently released a B-61 hydrogen bomb. It fell about seven feet and hit the runway. When members of the loading crew approached the weapon, they saw that its parachute pack had broken off — and that a red flag had appeared in a little window on the casing. The bomb was armed. Arnold’s team arrived at the base, removed a small panel from the casing, and rotated a switch with a wrench. A green flag replaced the red one in the little window; the bomb was safed. The whole procedure took about an hour, and Arnold’s unit flew back to Barksdale on their usual means of air transportation, a cargo plane.
