A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  Mr. Jarkovich was like a piece of furniture, never turning around when I came to visit. To me, he was a slouched back in a wrinkled plaid shirt. At the top of his back he had a full mop of bushy brown hair, unlike my father, who was going bald. And while my dad was always perfectly clean and clad in a white cotton short-sleeved shirt with the collar starched, Mr. Jarkovich did not even iron his shirt. Maybe he did not have a wife, but even my dad could iron his own shirts. Mr. Jarkovich wore blue jeans rather than dress slacks. His hair never looked recently washed. He was by base standards disheveled.

  But suddenly, because of the aliens, he became a superstar to me.

  “Did he see an alien?” I excitedly blurted out to my dad that day. “Where are they?” I forgot that my dad did not believe in aliens so I was not supposed to either. All the drapes were drawn in the house in a desperate attempt to keep the sun out, but light was filtering in through the cracks in the drapes, lighting up the dust like little spaceships.

  “No, I should have said Lemurians,” my dad said to my mom, not us. “He won’t stop talking about Lemurians. I don’t think they are aliens. I’m not sure.”

  “Oh . . .” Christine and I deflated a bit. I knew all about aliens from The Twilight Zone and NBC but had never heard of Lemurians. They sounded like monkeys. Everyone believed in monkeys.

  “He thinks they live around here somewhere.” He looked concerned.

  For a while, the Lemurians consumed my dad because they consumed Mr. Jarkovich. I thought they were at least more interesting than Nixon and seemed to make my dad happier. One day, my dad brought home a book about them called Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific, which Mr. Jarkovich had lent him. We found out they were creatures with a third eye for a brain from an island called Mu, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When their island sank, millions of years ago, they had to move to Mount Shasta in California, where they lived in the lava tunnels.

  “So they’re not aliens,” my dad explained. “It sounds like they’re residents from Earth but from a long time ago. They are an ancient people.” They still sounded supercool. After reading a bit more, he went on to explain that after moving to the lava tubes inside Mount Shasta, the Lemurians met some actual aliens from Venus who were already living in Mount Shasta.

  “So there are aliens,” I insisted.

  “I suppose so,” my dad said. “The aliens were from Venus. The Lemurians learned to live with them, and then they all started building tunnels across the whole United States. Cherrrhem. . .” My dad paused. “Jim Jarkovich told me their tunnels extend out to Area Fifty-One and run right beneath China Lake.”

  It seemed like a lot of aliens were being spotted that summer, especially on the Gulf coast. CBS News had reported, “Gulfport police have received so many calls that they’ve posted a nighttime watch.” For aliens. Even Ohio’s governor claimed to have seen one. My dad said UFOs were just top secret military planes that we were not allowed to talk about. But Mr. Jarkovich worked on the base too, so why did he believe in aliens? It was confusing.

  “What are they doing in the tunnels?” I asked, fascinated. I had always tried to dig to China through the ant holes, which were entrances. Now I had a new reason to dig.

  “You know, this is something that only Jim Jarkovich believes,” my dad said, trying to dampen my enthusiasm. “None of this is true. It’s make-believe.”

  “But why does Mr. Jarkovich believe it, then?”

  My dad did not really have an answer. Adults never had answers.

  “I don’t know, Karen,” my dad said impatiently. “Jim seems to think it is really important, so I’m trying to figure out why it’s so important to him. I want to help him.”

  “Well, what does he think they’re doing at China Lake?” I asked again.

  “Building atom bombs,” he solemnly replied, patting my head to protect me from the bomb. Mr. Jarkovich believed that the Lemurians knew how to get to the old atom bomb fuses and radioactive materials that had been left behind at China Lake. He believed the Lemurians were making atom bombs underground to be better prepared for the next world war. The Lemurians had even invited some U.S. government officials to join them underground, where they were creating a whole new society. There, aliens and congressmen would meet in secret five-star hotels and discuss the future of the planet. Since the Lemurians were supposed to be wise and eternally kind, I did not really understand why they needed the bomb, but I thought their ideas sounded a lot like the Mansons’. They were waiting for Helter Skelter and preparing just in case.

  Maybe the atom bomb made everyone want to tunnel, or maybe it was the desert. It was cooler underground. In the desert, all the animals lived down there. Once, a man named “Burro” Schmidt who lived nearby became obsessed with tunneling. It was during the California gold rush, though his tunnel had nothing to do with gold. Legend goes that Schmidt dug through a mountain so his burro would not have to climb over it. He was nicknamed “Burro” Schmidt because he loved his burro that much. Of course, at first he did hope to find gold on the way, but he kept digging even when it was clear the mountain contained none. He kept digging even after a road was built around the hill that made his tunnel unnecessary. After thirty-eight years of digging, he finally made it to the other side and then sold his mine and burro and moved away. Now he is famous for his tunnel.

  My dad and I would wander the desert, looking for desert holes, wondering who lived inside those tunnels. He would lean down far, bent at the waist, trying to see, his brain clicking.

  “Hello, down there!” I would wave and loudly greet the snake or kangaroo rat while he compared this hole size with other sizes he had stored in his memory, figuring out probabilities and possibilities for who lived there.

  On the CBS Evening News, a cabdriver named John Lane said he dropped a passenger at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, when a blue light landed on the freeway in front of him. Soon a being with a crablike hand walked right up and knocked on his cab window. John Lane did not say if he opened the door to say hello or if he took out his gun. Maybe it was a Lemurian. They were friendly and wise, so John Lane should have tried talking to them.

  “I don’t know what to do,” my dad said quietly to my mom one night at the dining room table. I imagined we were all trapped in the beam of our hanging light, like when the aliens abduct you and you are paralyzed. “He talks about Lemuria all the time, says there are tunnels beneath China Lake. He thinks the navy is only dropping bombs to create new entrances to Lemuria. I’m afraid he’s going to go look for them on the ranges at night. That would be dangerous.”

  “Did you tell your boss?” my mom asked.

  “No, do you think I should? I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “But they sound nice, the Lemurians,” I interrupted, trying to make my dad see the positive side of the situation. After all, their ultimate goal, according to the book, was bringing wisdom and peace to Earth.

  “It sounds like some kind of cult to me,” my dad countered. “A lot of people seem to believe this nonsense.” To us, a “cult” meant anything that was non-Christian. Lemurians were not Christians.

  “Maybe if you talked to him about God,” my mom suggested. “Bring him a Bible. Maybe that will help.”

  I knew where this was going. My mom and dad had done the same thing with the Mormons who came to our house, turning the tables and trying to save them instead. My parents even read the Book of Mormon so they could explain to the Mormons, logically, what was wrong with their religion. The Mormons kept coming for some juice and deprogramming, so maybe they liked it. An old Mormon trail ran across our valley, after all, so they had been doing this sort of thing for a century. I am sure my mom and dad posed little threat. During those long Mormon evenings, I learned a lot about talking salamanders and golden plates, and my parents seemed happy to have these new friends.

  Then, one day, the Mormons sto
pped showing up, perhaps realizing the battle was futile. My mom and dad seemed a little sad after that, looking out the window in expectation and turning away like abandoned children when no one showed up.

  “Haven’t seen them on our street lately,” my dad would say. “I hope they are okay.”

  “There are a lot of doors out there, Earl,” my mom would reply.

  Now it was Mr. Jarkovich’s turn for some deprogramming. I wondered if he would start coming to our house with his book while my parents held theirs. Then they could fight and laugh, then hug, over coffee. I still kind of missed the Mormons.

  Instead, my dad only got more worried about both Mr. Jarkovich and Cambodia. Mr. Jarkovich was getting worse, he said. Some days he did not show up for work, and other days he did not work when he showed up. My dad was afraid he would get fired.

  Cambodia would not go away for Mr. Nixon either, and he only made it worse by breaking into that journalist’s office and the offices of the Democratic National Convention. Still, no one had any idea how bad it could get, how the investigation might never end. It was only when Nixon was forced to release his White House recordings that people saw who he really was. Even my parents turned against him then. “The mouth on that man,” my mom said. “Do people really talk that way?”

  Back in Mississippi on the Pascagoula River, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were assaulted by claw-handed aliens that looked like little gray men. On October 11, 1973, they claimed, they were fishing off a dock when a spaceship suddenly appeared and sucked them up inside. There, they were studied by a creature with a giant eye for twenty minutes before being released. I thought this sounded like a Lemurian since he was just curious, not mean. Afterward, Charles and Calvin went straight to the police. Later, they told the press they believed in God, but this did not keep them from believing in aliens too. Maybe you could have both, contrary to what my dad said. The sheriff said there had been so many sightings that he could not sleep at night and “would seek presidential intervention if somebody didn’t do something.”

  When I asked my dad why we were bombing Cambodia, he looked at me as though I were a student from Kent State. “You kids just don’t get it!” His temper flared. “Those pilots were bombing near the border. It was a confusing situation. Nixon said he was bombing near the border. He wouldn’t . . .” But his voice trailed off.

  “So it was just a mistake, you think?” I wondered aloud.

  “You don’t understand what communism is like, Karen.”

  I was not sure how he did either.

  Nixon blamed the journalist who had leaked the Cambodia story, saying this man had ruined the operation and violated national security, but it was a losing argument. When he left the White House for the last time, he flew away in a helicopter, off to who-knows-where like the Mormons.

  After that, Mr. Jarkovich disappeared too. He simply stopped coming to work.

  “What happened to Mr. Jarkovich?” I asked one night.

  “Maybe he made it to Lemuria,” was all my dad said. But there was no twinkle in his eye when he said this. I never knew what happened to Jim Jarkovich, aside from a letter I found from him in my dad’s box after he died. Mr. Jarkovich wrote with a desperate slant, “Thanks for being a friend and attempting to understand my suffering. Tell the others from both branches I care about them regardless of how they feel about me. God Bless You!” He believed in aliens and God too. I learned a lot about what you could or could not believe from TV that year. Another brick in my walled world fell out.

  Maybe Mr. Jarkovich simply had had enough of the military and suddenly quit. Maybe he was committed to a mental hospital. Maybe he went home and shot himself. I do not know if anyone else at work cared about him besides my dad, or if they were just glad for the empty chair. It could be that the whole lab went into a panic and somehow tracked him down but what they had found out was classified. National security.

  Maybe, just maybe, he finally made it to Lemuria.

  Today, there are still people who think we are hiding aliens at China Lake.

  Others claim to have been kidnapped and held in electrified “baby cages” with thousands of other babies at Hangar 3. They call it Operation Monarch and say its purpose was to turn babies into little Manchurian candidates, or devil-worshipping sex slaves, or something like that. They had to be hypnotized to remember even that much.

  My dad would call this “a cult” if he were alive. I don’t know what I should call it. Disinformation, maybe. Paranoia. I can only confirm that I was in that hangar at the very time these hypnotized people claim to have been locked up in baby cages inside. There were no cages. No babies. Nada. The hangar was big and wide and open and there would have been nowhere to hide those babies from me.

  As for Nixon, he was forced to resign on August 9, 1974. In the final articles of impeachment, Cambodia was not included, to the ire of Congressman Robert Drinan, who said, “Can we impeach a president for unlawful wiretapping but not impeach a president for unlawful war-making? Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?” It turned out we could. Nixon disappeared like Jarkovich after that, and no one spoke of him again. The next president, Gerald Ford, seemed to come and go with no one noticing. We were all too tired from Nixon.

  Over the years, I came to realize my dad felt that Nixon had lied to him personally. He was mad that Nixon pretended to be a good Christian on TV but swore like a sailor in private. Mostly, he was mad that those bombs had landed on Cambodia without any warning. You see, in the weapons industry, you like to know where your bombs are going. You feel a little responsible. My dad felt responsible for Cambodia.

  I didn’t realize how much until it was too late.

  Chapter Nine

  Atom Bomb School

  As I entered Groves Elementary School each day, I passed a portrait of General Leslie Groves, a black-and-white photograph of a large man with a square jaw, curly gray hair, and a bushy mustache. To me, he looked like a bully guarding my hallway, wishing he could punch someone in the nose. I avoided looking at him. The navy had separated me from my sister, who went to Vieweg, a block in the other direction. Oddly, the following year we switched schools; I attended Vieweg and she went to Groves. I have no idea why. There were two elementary schools and one junior high on the base; for high school, there was only the “public” school, off base, a frightening alternative to the security of navy schools.

  I only recently discovered that my school was built for the Manhattan Project. It seems I grew up in the part of the base devoted to building the nuclear bomb, where the people from “Project Camel” lived. Project Camel was China Lake’s contribution to the development of the nuclear bomb, though apparently no one remembers how it got that name. Some claim the name came from an old Arabian tale, which warned not to let a camel stick its nose in a tent because the whole body would follow. It meant something like “getting your foot in the door.” If that was the case, I guess we thought the bomb would get our foot in the door of Japan. Others said it meant that when a camel puts its head in a tent, its breath is a foul explosion. Either way, it seems to have something to do with camels and tents. Maybe some Washington person just thought we had camels and lived in tents at China Lake.

  China Lake designed the “implosion” trigger for the Fat Man bomb, while Los Alamos built the “gun” trigger for the Thin Man bomb, later renamed Little Boy. I sometimes wondered if China Lakers felt slighted that the Los Alamos folks got all the credit, though I suspect they were just proud to have kept their secrets better than the nuclear braggarts at Los Alamos. At China Lake, about one hundred people developed fuses, tested “dud” bombs, designed triggers, and worked on a non-nuclear version of the bomb that was packed with TNT. It was called “pumpkin” because it was big and round and painted orange to distinguish it from the nuclear kind. My mom’s nickname for me was also Pumpkin, which she would say befor
e patting my head and sending me off to school. “Goodbye, Pumpkin,” as they said to the bomb when it left the plane at Hiroshima. Except that pumpkin did not come back.

  Only a handful of people on the base knew what they were building, that it was going to be atomic. For most, it was just a big, clumsy bomb. “Is this atomic?” maybe someone asked one day.

  “Do you have a need-to-know?” would have been the reply. That’s the question we always asked on the base before responding to a question. If you did not need to know to do your job, you did not get to know. Everything outside of your assigned duty was secret. Only Groves and his top scientists got to see the big picture, the atom bomb. The others were merely designing a trigger, mixing explosives, or painting a large orb orange. They did not know they were blowing up Hiroshima.

  On July 18, 1945, Captain William Parsons stopped by China Lake to thank the members of Project Camel for their work on his way to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. (Did they feel tricked when they found out? I heard a rumor that some had cried.)

  After finally watching the A-bomb explode at its target, Parsons described his feelings: “Once in many centuries, you can’t shake off the Midas touch. That’s what happened to us.” Everything in Hiroshima became gold. But the “father” of the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, did not feel like Midas. He felt like Shiva, the god of destruction, and said in tears on TV, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” Then he quoted Hindu scripture, saying, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”