A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  So Martha was sent to Harris, who put her in charge of the Gerber. One had to wonder how she got to be in charge, to the point that in the end she could stop production on the Sidearm. Apparently, she had only a high school degree. Was Harris having an affair with her and treating the Gerber like a present for her? Was she just that pretty? Whatever the reason, my mom’s access to the Gerber did not improve after Martha arrived. Once, after getting two hours with the plotter, my mom had to beg Harris for two more.

  Then he yelled at her, “Can’t you do anything right?”

  She started to cry.

  And the filter was never changed, not for four long months. If my mom believed in “working as good as any man,” Martha clearly had a different strategy. She believed in the power of rumors. First, Martha wrote a memo claiming my mom had been imagining problems with the Gerber and was compulsively tampering with it. Next, she started printing plots and showing them to everyone to prove the Gerber worked fine. In response, my mom printed her own plots, pointing out the problem to Martha. My mom wrote to Harris, “Only a non-trivial design, such as a modulated spiral, would likely repeat the problem.”

  In response, Harris accused her of calling him “trivial.”

  Who knows how long this “print off” might have lasted if Mr. Bukowski had not finally intervened. “The plots are bad,” he wrote to Harris. “I should not have to tell you this.”

  Next, Martha tried a different strategy. She claimed my mom’s software instructions were the problem, not the Gerber. She refused to communicate any further with my mom, who she said was being irrational. Because of this, Mr. Bukowski had to be constantly on the phone, even while on vacation, as a mediator between Martha and my mom. He even wrote to his boss to complain.

  Finally, Martha hit on a winning rumor. “Why do you think Mr. Bukowski treats her better than everyone else?” she whispered, lifting an eye in insinuation. My mom overheard this and knew there was no evidence to prove Martha wrong this time. There was nothing to print, nothing mathematical to prove, which was her specialty. And rumors will always find allies. Soon my mom heard people whispering in the hallways that she was Mr. Bukowski’s “pet.” They questioned her credentials, wondering how she got the job without a degree in computer science, only medical technology.

  One day, she heard something rattling in her desk drawer and opened it to find bullets. “They were about this size—” She held her fingers an inch apart when she told me.

  “What did you do?” I asked, my eyes twice as big.

  “I told some people about it, but they just shrugged. Then the janitor said he could use them, so I gave them to him. He said they were for a rifle.”

  “What were they doing out there?” I said.

  My mom shrugged. “I assumed they were for rattlesnakes,” she said. “But maybe they were for spies.” Then she laughed.

  At the time, she was not laughing. Instead, she retreated to the couch and called in sick. That was when Mr. Bukowski finally stepped in. To me, Mr. Bukowski sounded like the kind of guy who could take a lot but had his breaking point. His parents had escaped from the Soviet Union, after all, so he must have known plenty about cat-and-mouse games, government bullies, and espionage. He decided he could play.

  “I want you to keep an eye on the Gerber room and report to me who is using it every day,” he first wrote to the micro-miniature lab. They were in the room next to the Gerber lab.

  Soon the spy was writing on U.S. Navy letterhead every day, “No one today.” Next, Mr. Bukowski passed this information up to his boss: “No one today.” Evidence against Harris began to mount. Cases were being prepared. The plan was to prove that Harris was deliberately withholding the Gerber from my mother, claiming it was in use when it was not. They needed the double-entry ledger for that.

  One day, Mr. Bukowski urgently needed plots for a trip to Dallas, but when my mom went to the Gerber room, she found it locked. The secretary then told her that both Martha and Harris had gone out of town for a few days and had taken the key. In a panic, my mom burst into Mr. Bukowski’s high-level meeting to explain. A sea of desert-grizzled engineering faces looked up at her.

  “They’ve . . . they’ve gone,” my mom sputtered, humiliated. “They took the Gerber key!”

  Mr. Bukowski had to cancel his trip to Dallas, the contractors had to postpone the missile production schedule, and ultimately the missiles may not have made it to the field in time. This was when Mr. Bukowski, a mild-mannered Polish man whose parents had told him to be grateful every day for what he had, finally lost it and was no longer grateful. He wrote to his boss, “The generating of high quality Gerber artwork has always been a challenge and undoubtedly will continue to be so; but the events of the last four weeks were almost enough to make me look for some other kind of work.”

  And because Mr. Bukowski never lost it, a decision from above finally came down. A memo arrived from Code 35, above them all, copied to everyone involved. It read simply, “Any problems with the Gerber will be solved by Mary.” The verdict was in.

  My mom lost many battles but finally won the war. But war leaves scars, and living next to the enemy, even after a détente, is never easy. After that, my mom suffered from a lack of confidence. Since my parents were from different branches and could talk only on a “need to know” basis, she could not tell my dad what was going on. He started to draw the blinds when she was on the couch, afraid she would die as his mother had done. He worried about having to travel so much with all of us left in his wake, bouncing and about to upturn like a boat. My sister would stare at him with her serious glasses face, perched and waiting for him to fall over too.

  The Gerber never fully recovered either. After being fussed and fought over so much, it decided it had had enough even after my mother got full custody. The fight had been too long, the adjustments too few. Its lamp exploded, destroying the mirror and the lens. After that, my mom explained, “It never got back into perfect adjustment.”

  I would not be surprised if Harris blew it up.

  * * *

  —

  If I asked my mom what she did at work, she would always say, “Oh, I was at the bottom of the totem pole—nothing important,” followed by, “People always said I was too slow.” Of course, partly this was my mom’s personality. Like my dad, she could be shy, humble, and stoical. She once said, “I’ve always been a nobody all my life. Your dad was always more popular at church.” I found this hard to believe, since my dad was the quietest person I have ever known. Nevertheless, after a lifetime of hearing my mother say such things, I truly came to believe them. At least, I assumed my father had the more important job at China Lake. Imagine my surprise when I discovered her work file, which held the Gerber memos.

  They also held so much more.

  My mom started as a GS-3 math aid, which involved using a miniature calculator and “keypunching data and programs” into the mainframe computer, a machine that took up the whole basement and had to be fed wallet-sized cards full of punch holes. But within a decade, she wrote of her credentials, “I have a system level knowledge of Tomahawk’s navigation,” including its “Inertial Navigation System (INS), Global Positioning System (GPS), barometric and radar altimeters, pre-stored terrain altitude profiles (TERCOM maps), and terrain imagery.” She could change a torpedo heading or launch point with the stroke of a DOS (disk operating system) programming line and, out of sheer boredom, once designed a laser bar-coding program years before anyone had heard of such a thing. She wanted to keep track of government property because she thought too much of it was disappearing. While my dad evaluated pitch and roll, my mom prepared the simulation programs and test plans for him to follow. She plotted his results. She analyzed his data. In one yearly review, her division boss wrote, “She is a perfectionist who holds the team together and could easily do any of our jobs. She needs a substantial raise.” Imagine that. She not only wrote c
omputer programs, but also converted them to other languages as computers were evolving. She could even build a computer.

  After some research, I discovered that my mom’s job was not that unusual for women at the time. Called “computresses,” women were once hired to operate forty-pound calculators that did nothing more than add, subtract, and divide. They did the math for the engineers. Back then, this was considered “clerical,” or women’s work, like typing. But slowly, computers evolved from these motor-driven calculators, and women were the only ones who knew how to use them.

  By the time my mom arrived on the scene, calculators were already “miniature,” but computers were enormous. She was at the forefront of the shift to computers that was a room-sized IBM mainframe set up in the basement. She told stories about “punch cards” and how the IBM had to constantly be fed with them. That was “programming” then. Ironically, as computers became central to the process of building a missile, and then guiding missiles, women became central too. The men did not know how to use them. My mom once said to me, “I was shocked that these guys did not know how to do basic things like plotting. I had to do everything for them. Except for Mr. Bukowski, of course. He knew it was important to learn.” Nevertheless, the men still got the big salaries.

  Imagine that.

  * * *

  —

  When I told my mom only a few years ago that I had found and read her work notes, she was not angry, as I had feared. She simply looked over the contraband, then said, “So now you know what I did at work, though it was a lot more than just working on the Gerber.”

  “I know!” I said. “You never told me, Mom.”

  “Well, we’re not supposed to,” she replied, stern and worklike.

  Then she brightened up and said, “I once drove a missile to Newport Beach.” She laughed.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, shocked.

  “I mean, I put it in the trunk of the Toyota Camry and headed off to LA. It was supposed to have some tests done there.”

  “But what if you crashed?” I asked. In Los Angeles, there were gridlocks, drive-by shootings, and Lamborghinis speeding by at 120 mph.

  My mom said she drove slowly, as she always does, and tried to focus on the destination: Lockheed Martin. “That must have been weird,” I commented.

  “I noticed my hands had turned white by the time I got there. I was gripping the steering wheel so hard. So I decided to get off the freeway and go to the mall,” she said, laughing. “The missile sat in the parking lot while I shopped.”

  “Which mall?”

  “You know, the one in Brea. I shopped for a few hours, and after that, I was fine to drive. But now, when I think about leaving that missile in a crowded parking lot, I wonder what I was thinking. Anyone could have broken in.”

  “Was it armed?” I asked, picturing something far worse than a robbery.

  “Oh no, it wouldn’t fit in my trunk that way. It was just the nose. But what if the police had stopped me and wanted to look in the trunk? No one told me what to do in that case.”

  I think my parents have different stories from those of other parents.

  Then she looked at the notes again and said, “It’s a good thing I didn’t write down what the real problems were at work. This was nothing in comparison.”

  “And I bet you won’t tell me now,” I said.

  “Of course not. You would put it in your book.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  President Kennedy’s Lincoln

  When my family first drove down the main avenue of China Lake, we passed “Kennedy’s Forest,” which was really nothing more than a few rows of sycamore trees. Ironically, those trees had not been planted in Kennedy’s honor, but had once been blown up for him at a weapons show. They were dubbed “Kennedy’s Forest” only when they miraculously started growing back. They had survived, while he had not.

  Shortly before our fateful long family drive into the desert, my dad wrote to my mom of his doubts about moving. “My worst fears were confirmed,” he wrote from China Lake before he came to get us. “I am going to be the aerodynamicist on the AIM-9L. I will be furnishing all the aerodynamic data, trying to solve any aerodynamic problems that come up, writing weekly progress reports, and estimating percent work remaining. . . . Pray for me.”

  Only now do I know that my dad had been assigned an impossible task: he was supposed to make the AIM-9L Sidewinder fly straight when it could not. I found this out thirty years after the fact, long after he was dead and the base’s files were finally declassified. Before that, they were not even accessible to people on the base. After their declassification, the files were moved to the National Archives at the University of California–Riverside, which was where I read them. By then it was too late to tell my dad that it was not his fault if those missiles did not hit their targets. He could not have stopped it.

  As with my mom’s files, barely saved from the shredder, my dad’s files—the Sidewinder files—had been all but forgotten by the time I found them in 2011. Only I kept lurking, wanting to know what my parents did, searching for answers. So I drove to a small brick building outside of Riverside, where they were stored, and I began to dig. There were stacks of boxes on the Sidewinder to go through until I finally happened upon a report by Sidewinder designer Howie Wilcox. In it, he strongly argued that the Sidewinder not be sent to the field. “Idealized missiles,” he called them, claiming they were unfit for the harsh reality of Vietnam. He wrote that engineers were working in an “idealized environment,” a math equation in which the missile could not miss. He meant my dad and his blue graph paper.

  In Vietnam, he wrote, the Sidewinder would not work in the rain. It would not work in the clouds, in the haze, or in the smog. It would not work on sunny days above the ocean. It was a Green Eggs and Ham list of flaws: “Not in the dark. Not on a train. Not in a car. Not in a tree.” Not anywhere, Sam-I-am, you see. Howie concluded, “Only fair-weather attacks are possible with an infra-red homing missile.” The Sidewinder had been tested only in the desert. Vietnam was not a desert.

  Designed to track the red glowing heat of a plane’s tailpipe, the Sidewinder could not distinguish tailpipes from light refracting in the clouds. It “went crazy” over reflections of the sun on the ocean. Finally, Howie warned, the enemy could outsmart a Sidewinder by throwing a flare out the window. The Sidewinder would forget the tailpipe and jump on the flare as if it were the best thing in the whole world. That report contradicted everything I had heard about the Sidewinder growing up. It was supposed to be our premier weapon, our pride and glory, the star missile of China Lake. But here it sounded more like a perpetually distracted kitten, chasing shiny things.

  Why did no one listen to Wilcox? I thought. Vietnam was hazy.

  The Sidewinder had a success rate of only sixteen percent in Vietnam.

  If the navy had listened to Howie, they would at least have kept the guns on the planes as a backup plan. Instead, they replaced the guns with Sidewinders, so when those missiles missed, the American pilots became sitting ducks. If the navy had listened to Howie, they would at least have taught the pilots to dogfight rather than declaring it an obsolete skill. The Topgun U.S. Navy strike fighter tactics school, about which the Tom Cruise movie was made, was only opened after one thousand planes were lost in Vietnam.

  How was I to know that when my dad stopped bouncing lightly on his feet twice, as he did when he was ready to go somewhere fun, it was because the Sidewinder was not working? Granted, Howie’s report was written a decade before my family arrived at China Lake. But sixteen percent is nothing to brag about. We were there for the important years, when the missiles were flying, when Roger Stone was working for Nixon’s CREEP (the Committee to Re-Elect the President), when Cambodia was being bombed, and when bodies were coming home from the war by the thousands. Stone was known as Nixon’s “dirty trickster” at the time, responsible for pl
anting moles in the DNC and otherwise trolling Nixon’s opposition for re-election. Though his day job was “scheduling,” Roger Stone said, “By night, I’m trafficking in the black arts. Nixon’s people were obsessed with intelligence.” We were there for the years of dirty tricks.

  By the time we arrived at China Lake, Kennedy’s trees were halfway back to their original size. Soldiers were coming home with something called “post-Vietnam syndrome.” To me, Kennedy represents a different path we could have taken, a path that would not have ended in defeat. People loved him in China Lake when I lived there. He was the only president ever to have visited the base.

  In the armaments museum, you can still watch a video about his visit or skim through photographs and news stories about that day—June 7, 1963. This was eight years before we moved to the base, but his memory still lingered. There, you can watch him land on Air Force One at the Area E airstrip. As his plane pulls to a stop, white-jumpsuited men with white hoods, looking like a biohazard team, push a stairway up to him. They look as if they’d just run over from the chemical lab to help Kennedy out of his plane.

  Then, in dazzling contrast to the white of the plane, the staircase, and the jumpsuited men, Kennedy steps out in a black suit and black tie with a white handkerchief in his pocket, looking as brilliant as his smile.