A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  “Well, you never know,” he said. “But that etching might be history someday, too, just as important as the others.”

  Before long, I became impatient with the slow pace of the photographers. Sensing this, Todd said, “You can run ahead now. You don’t have to wait for us.” I gratefully took the opportunity and ran, confident of the way back.

  After a while, I started to notice the canyon walls seemed darker and shinier, like obsidian, and the petroglyphs were different too. A long, deeply carved line jumped from rock to rock, looking like a snake. Curious, I followed it until a bright fuchsia flowering beavertail cactus interrupted the line, clinging to a crack in the side of the wall. It was then that I knew I was lost, since I would have remembered those flowers.

  Nevertheless, the contrast of the brilliant flowers, the polished black walls, and the abstract, swirling line was haunting. The colors were stunning and pulled me forward, everything seeming suddenly supernatural. This was a land of unicorns and mazes, fuchsia cacti, orange poppies, and long hypnotic swirls. Though there were only lizard-tail tracks in the sand rather than footprints, the feeling of peace was so powerful that I could not stop. I wanted to curl up in the sun and watch for wildlife. I wanted to be with my father again, peering into desert holes and wondering about the animals inside. I wanted to be on my old porch, watching the crevices of the Sierras fold into darkness. I wanted to be inside the holes and canyons of childhood. I did not want to go back. My father might crawl out of a rock at any moment and be my spirit helper, giving me a bulletproof vest. These were the moments that kept me going.

  Suddenly, I remembered I was on an active bombing range.

  I headed up a ridge to get my bearings before realizing I could step on a land mine out here. Missiles and mines could be anywhere. Unexploded ordnance. This was not like being lost anywhere else. Instinctively, I turned around and started retracing my steps, hoping I was going the right way, hoping nothing would blow up beneath my feet. Finally, turning a corner, I saw Todd in the distance. I stopped, leaning over to rest my hands on my knees, and realized how heavily I was breathing. Almost hyperventilating. Catching my breath, I shouted, “Hey, over here!” waving my arms.

  Todd turned and, seeing me, looked as if he had just seen a dead friend. He shook his head back and forth the way my father did when I was in trouble. “You can’t get lost out here!” he shouted across the desert. “You just can’t.”

  Shamefacedly following him back, I came over a ridge and saw my mother. She noticed me, brightened up, and waved. In her face, I saw I had everything I had ever needed. It was finally clear.

  Getting closer, I heard my mom happily chatting with Evan about weaponry. “We used to call burros ‘warm targets,’” he said. “They would be good practice for our heat-seeking missiles. Besides, there were just too many horses and burros out here.”

  “I know,” Mom said. “Now they can’t find enough people to adopt them.”

  Todd stormed up to them while pointing at me. “We almost lost her!” he said. “She got lost!” He seemed to think my mom would be as upset at me as he was.

  My mom laughed. “Yes, but she always finds her way back,” she said, smiling at me. “She knows what she is doing.”

  Todd turned to me and said, “Think of the paperwork if you hadn’t come back! Just think of it.”

  But I just chuckled. We were okay. Todd had survived three wars. I had survived China Lake.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  My Hidden Knowledge Detector

  For so long, I had believed that only a man could pull me out of my baby cage, my fake reality, my MK-Ultra box. I believed, like so many women, in a rescuer, someone who would take me away from China Lake. Yet men had only sent me into new altered domains, regions too difficult for me to compute. I needed to hunker down. To investigate further.

  I needed to learn how to trust my own “dead reckoning.”

  After all, I had survived. I had held down a job, published academic books for tenure, and done all the other things women do to stay afloat. This memoir does not negate any other versions of me circulating under the name Karen Piper. You can Google them. We are, after all, multiple beings. But with this book I was building a new me, brick by brick.

  A guidebook.

  In this version, I doubled down. From my dad, I learned about migration routes and safety. From my mom, I learned to laugh no matter what was thrown my way—and the world, it seemed, was just starting to hurl things at us. We knew the world was changing all around us—migration routes were opening and closing as wars started and ice caps melted. The Northwest Passage opened. The Syrian borders closed. Mom and I wanted to be there before too many routes closed. We wanted to see architectural wonders before they were razed by this or that fundamentalist group set on destruction. Hindus blew up mosques. Muslims blew up temples. We wanted to see the animals and coral reefs before they went extinct.

  Now there is a name for this form of travel. It’s called “extinction tourism.” Apparently, a lot of us want to see disappearing things, to have one last look at the penguins and orangutans and pandas and leopards that no one seems to want to keep alive. To say goodbye. And sorry. Coyote, antelope, jacket rabbit.

  I was testing my “dead reckoning” in a world that seemed to have lost its bearings. I was in search of clues, of stars with which to steady myself. I bought a new house to contain all the driftwood of my memories, a place that was mine and not Keith’s. I threw a bright red rug over the light hardwood floors. I bought a black leather couch and teal pillows. Cardinal and indigo bunting. I hung the Sierra Nevada mountains on the wall. My two decks, one screened in and one not, became my offices. I chased the sunlight, or fled the mosquitoes, from one to the other during the day. I watched the whole world come to my bird feeder, migrating from north to south and south to north, showing they could match the pace of my new migrations. An indigo bunting flew by my window, a fiery flash of royalty with iridescent wings changing from purple to blue in the sunlight. A cardinal stood out against the spring leaves of my forested backyard like a spot of fresh blood. A deep breath entered my lungs and stayed.

  Was I moving on or settling down? I could not tell.

  Nearby, the Missouri River raced down a channelized path, roaring with its own stories and changes. Sometimes it jumped its banks. A friend invited me to kayak on the river, and we fought it upstream to a sandbar in the middle, where we stopped for wine and a picnic. Then we floated back silently in the dark together. Over time, this became a habit. There was an addiction to seeing what the river was doing. Sometimes a bonfire would be raging when we arrived at our island, and our circle of friends would expand. Sometimes the island would be entirely submerged. When the river was high, we would dodge refrigerators and trees caught in the melee of its roaring waves. We were wild. I was wild again.

  Still, I had some unfinished business. When I found out where all of China Lake’s archives had been sent, thirty years after the fact, I knew I had to go. I had been trying for years to gain access to these files. When I first started looking, I naively thought I could just walk into the basement of Mike Lab, where I knew the records were kept. Then I remembered they had been moved, and many destroyed, after the flood of 1984. I heard the files were sent to the base’s technical library, next to the commissary store. Having had been there many times before, I somehow assumed I could just walk in when my mom still had a badge and could take me on the base. Instead, I discovered the doors were locked. No explanations are necessary on the base. History just vanishes.

  So when I heard the records had been moved to the National Archives in Riverside, I was delighted. I wanted to know more about what my dad did for a living. The archives are kept in a small government building on the outskirts of town, surrounded by brown grass fields for cows. My mom offered to pick me up at LAX and take me there, so I flew in from Missouri. We could get a hotel, she said, go to the
mall afterward, and then head back to Ridgecrest.

  Inside the archives, it was freezing cold, which is the case in many places deprived of cool air outside. “Did you bring a coat, Mom?” I whispered. A young man with black European-style square glasses greeted us at the door as though no one ever came to visit him.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, bowing and waving us inside. “Come in, come in.”

  “I’m just here for the air-conditioning,” my mom told him. “She’s the researcher.”

  “Yes, well o-kay,” he said, lifting the last syllable as a question. “The air-conditioning is good.”

  Perhaps my experiences in being turned away elsewhere made my mom think we would soon be at the mall. Instead, we were directed to a room with about thirty schoolhouse-sized desks and asked to sit down. A woman bent over a nearby desk, deep in thought. She was the only other person there.

  “You can mark the files you want to see,” the man said, handing each of us a menu as if we were ordering sushi. Then he sat down at a larger desk, facing our desks, and waited for us to decide.

  After a cursory perusal, I marked everything on the Sidewinder, having no idea this meant that library-sized carts filled with files would be rolled to me, one after another. When the first cart came, my mom laughed. “Oh, Karen,” she said, “what did you do now?” She knew the mall was getting further away and only then began to study her menu of options. Three days later, we would still be there.

  I knew it was probably still too early for my dad’s files to be there since we had moved to China Lake in 1971 and now it was 2008. Thirty-seven years. Technically, they were long past the declassification date, but the process takes a long time. Names have to be erased and files redacted. So the files stopped at 1974. I homed in on the years around 1970, where I thought I might find my father.

  That was when I discovered Sidewinder engineer Howie Wilcox and first read his warnings about “idealized missiles” heading to Vietnam. The Wilcox files took up shelves, and were filled with early prototype drawings, test results, and mathematical equations for the Sidewinder. By the end of the first shelf, I felt as though I knew the guy.

  Then I came across something completely unexpected, something more important to Howie than the Sidewinder. It was in a file he marked “Global Thermal Pollution” from 1973. The first thing I noticed was that much of the writing was in all caps. There were even exclamation marks, unusual for a scientist. “Global thermal pollution,” as he described it, was potentially more catastrophic than smog. If unchecked, he explained, it could “melt the polar ice caps and cover the world in a steamy haze.” After that, he wrote, “the tropical oceans would begin to boil,” and eventually the “earth itself would be vaporized.”

  I had been looking for missiles, not this.

  The report was written while he was working for China Lake’s “Independent Research” branch, which actually appeared to support climate change research and mitigation. This was surprising to me, since even Democrat president Lyndon Johnson clearly did not understand it. In 1965, Johnson had appointed a scientific advisory panel to report on “Environmental Pollution.” They wrote, “Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment . . . the climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.” But Johnson said to the head of the auto workers’ union that the report was about “the whole natural beauty thing” that “more garden clubs are getting interested in.”

  In response, he proposed a “Highway Beautification Act” to clean up the highways and said to this union guy, “We’re going to have Travel USA. We’re gonna try to make ’em see American, and go to Wyoming, and go to Colorado, and take their kids out on Sunday afternoon . . . and we sure want to make these places attractive to drive on ’cause we’ll make more automobiles sell more.” That was his solution to climate change. Maybe the panel should have written, “The tropical oceans will boil.” Maybe that would have gotten Johnson’s attention.

  Meanwhile, the navy let Wilcox start a prototype ocean kelp farming operation off the coast of San Clemente Island. Kelp, he said, would photosynthesize our vast sunlight resources, turning them into a biofuel that could replace fossil fuels. It would also absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. It was the first large-scale geoengineering proposal. I think the navy’s top brass knew, even back then, that sea level rise would cause their ports and bases to sink. They knew it was a threat to national security.

  Wilcox patiently anchored the large bulbous algae to the ocean floor with lines that could later be pulled up for harvest. There, they took root and thrived. Sea otters came to celebrate the feast.

  It is all in the files, including the farm’s unnatural demise.

  In 1971, a navy review team came to China Lake from Washington, DC, to review their “Independent Research” programs, including Howie Wilcox’s kelp farm. Other programs at the time included a portable igloo that could be blown up and filled with water, which would then freeze in the Arctic. They included a “Hidden Knowledge Detector” that could measure “covert mental processes.” According to the report, these were very different from lies; they were what people did not even know they were lying about. Then there was the deep-sea jeep, a glass orb that roamed the ocean floor and was powered by melted salt. (Jacques Cousteau helped out on that one.) There was a scientist obsessed with figuring out the “quantum mechanics of H2O.” No matter how hard his boss tried, this man would not be stopped. He did not care about the money. He cared only about H2O. He always knew he was this close. It is in the letters.

  I laughed out loud. Igloos and Knowledge Detectors? I wanted a jeep that ran on melted salt. Finally, I got to the navy’s review of Howie’s project. The team concluded that while it was worthwhile, “there is at present no apparent military application of this work.” The time for kelp farming and igloos was over. It was time for war. For Vietnam.

  Maybe that is why Howie Wilcox began to write in all caps. After that report, Howie sought funding elsewhere with limited success. He wrote a book titled Hothouse Earth. He kept fighting. When he died, he left most everything to Planned Parenthood, not because he cared about abortion ethics. It was simply his last attempt to stop the planet from being vaporized. His wife said she was proud of him.

  The man with the black glasses was still going to and fro when I noticed that the other person in the room was competing for the same files I had asked for. The young man was taking my files straight to her. I looked at her more closely. She looked quite professional in her brown sheath and small heels, at least in comparison to me in my T-shirt and flip-flops. She was around forty and had perfectly curled short hair and jewelry that looked like real gold. A big diamond too.

  After building up the nerve, I approached her table, which was only about fifteen feet from away mine. She jumped when I said, “Excuse me.”

  “Sorry, you startled me.” She laughed, embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “It’s just that I noticed you’re researching China Lake.”

  “Who are you?” she asked, looking suspicious.

  “I’m from China Lake,” I said. “I noticed we’re working on the same files.”

  She turned to reach for something in her purse. “You are?” she asked, acting suddenly eager. Her professionalism scared me a bit as she handed me a card. I was not prepared for this.

  “I don’t live there now,” I said, trying to backtrack. “I just grew up there. My mom still lives there.” I pointed to my mom, who was poring over an old map.

  “Really?” she said, looking excited. I glanced at her card, which said something about a data research group. She explained, “The navy hired us to study the effects of radiation on people who lived there, mostly depleted uranium.”

  “So you mean on me, huh?” I joked, then realized that she actually did mean that.
>
  This felt very strange.

  “But I was always told we didn’t work with radioactive materials,” I said.

  “Not uranium, but depleted uranium,” she replied. It was what doctors believed caused the Gulf War syndrome. It was used as a shell casing to rip holes in tanks.

  “What are you talking about?” My mother smiled and walked over, apparently thinking I had met a friend from China Lake.

  “Sorry, my name is Jolie.” She held out her hand. “Are you from China Lake too?” she asked my mom. “Is it possible I could interview you?”

  My mom scowled. “My work out there was secret,” she said.

  “Yes, I know,” Jolie replied. “I won’t ask you about your work.” My mom took her business card politely and said she would think about it. But after we left, my mom handed me the card and said to throw it in the trash.

  “Don’t you want to talk to her?” I asked. “For history?”

  “She wants to know too much,” my mom replied.

  Perhaps I wanted to know too much too. Perhaps all my questions would never be answered. Nevertheless, there was one last thing I wanted to know, which I had been looking for in those files but had not found. I wanted to know why my dad had been so happy to retire, why he thought even Alzheimer’s was better than the navy. I wanted to know why he said the navy wanted salesmen and why he said they “faked the tests.”

  * * *

  —

  So I called the former technical director of China Lake to ask him. I called Burrell Hays. I simply looked him up in the Ridgecrest phone book. I remembered that he had once been told to keep silent in the face of corruption too. Maybe he would know my dad.

  Someone picked up the phone. A woman.

  It was then I choked. “Uh, uh, excuse me . . . I mean, is Burrell Hays there?”

  “Yes, but he’s out mowing the lawn,” she replied pleasantly. “Can I help you?”