Audio
Oral History Interview with George Reader
Transcript
Abstract: George Edward Reader moved to South Florida from Fort Worth, Texas for work at the Strategic Army Command [STRAC] . At the beginning of this interview, Reader talks about packing up all their equipment within 24 hours, boarding the train, and traveling to Miami, Florida. He goes on to talk about the equipment, arriving in Miami, living in the tent city, the berm, the missiles, how military were treated in Florida City, and his family.
NANCY RUSSELL: This is Nancy Russell, Museum Curator at Everglades National Park, conducting an interview on October 19, 2002 regarding the Nike Missile Base at Everglades National Park and associated history within Dade County. May I have you state your name, please?
GEORGE EDWARD READER: My name is Chief Warrant Officer II, George Edward Edward Reader II, Army of the United States, Retained.
RUSSELL: What were the dates that you were duty stationed in the area?
READER: I was one of those persons who came here originally from Fort Worth, Texas when the President of the United States declared a state existed between us and Cuba and the Russians from Fifty Second Artillery STRAC, three units: A Battery, B Battery, and C Battery. We were put on the train immediately because we were a mobile unit and brought here to Dade County, Miami. We originally were set up in various tomato factories and bean factories in a line from here up to Miami. C Battery was placed up at Hialeah; D Battery was placed up Tamiami off 2741; A and B Batteries were placed co-batteries at the Everglades National Boundary, right at the road going into the Everglades National Park, adjacent and across the road from [unintelligible].
RUSSELL: You said “STRAC.” Could you define that a little?
READER: Strategic Army Command. STRAC meant—STRAC was the designation given to us because we were a unit that was mobile, in constant training in order to maintain expertise. We had all the boxes already laid out. We had to use the equipment that we had for training possibly, but all that equipment was designated to a particular box so that, if given the word as we were given, within twenty-four hours we were able to, and we did, take every piece of equipment we had, put them in those boxes, go to the rail head at Fort Bliss, Texas in El Paso, place all the equipment on that rail head, and get it down here to Miami, Florida.
RUSSELL: So, you got from Fort Bliss here in twenty-four hours?
READER: No. Seventy-two hours. Within twenty-four hours we had all the equipment loaded.
RUSSELL: What kinds of equipment did you have to load to bring down?
READER: Notwithstanding all the jeeps, weapons carriers and trucks necessary to haul and maneuver and pull our stuff around with, but the other items, within the launching area itself, you have dollies to hold the forward body sections; you have dollies to hold the warhead section; you have dollies to hold the main body section. You have an apparatus that’s called an RRT, a ready round transporter, which after you assemble all this material in a bermed area because it is explosive. In case something goes off you want a berm, so the blast goes up and out, not laterally, it goes up diagonally.
You go into this area, and you take the booster and you put it on what was known as a handling rail, and then you take the missile, and you join it to the booster on the handling rail, which is sitting on the ready round transporter, and then you hook a five ton or ten-ton truck up, on a pendle hook. You move it out of the explosive berm area to the launching area itself, and the launching area has rails, it’s like a railroad track. And there are wheels on the handling rail. You move, maneuver it up to the handling rails, and physically—it has wheels on it to help you start it with—the men, by back power push it onto the rails and then onto the launchers. [unintelligible] also in the case you have an A frame. A frame is a hoisting device, load tested to 6,500 pounds to pick up a 5,000-pound piece of machinery. And it’s a portable [unintelligible], in other words, each of the four wheels on it has a crank so they can be turned and also driven, backwards or forwards, by four men that operate it, and then you have another person who has to guide and manipulate the hook that you hook up to the beam to pick something up with. And then you’ve got another person who’s the chain person [unintelligible] all over the chain. So, it’s not something that’s done by one individual. There’s many many people involved. It’s like having an orchestra with an orchestra director, which in reality is exactly the way we did things.
From a personal aspect, there’s a thing that’s called security. And surety. Surety is more important. Through training, the security aspect and investigation of the individual, assures that the individual has surety, they can do a job and do it efficiently and get it done correctly without a mistake. So, these individuals all get together, and you have a person that’s the supervisor; that’s the director. Then you have a reader. The reader reads from the page what the instruction is. Then you have the doers. The doers do what the reader said to do. Then you have the checkers. The checkers check to see that the doers did what the reader said to do. Now you have the verifiers. The verifiers will make sure that the check done is all complete before you go to the next step. What we’re saying here is that at no time were there any less than seven persons involved in one assembly operation.
All right, now that you have all these items that you’re using as missiles together, then you only need five people as the launcher crew. They only need five people on the launcher crew to actually fire the missile because all they have to do is go out to the rails and move missiles back and forth on the rail to the launcher as the mission is changed. Whether it’s an air defense mission or whether it’s a surface-to-surface mission. A lot of folks don’t understand that the basic mission given to [unintelligible] their defense command was air defense. Then as the radar increased in proficiency and distance—Now we’re capable of using an atomic bomb on the end of one of these missiles, a thermonuclear device. [unintelligible] the [unintelligible] word is called red barn. If you ever saw a missile sitting out there with a red barn on it, the red barn was a protective enclosure put on top of the barometric [unintelligible] fixture that’s attached to the end of a missile that had a nuclear warhead inside. It’s very important because of fusing, and there’s different problems involved in fusing, but without betraying any security, what they did was, this sensed the speed of the missile, the barometric pressure up above as well as the barometric pressure of where the missile was going so you had two barometric pressures set into the guidance session when the missile was fired. It said to the missile, okay, if we’re down here at zero, here at Homestead we’re zero, in the Everglades we’re zero, if we’re here at zero, we can’t afford to have [unintelligible] to go up. We don’t want to kill any of our people. So, how high does it have to be? A Hercules missile, when it’s fired, has 176,000 pounds of thrust. Leaves the end of a fourteen-inch launching/handling rail at fifty G’s, and at three to four seconds, depending upon the temperature and humidity, is 12,000 feet in the air. Now, that’s faster than you can move your head. So, we’re going to let this missile arm when it gets to, say, 15,000 feet. Then if it goes off at 15,000 feet, it’s a thermonuclear detonation, it won’t hurt you here [unintelligible]. So that’s with an arm. It’s called the arm barrel. And it gets the fuse barrel, the fuse barrel being what altitude is it going to down to, then go off. [unintelligible] We don’t want to have a down burst. So, this is what was tactically done, kind of automatically. That was set to 3,000 feet below the terrain. To make sure that it went off when it hit the ground. And [unintelligible] the thermonuclear detonation. Does it have to be that way? No. Perhaps the target you had, you wanted it to detonate 2000 feet above the ground to give you some other kind of destructive parameters. Or you could set it then, you could set that in the missile.
RUSSELL: And when you deployed down to Miami, you didn’t have the launcher and everything assembled? You did that when you got down?
READER: The launchers were assembled, yes. They were assembled. All the equipment was assembled. All we had to do was de-cable them and [unintelligible] boxes. And the boxes held all the cables for the different things, they were like rolled up and put in those boxes. You bring the systems out here, you put the launchers in place, put the [unintelligible] rails, tubes across them, and you run the cable from here to the launching control tier, from launching control tier you put it up here to the RCDC, that’s the Radar Control Director Central. That’s where the battery control officer sits with a little red protector switch that says Fire. From there, up in the RCDC, you have access to a low [unintelligible] radar, a target ranging radar, a target tracking radar, and a missile tracking radar. The missile tracking radar is the one that tracks the missile and sends the information accumulated by target ranging, target tracking, and the acquire radar, feed it in the computer and it send it back to the missile tracking radar to the guidance system in the missile. [unintelligible] keep this thing going. They’re all together. They’re on our truck, they’re on our trailer. It’s never taken off the trailer. When in use, like for practice training, you put it where you want it to be, and then you jack it up, put some kind of device underneath it so there’s no strain on the wheels or undercarriage. But when you’re ready to go, you remove the restraints from the undercarriage, put on the wheels, put it on a truck, you’re gone. Same way with all the loads. The only big thing you have to work with is the missiles themselves. Because the missile has to be sent in separate containers. You have the MA1 [unintelligible], rocket sustainer holder which goes in the missile. That’s in a separate box by itself. And you have the fins, the warhead body fins, you have the main missile body fins, you have the forward warhead fins, you have the fins for the forward body section. They go in a separate container. The warhead itself goes in—it’s hermetically sealed; people think it’s pressurized, it’s not really. It’s called an [unintelligible] container. Warheads are shipped in [unintelligible] containers and missile bodies are shipped in Air 410 [phonetic] containers. And the other stuff are shipped in boxes. The sustainer motor is shipped in a box. It’s not in a hermetic container.
So, when you get these items in, the first thing you have to do is receive them all—Do I have all the boxes I need? Now you go take the lid off the box—Is everything in the box that’s supposed to be in the box? And then you put them in the different places they have to go. You take the main body section itself, you put it on the main body section truck. You take the forward body section, put it on the forward body section truck. You put the assembly building and what you have, electronic electro[unintelligible] hydraulic [unintelligible]. And you have a power unit that drives the HPU. The HPU is the hydraulic pumping unit that’s on the missile that powers the other parts. The HPU functions from 1700 to 3000 psi. When the pulse is put into that, that is no longer than 870 milliseconds. So, it’s a very very short period of time. And it receives pulses from the guidance center, or the MTR computer, [unintelligible] does the same thing that the [unintelligible] does. So, they receive what is called pulses [unintelligible]. So, the pulse, that is no longer than two hundred microseconds—So you have five separate pulses, you have five separate pieces of information to that flight unit in the guidance unit for the missile.
RUSSELL: How many people did it take to assemble the missile and how long?
READER: A standard assembly, as service function, consisted of one senior warrant and one junior warrant officer, an assembly sergeant, an assistant assembly sergeant. So, you had a CW3, a CW2 or W1, an SSE sergeant first class, an SST staff sergeant, and then any number of E5s or E4s below him who had just come out of school. And in that sense, for the assembly building you had seven people. Did it take seven people to do it? Uh, turn it off.
[Recorder turned off. Turned back on again.]
RUSSELL: About how long?
READER: According to the book, 7 hours. No short cuts. Nothing going wrong. And as you have in one newspaper clipping that I provided Sergeant Carter, when we went to [unintelligible] service practice at the McGregor Guided Missile Range from here—we went over to Homestead Air Force Base, they popped us on a C130 and they flew us over to Biggs Air Base. From Biggs Air Base, they transported us out to McGregor Guided Missile Range at Carrizozo [phonetic], New Mexico. We went down range, there was equipment already set up for us, and we made the best grade in the entire air defense command. And we were declared Battery B Day right here in Miami, and I’m very happy to say that I was the unit guide out there, and we paraded down the street in downtown Miami and Miami Beach. That was fantastic.
RUSSELL: Now, after the command was given for you guys to come down here, when actually did you arrive here? What month and year? For the record.
READER: For the record, we’ll have to chase out the exact time, to be specific. I frankly do not know the exact date.
RUSSELL: Do you remember the month?
READER: It was some time in ‘63.
RUSSELL: So, 1963.
READER: Yeah.
RUSSELL: So, when you got out to the park, there were no facilities yet?
READER: No. See—That’s another object. We were not in the park. The United States made a contract with one of the local people out there in agriculture to take over space in one of their tomato fields, which is right on the border of the park and the highway going in. We were on the northeast corner of the border by the road going in. So, by the fence itself at Everglades National Park was [unintelligible] Battery and adjacent to us was Alpha Battery.
RUSSELL: So, you lived in a tent city?
READER: Yes, we lived in a tent city. And it was very difficult for a lot of fellas, especially those that were married, that includes me. We had three children. And I became friends with the then chief of police at Homestead, and he had one of his branches building a new complex over here. And we were able to go through the housing office up at Fort Gordon, Georgia, who had to approve all the paperwork and get that place approved so that we could move into it, but prior to that—you know where the water station is on the highway? On the right-hand side? Where the [unintelligible] used to be. Also, across from there—do you have any recollection of the orchid man that used to be there many many years ago? That’s where I lived. I was the closest person to the site. Next to a gentleman by the name of Garza. Just down from where you’re going out to the highway and you turn right, right where that air operation is there. Garza lived there. But Garza was the watcher crewman. I was the only technician to live that close. So, any time something went wrong, guess what. I went.
RUSSELL: And what was your position?
READER: Well, the military specialty at the time was called 225.10. The actual term was Nike universal electronics maintenance materials specialist. Meaning, you can handle anything from Ajax through Hercules. Ajax was powered by acids and hyperbolic fuel, and Hercules was powered by solid rocket fuel.
RUSSELL: So, what was a typical day for you, if there was such a thing, when you were stationed here?
READER: Well, you’re right, there was no such thing as a typical day, just doing what it was necessary to do. As I told your young lady friend here before, having a previous day assembled a missile, adding a ready round transport, having a little bit of rain the night before, going out there in the morning and instructing the men to take it down range and put on a launcher and being told, no I can’t do that because there’s an alligator out there in the puddle, and my instructing my hydraulics mechanic, “Hey, Leroy, go get me a twenty-foot piece of 3/4 inch rope,” and making a bridle with a lock set and a clove hitch and going out and having somebody get his attention from the front, slapping the lock set over his muzzle and put the clove hitch on his throat and carry him out like a briefcase so they could get to work and take the missile out and put it on a launcher. You call that an ordinary day? Yeah, that’s an ordinary day.
RUSSELL: What other kinds of obstacles, so to speak, did working in the Everglades present?
READER: One obstacle was the terrain itself. Folks who cultivated the soil and went out there and irrigated it to bring in their crops were really unaware that this is all coral, the [unintelligible] is coral. And consequently, there are caverns. Well, we weren’t messing with the same kind of material they had. A launcher is 19,000 pounds. The missile by itself is 5000 pounds and whatever you put on top of it. You take a five-ton trailer. What’s five tons? A five-ton is 10,000 pounds. Okay a missile is 5,000. So, you take a five-ton trailer and the missile weighed 5000, how many pounds you have? Well, you got 30,000 pounds. You take that over a piece of ground that nobody’s been over before with 30,000 pounds and all of a sudden, guess what. It caves in. So, we found out pretty early that this existed. And we had to get Caterpillars in, and I was Caterpillar certified, and one other person was Caterpillar certified. Between he and I, we had to train other operators, and also establish a safety officer regimen, so that you have two people actually operating the Cat, and two other people who are going before and after you watching. To see what’s happening to the ground or the terrain around you. And the minute you see something going wrong, you get people to stop. The machine makes a lot of noise, so you can’t use vocal commands. You have to use hand signals that are used throughout the industry, standard hand signals.
One time, when my friend Larry was operating the Cat, and I was out there, the safety officer at the time, he was really lucky because he hit a big hole. He was going forward. That blade went down, that blade disappeared into the hole. But he got it stopped before he went any further. We came back behind it, got a ten-ton wrecker, with a pendle hook on the back of the Cat to help the Cat out. We got tension on the chains with that wrecker before he engaged the clutch on the Cat so the Cat wouldn’t tilt down and go further down in the hole. And each time we’d discover one of these, we’d have to get someone else to come in with a load of the same kind of material, a gravel coral sand material, the same composition, and put it down in there and then go back over it and fill it with water, to make sure it wouldn’t sink anymore, so we’d get a solid place to put things. That had to be done through the entire operation before we got completely set up.
RUSSELL: What were you preparing the ground for? Just for the weight of the missiles?
READER: For the weight of the missiles, for the weight of the launchers. Yes. For the weight of the other equipment to be put on them. Once it’s in place and that configuration becomes a semipermanent one, then you don’t have to go through this.
RUSSELL: And at this point, this was all outside of the park?
READER: Yes, yes.
RUSSELL: And did you do any bombing? Earth bombs?
READER: Absolutely. That’s another colored horse. Standard with any of the missile systems is you have to have a warhead building berm. Several things are done in the warhead building berm. In this case, warhead tent berm, because we didn’t have any buildings yet. We lived in tents.
RUSSELL: Did you have tents that were over the missiles as well?
READER: When we’re working on them, but not down range. Once they’re out there, they’re kind of semi-impervious to weather. They just sit there statically. You have something I could write on?
RUSSELL: Sure.
READER: I can give you a picture later. The berm itself is shaped like a U here. And then there’s a skirted area here for entrance. So out here you would have a little roadway path coming in like so and just coming around like this and going out that way. And then inside, this area here is where you have your tent where you do your work, the berm of course being built-up earth to a specific height so that if you do have an inadvertent detonation the blast goes up and out, and the same here, like this. So that protects the entire launch area, the entire area where you’re at. So, you can come up here in the assembly building and check all this stuff out, then you bring it down here and you put this together, and from here you take it down to the launching area. If you’re doing a booster cluster, an Air 14B Hercules booster cluster is four M5 Ajax boosters, put together, front and rear, in a cluster. The front part is a thrust assembly area, and the rear part is [unintelligible] control area, so you have a bridle that’s put upon the rear, and you put fins on it, and you come to the front and you put the struss structure there in which you insert the boat tail, or the rear end of the missile. And those two then become one continuous unit. The missile motor itself is put in here in the same place. You do the missile assembly up here in the assembly building where you’re checking out the rear body section, the main body section, and the forward body section. Without the warhead, without these motors. You have the electrical tester, the electronic tester, and the hydraulic tester. So, you complete each test. If all these tests go well and good, that’s great.
Then you take everything here down to the warhead berm or warhead building. There you install the sustainer motor in the main body section of the missile. Then you take the warhead section out of the F409 container and put it on the front end, the station #150 of the main body section. And station 87.5, which is the front of the warhead body section, you attach the guide ship. And then you have the main fins that have to be attached to the main body section. You have warhead body fins that have to be attached to the warhead body section. You have forward warhead fins that attach to the warhead and the aft port of the flight control unit. And when you have all that together, you’re ready to mate it with the booster itself. You have the ready round transport which has the [unintelligible] beam on top of it. You pull that in place. You take the lifting device, you put the booster up there, all the way back on its cleats, put the screw all the way back, and then you bring the missile up and you put the boat tail section into the booster. And up front there’s a [unintelligible] assembly, and a [unintelligible] comes up and it affixes itself, believe it or not with only one bolt, at station 150 on the handling ring of the warhead. And you pull it down, and it holds that down to the front yoke, and the rear end is held only with that screw in the back. And there’s cleats, shaped like an L, that are screwed into this booster structure and these [unintelligible]. You don’t need to have something like this that’s slipped over to hold the pin. It’s not going to go anywhere. All it has to do is slide. Between the missile and the booster cluster, there is a thing that’s called an arming lander, that is a physically attached wire between the booster and struss structure and the aft [unintelligible] structure of the missile. And inside the missile are [unintelligible] called VA617s, which are quick activated thermal batteries. When the booster separates through aerodynamic dysfunction, at approximately 12,000 thousand feet, three to four seconds, then disarming landing is pulled. Because the drag of the booster pulls the booster back, but the missile is still streamlined, it wants to go forward. What it does then, it pulls this lanyard which pulls two pins on these two VA617 batteries and they fire the M30 sustainer motor within the missile itself and cause it to go on down range.
RUSSELL: Now, when you guys were in the tent city, how far away from the actual launch site were you?
READER: Six thousand yards. The distance is controlled by the cable, and it’s configured. The cable, the computer, the missile tracking radar and the missile itself. Have I already told you that you don’t need the missile control tower to fire a missile? But you absolutely need the section control simulator, the section simulator group, and the launching section where the missile erecting team is at. You can have all kinds of things go wrong, but as long as you have a telephone or a radio communication between the launcher operators—there’s five crewmen at the launch of a missile—and a battery control officer at the main radar van, you can fire a successful hurtle.
What has to happen is, the missile tracking radar smooths to an altitude of 12,000 feet above that missile that’s going to be fired. And it’s receiving commands from all the other satellite radars and the computer; those commands are still going on. The missile is fired, and when the missile is fired straight up it has all the commands it had otherwise in its system before its umbilical cable severs. When the umbilical cable severs, then the last command it had stays in the guidance unit. There’s a thing in there—there’s a sequential timer and a failsafe device, right? Which is hooked up to the guidance unit. The sequential timer, it’s a delay of a third of a second. So, there’s what is known as a hold-off pulse created in the guidance section. By the radar. When the guidance section loses the radar signal, there is an electronic timer that starts to work by going through the sequential timer before it releases a ground to the failsafe device to blow the missile up midway, give it a failsafe detonation. Well, this is not going to occur before it gets to 12,000 feet. So, you shot the radar up there, the missile tracking radar, to 12,000 feet, the missile is fired, it goes up there, it meets with the signal. The missile tracking radar says, “Ah! I see you mother. We’re ready to go,” and continues on down range to its target.
There are some fallacies a lot of people have told about that that don’t really understand what is known as the sequence of events. When fire command is given—let’s say all communication is gone—we have to use a simulator group and [unintelligible] so the battery commander knows when the target’s going to be, where it’s at, when they have to shoot for it. So, he will order verbally—He can switch all the switches he wants to, but the logic on it can’t get there. It has to be vocally. He gives the fire command to the crewman. The crewman then pushes up the red switch and hits the fire command. There is a 1.75 second delay between the fire command and the launch order. This is so—Certain electronic sequences have to take place in order for it to go good. And it needs those 1.75 seconds for all those things to happen. That’s why two-second delay is put in. So, if you have a .25, it didn’t happen, it ain’t going to happen. It just won’t go. The system will break down.
RUSSELL: How long would it take them to get the ground prepared, the earth berming, and all the things you guys had to do so you were ready?
READER: Notwithstanding what we had to do afterwards, within 48 hours—.
[End tape side A]
[Begin side B]
RUSSELL: Once you were in place, did you have a lot of down time when you just felt you were waiting for an order, or—
READER: No no no no, we were always—You’re talking to an individual who was in B Battery which was the best in the United States. B means Best. Battery B, 2nd Flight, 52nd Artillery, 47th Brigade, 2nd Region, United States Army Air Defense Command was the best guided missile unit in the United States. Probably the world. I was also into—we were in other parts of the world as well. We loved what we did. And we did it very well. Any time something was wrong, it was taken care of immediately. There was no putzing around. Everybody got in with both hands and feet. We resolved any problem and corrected it. The main scheme of our life always was an active, secure ready-to-fire guided missile to do the job it was meant to do. To destroy a hostile target attempting to infringe upon the boundaries of the United States and/or if we should have been given the order to fire a nuclear device on Cuba, it would have been a reliable device and it would have done its job.
RUSSELL: Could you speak a little bit about what the attitude was nationally or within south Florida and within your unit towards the whole Cuban missile crisis event?
READER: Within our unit, our battery, within our defense itself, there were no problems. We were privy to a lot of the operational intelligence that comes right out of the White House and the Pentagon. And I still am. I am on a State Department list, and daily, I get various little communications from the State Department. As for my middle son, who was here with me when I got here from Fort Bliss, today he is the Special Agent in charge of the criminal investigation unit at Fort Lee, Virginia. He’s a W3. So, we’re all very proud of what we do. And the key is simply this: we military take an oath of office. That oath of office, the most important part of it is “to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” That’s what the job is about. It isn’t about whether you’re black, white, yellow, green. It isn’t about whether you’re Catholic or [unintelligible] or Mohammedan or Shinto. It’s about anyone who attempts to destroy the logic and theory and functions that we enjoy as a free nation, the United States of America. When you know you’re doing your job, it’s enough. It’s enough. What isn’t enough is when you go outside the gate or off the government premises, and you run into a lot of these civil yahoos who, I wouldn’t care if you were military or who you were, have no respect for human life whatsoever. Some son-of-a-so-and-so, who is thirteen years old, with a couple of other thirteen-year-olds in the car, to drive by a convenience store and knocks off a seventy-nine year old clerk who’s just trying to make a living and keep his retirement, I don’t really—I get excited and I shouldn’t go there.
RUSSELL: Were you, the military presence here, in Florida City, in Homestead community and south Florida—How were you regarded?
READER: Very well. Very well. After people knew what we were doing, what we were about. Initially, command, out of Homestead Air Force Base and the tomato sheds up the line till we had our own headquarters, and up Fort Gordon Georgia and up Washington, DC, and up [unintelligible] Colorado were a little bit upset with people from Dade County because of this. This is on record also. I hope I don’t hurt some feelings, but if I do, this stuff is true. The local realty associations, really, they saw a way to make a couple of bucks so they upped everything. And we found it very hard to get livable quarters for the persons that were here doing the job. Like I said, I had the closest place, which was across the street from the power plant, the old place out here on the highway—you can turn left at [unintelligible] stand and get out there. I got that from friends of mine who knew I liked flowers and knew the orchid man that lived out there, and this place was next door to him. That’s how I got that place. And it was fantastic, it really was, I was the closest person to the site. Outside of Garza. And later on, becoming familiar with the Italian community here and the chief of police of Florida City, and some people he knew was building some houses over here in Florida City—I was able to get a place there approved by the persons in Atlanta and placed on a list, so I actually had military housing. Uncle Sam contracted him for this home. That kind of started things rolling. Initially I was a little upset because there was nothing here for us. I was just E4. I was running out of funds. A lot of them were. And I went to my battery commander, I said look, come Tuesday of next week, I’m going to have a truck parked in the middle of A-1A out here in Florida City. He said, “What do you mean, George?” I said, “That’s exactly what I mean. I can’t get any help with housing at Homestead Air Force Base or anywhere else around here because they’ve put it up, the group. I’m only an E4, I can’t afford those prices.
RUSSELL: Do you remember roughly what an E4 made at that time?
READER: Hmmm—I’m going to say less than $500 a month. Let’s try to put something to this. In 1975, as an E6 with five children, my income was $857 a month. I can come up with the exact pay amount for you if you want, for whatever purposes you may have.
RUSSELL: It’s just a social history, curiosity question for when the men were actually out here doing this job.
READER: Well, we all had the same kind of—whether you were a major or a GSC, the same lack of reception within the community. Because of these businesspersons. It had nothing to do with the guy next door. Nothing. I could buy a [unintelligible] doing some things, and I went by my old—used to live over here at 1413 NW 14th Avenue and talked to some of those folks over there who remembered exactly, said, “We’re sure glad you’re still alive. Thanks a lot for the job you did. We’re really appreciate it.” That’s the way with common everyday GI Joe neighbor, grassroots American, yes. They’re very appreciative and grateful for what we were able to do. And I want to make this point very very clear. We missiliers [phonetic], we were and are the only tactical unit in the world who was tactical at all times, even during peacetime. We never knew peace. That wasn’t our job. Our job was to be prepared at any time to defend whatever we had to defend. That’s the way we had to train. That’s the way we had to live. That was our attitude. It’s still my attitude.
RUSSELL: So, when you were in the tent city, were you just there for a few months until you were able to get off base?
READER: Myself, because I had a family, I had to help with field defense, yes, absolutely. And as an assembly person, with mechanical knowledge, et cetera, et cetera, expertise, they needed it. But, yeah, I lived here in Homestead/Florida City.
RUSSELL: So, were military personnel actually living in tents out there?
READER: Absolutely. All the time. All bachelors lived out there.
RUSSELL: So, the difference was you had a family.
READER: That’s the difference. I had a family. If you were—This is the law. If you were E4 with less than four years of active duty, you were not authorized to have your dependents with you. Period. So, your basic—If you’re an E3 or an E4 with under four years, you live in those tents. If you have family here, it’s at your expense. If they have to live here, you have to stay in the tent. And you can’t leave the site unless you have permission from the commander, [unintelligible], and the first sergeant.
RUSSELL: And presumably families could not come to the site.
READER: Oh no no no no no. Nobody. Unh-uh. No one.
RUSSELL: You were talking a little bit earlier about the perimeter fences with the concertina wire, the security.
READER: Yes, yes. We had to do it this way. This is kind of a money thing, too. What they did was, they put a separate restricted area around the launching area, and a separate restricted area around LCHR RSC. Between the two, of course, it was 6,000 yards of cable, between here and here. That 6,000 yards was not just cable. The 6,000 yards was arrived at because of missile tracking radar catching the missile. That’s where the 6,000 yards came in. That said, okay, in order to do this, you have to have this amount, this much [unintelligible].
RUSSELL: Right.
READER: So, they put concertina, put three rolls on the ground like this, put two rolls on top of that like that, and do like this, so that’s seven by seven, like so. [unintelligible] For all purposes, you can’t get through there. I went through a missile site over in Germany on another security thing, and they went in and they captured one of their people and come out and—that was the funny thing. Yes, all the people that were bachelors lived out at the site. And we had three shifts. Look at it this way. We had A Section, B Section, and D Section. ABC, C [unintelligible].
RUSSELL: Why is there no C?
READER: A, B and C Sections, okay. A, B and C Sections did everything. Divided up that way. So even in maintenance. So, there were seven of us. Seven of us is divided by three. How do you get seven into three? Well, you got a supervisor who [unintelligible] control everything, so that person is on call at all times. So, you got six. That means two. So, with every day, the people in A Section had to be on duty, you got two people [unintelligible] on duty. Plus, the guards. The guards are broken down into three separate units of guards, too. And most of the guards were MPs. You had your own people as well, but they were MPs.
RUSSELL: So basically, each section worked an eight-hour shift?
READER: Twenty-four hours.
RUSSELL: Twenty-four hours?
READER: Yes ma’am.
RUSSELL: And then you were on call twenty-four hours?
READER: No no, you worked twenty-four hours. If you came on duty at 8:00A.M., and you have a duty section—the next day at 17:00, you were off. So, it’s twenty-four plus. Eight till seventeen is how many? Five? Five and twenty-four? Thirty-three hours? So, you pull a thirty-three-hour day.
RUSSELL: And then how much time did you have off?
READER: Not really. You had the next two regular days. And then you come on your duty day again. When I was given my commission as a warrant officer, I was in Pittsburgh defense in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was a later year, in 1967, after this.
RUSSELL: Directly after this? Were you here until ‘67?
READER: No no no no no. I left here in 1964. And went to the nuclear control unit in Vicenza, Italy. From there I went back to Fort Bliss. And from Fort Bliss I went to Pennsylvania, and from Pennsylvania I went to [unintelligible], Germany. From there I went back to Fort Bliss, and then I went to [unintelligible], and from [unintelligible] back to Fort Bliss. And then I went to Korea and from Korea back to Fort Bliss. Fort Bliss was the home place for air defense people. [unintelligible] Fort Bliss, where I am also a certified, qualified instructor in [unintelligible] fields. In 1975, in cooperation with two other technicians, we re-wrote all the lesson plans used by the Army Air Defense Command in missile school, some 419 lesson plans. We went back over the state-of-the-art electronics from 1910 through 1974. Threw out all the garbage. Brought in all the newness and the accuracy, changed everything that was taught and made it right now. Not without the cooperation of the United States Navy, the United States Marine Corps, and the United States Coast Guard, and the United States Air Force, which I dealt directly with their school commands. I got all their data from them. As well as institutes like Berkeley, like [unintelligible] and got everything together and made it all straight. I’ve not been not busy.
RUSSELL: So, you were here basically about a year?
READER: Year and a half.
RUSSELL: And in that time, what kind of changes did you see in the area? Other than the changes that you all made in the topography?
READER: Are you referring to people changes within the unit itself, people changes to the unit, community relations, or what?
RUSSELL: All of the above.
READER: All of the above. Okay. Yeah, sure. As when we came back from Fort Bliss being the top honors battery in the Air Defense Command from here, and Miami created Battery B [unintelligible] 52nd Day in Dade County, Miami, and we did our parade in downtown Miami Beach.
RUSSELL: And when was the parade?
READER: I forget, but he has a copy of it. The news article. That was really something and a lot of fun and doing our Veterans Day our here in the hardtop at Homestead Air Base, all the people coming out. That’s really when a lot of things happened because you couldn’t go on the site. No such thing as open house. This is an active missile site. With duty. But we pulled the missile out there. We pulled the equipment out there. And I was the one who was standby with Captain Whitaker, who was our watcher platoon leader out here in D Battery. He and I were the chief speakers and presenters of our system to the public. And that was really nifty. I had my wife and three children there; they were out there with me also. A lot of reception, a lot of good questions.
I’m quite sure we calmed a lot of the fears people had. There was a lot of fear involved, too. We [unintelligible], we were right across the street from Aerojet General. What did Aerojet General do then? The Aerojet General had three particular manufacturing facilities out there, made the motors for the Saturn V. And the Apollo system. They dug a canal from there out to the Atlantic Ocean. They built the motors there, they put them on a barge, they pulled them out there, and they towed them up to the docks there at Cape Canaveral. And then put them on the missiles for Saturn. Well, there’s waste material involved, right? So, you have to get rid of it somehow or other, right? So, one night after the sun went down. I was on duty this night, too, and my wife called me [unintelligible]. They had a burn. In other words, they were burning off their trash. There was this huge, humongous, great big, white, red, yellow cloud going up in the sky about 8000 feet and then turning into a mushroom. Everybody was—Did we have an atomic accident down there in the Everglades? Well, that was not it, far from being the truth, but people were calling all over the place. No, Aerojet General just did a burn, and I guess they didn’t do a good press job and let everybody know they were going to do it.
RUSSELL: So, they assumed that there had been an accident here and not an attack?
READER: Yes.
RUSSELL: That’s kind of interesting.
READER: Yeah. After the decision was made to make these permanent sites, of course, the first site to go in, as far as my knowledge is, is the A Battery went into the national park. Then, B Battery was down there a little bit later. D Battery was already up in Tamiami, across from [unintelligible] airport where I used to fly out—also command instructor. They did that one, and then they went up and finished C Battery up at Hialeah. Then they did the basic work for B Battery out in Key Largo, keeping B Battery where it was—it was still active until they had everything done to receive it, so that the receipt could be done within a seventy-two-hour period of time, with no problems.
RUSSELL: So, do you remember when B Battery moved down to Key Largo?
READER: Again, if you want that information, we can get it for you. I can find out anything you want to know including the amount of money that Congress spent in 1967 in grants to find out the mating habits of the African fire ant.
RUSSELL: [laughs] Okay. Is there anything else that you would want to bring forward at this particular time?
READER: Oh, yes. My own displeasure at today’s general population [unintelligible], and we’re talking about what, three generations of folks? This is forty years since. And I had an experience today where I came by Delta Battery up there, of three adults in there and four teenage adults, they were going through the area which was the radar control area for Delta Battery. That’s adjacent to your enervation storage unit up there in Kendall, Tamiami/Kendall. And they’d been coming here for a long time, and they were just going to mess around and do pot shooting and target shooting and what not. They had no idea what it was for. [unintelligible] here we’re talking about three generations of folks who are on the property, it’s actually US Government property, we violate it, but they’re on this property, see these pads and buildings are out there, and have no earthly idea of what their function was. And their function was to defend the United States against the Soviet Union. That, to me, is discouraging. I do what little bit I can, and my comrades certainly do the same thing, on the internet, write letters, meet people to try to clarify history a little bit and destroy complacency. Because history is a very funny animal. If you neglect it, it will devour you sooner or later. It sure will bite you. It certainly will bite you. As it has, civilization after civilization. Rome. Venetia. France. I don’t care who. The Norwegians. You can’t get complacent. You have to remember.
When I was a child in school, I liked history, but not that much. I didn’t really get into it too much until my assignment to Okinawa Shima in 1951, and I got to meet the very fine people, the Rinukiwas [phonetic] from Okinawa Shima. What a beautiful people. They’re very small people. The biggest one fit underneath my arm. I’m only six feet and a half inches tall. But a more honorable, earth right, friendly people I have never met. And I’m dead serious. Once they are your friend, they are your friend for life. And if anyone should ever say anything about you that is the least bit off color, they’d have to deal with them. That’s the way I am. That’s the way I’ve always been. And I have years of that way. And I’ve been out with some married friends of mine, some off-color language being done. I have several degrees myself, other than what I do. I can use dirty language as well as the best language, and other languages along with it. It’s not necessary, is it? It’s insulting. It’s degrading. And it finally occurred to me that if somebody comes up and starts using this, it’s not something that I think about. It is ingrown in my spirit. I will turn around and defend you—snap!—that fast. It may embarrass you slightly that I do this for you, but I won’t apologize for it.
RUSSELL: Okay. Well, thank you very much for your time.
READER: The stories aren’t done yet, but we can stop here.
RUSSELL: Well, we can definitely do a Part Two.
[End of interview]
Description
George Edward Reader moved to South Florida from Fort Worth, Texas for work at the Strategic Army Command [STRAC]. At the beginning of this interview, Reader talks about packing up all their equipment within 24 hours, boarding the train, and traveling to Miami, Florida. He goes on to talk about the equipment, arriving in Miami, living in the tent city and nike missiles. Interviewed by Nancy Russell on October 19, 2002.
Credit
Everglades National Park
Date Created
10/19/2002
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