MINUTEMAN III STORIES

by Mike L. Veres

An hour’s drive north of Great Falls along I-15 will bring you to Conrad, right in the heart of Montana’s Golden Triangle. In a region where the typical prairie town has but a few hundred people; Conrad, Montana is a big place with a population of 3000. Still, it is a nice little town. It represents the three main cash crops of Montana: Wheat, Cattle, and Missiles. Papa-Zero Launch Control Facility is just three miles northeast of town, smack-dab in the middle of the 564th’s missile complex. I pulled my very first alert at Papa in July 1976. But Conrad is special to me for other reasons...

Conrad is a surprisingly rich town for being in such a remote location, with a lot of really nice homes on the outskirts of town. It has an unbelievable number of banks to service the local wheat farmers and cattle ranchers. Most of these farmers and ranchers owned thousands of acres (they often spoke in terms of square miles, rather than how many acres they owned), and were “land rich millionaires,” at least on paper. This was largely due to the high inflation rates that prevailed throughout the 1970's. In reality, they could not sell their land and make much of a profit. Most of them had serious cash flow problems, usually needing to take out annual loans to plant crops and maintain equipment.

So some of the local people tried other ways to make a living. The ‘Target Bar’ was built a few miles east of Conrad by an enterprising businessman when construction was begun on the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system. The bar was built right across the road from the ABM site. Although much work was done, the site was never completed due to the ABM Treaty being signed. The Target Bar itself was completed, but when the ABM program was canceled, the owner moved the building back into town where it is now the local Moose Hall. All that remains of the bar at it's original location is a weed-infested parking lot, a concrete slab, and the sign. The sign, naturally enough, consisted of an archery style target on a white background, with a black arrow piercing the center of the red bullseye. Today it is only a landmark.

Conrad also is home to the wooden mold used to build the concrete shell of Papa Launch Control Center. The mold is a huge oval shaped structure painted sort of a silvery color. It sits in the yard of the Cargill grain elevators and railroad siding, fading and peeling in the sun. It is now used to store some of their equipment. Coincidentally, back when we lived in Akron, Ohio, my wife Susan had worked for an insurance company which was a subsidiary of Cargill. It was really little more than a tax write-off for the giant corporation.

Conrad also has the Home Cafe’, where an excellent big, farm-type breakfast could be had for three dollars. Their hamburgers and fries were good, too. There was also a small bakery which did all of their own work. A dozen fresh baked oatmeal raisin cookies could be had for a dollar. I often stopped there on my way out to alert to buy cookies.

Conrad is near the western side of the Golden Triangle, so called because wheat farming dominated both the landscape and the economy. This area had been sculpted by the ancient work of glaciers. It featured land that was generally flat, but with some low, gently rolling hills punctuated by sudden cuts harboring narrow riverbeds and thick stands of trees. About halfway between Conrad and Tango (our Squadron Command Post near Valier), along a back road sometimes used by crews bored with the routine of always taking the same old route, there was an unusual sandstone rock formation. Several massive chunks of sandstone the size of small houses stood in the shallow depression of a field. These rocks were a little harder than the surrounding rocks and land, and were carved out by glacial water as it melted after the last ice age some 14,000 years ago. Fourteen thousand years and still standing! As I drove past those rocks, I often wondered how long our missile sites would be there, and what some future archaeologist would think of them.

The Golden Triangles’ southern corner was at Great Falls. It stretched north to the Canadian border, with Shelby on the west and Havre on the east. Shelby was the scene of the famous 1923 prize fight between Jack Dempsey and John Gibbons. Some of the old-timers still talked about that fifteen round fight. This northern part of the Golden Triangle is known as ‘The Highline’ because of the Amtrak rail line and it's proximity to Canada. Amtrak runs a train called The Empire Builder through Shelby and Havre, connecting the distant cities of Minneapolis and Chicago to Glacier National Park and points west.

For my first year on the crew force, we operated under a schedule that had two crews on site most of the time. Back then, both men were required to be awake at all times, so the two crews would trade off shifts that ran from six to twelve hours underground. This time varied with the seasons, because they were not allowed to depart the LCF until sunrise. The three shifts were performed over a 40 hour period for a total time in the LCC of 24 hours. During a crews' "time off" topside, they would have breakfast or dinner; play pool, or just shoot the breeze with the other people on site. You could walk around outside or shoot some baskets, maybe even take a shower before going to bed. You would see the Facility Manager (a middle-grade sergeant) mowing the lawn, and the Security Alert Team troops getting saddled up to investigate a security situation on a remote Launch Facility (LF). You might even meet the maintenance team you talked to over the hard phone line from one of your LF's, dog tired from a long day's work, in for supper and a well deserved night's rest before going on to another LF in the morning. In short, you could get to know some of the other people pulling duty at these remote sites.

This schedule made it possible to see some gorgeous sunrises, especially from Papa. I remember coming up out of the hole on many cold, clear winter mornings. The snow on the ground crunched under my boots as I loaded my gear into the big blue Chevy Suburbans that us crew dogs used. A look to the west was a real treat. Beyond the nearby wheatfields was the front range of the great Rocky Mountains only forty miles away, all blue and capped with snow; their peaks glowing pink with the rising sun. Katherine Lee Bates' immortal song "America the Beautiful" leapt to the front of my mind every time:

“...O beautiful for Spacious skies, for amber waves of grain; for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain...”

Bates wrote this song following an 1893 trip to the summit of Pike's Peak in Colorado, but I’ll bet she would have also wrote it if she had visited Conrad at sunrise on a clear winter day. This spectacular view made me proud to be an American, and proud to be a part of protecting this great country.

In a cost-saving effort that reduced the crew force by about one-third, the schedule was changed such that only one crew was normally on site, and spent 24 continuous hours in the LCC. This was made possible by placing special seals on certain critical hardware items to prevent and reveal any attempt at tampering, thus allowing the two crewmen to take turns sleeping in the LCC.

When the schedule changed, SAC lost more than some crewmen. The crews lost some sunrises. They lost a rapport with the people topside. It made the job colder, more mechanical, and a little less human.

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