Duty At America's Nuclear Outposts,SUPER GUARDS,By MSgt. Matt Glasgow Soldiers May 1980

You don't want to run into PFC Roger K. when he's working. He might have to kill you. Nothing personal you understand. It's his job. It's one nobody wants. Someone has to do it.

TONIGHT, his job begins with a routine guard formation. From all appearance, he and his buddies could be falling out for World War III. Pistols and rifles. Machine guns and grenade launchers. Flak jackets and live ammunition. For Roger, it's routine.

The clutter of voices falls away as SSgt. Ross B. yells the group to attention and calls names from his roster. After everyone's been checked out the NCO adds, "LISTEN UP! WITH THE WIND CHILL INDEX,IT'S GOING TO HIT 20 OR 20 BELOW ZERO TONIGHT. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR GLOVES, PARKAS, AND HOODS."

The job is too important to let weather interfere. They've got a nuclear arsenal to protect. There is no way of knowing when someone will try to break into the site. (For security reasons, the name of the post can't be disclosed. Troops call it "The Q."

Outside, thick snowflakes slap wetly at faces and weapons as the guards file into a waiting bus. It's not dark yet when the bus pulls up in front of the security complex. One at a time, the guards pass through bars, checkpoints and the cold gaze of a TV camera. They don't seem to notice the rows of high barrier fences, or the razor-sharp, barbed steel tape on top.

Shift change takes place with little talk. It's chow time for the outgoing day crew. Theirs has been a day of checking, logging and watching technicians who work in the area. Now, only guards remain on the site. Roger and his patrol partner crowd into an Army pick-up truck and point it down the road. At first, the truck trembles and jerks. After 70,000 miles inside The Q the two-year-old pick-up had developed a personality of its own.

The patrol winds through the fenced-in area, down a row of bunkers, up a fence line and past the building the security nerve center. Three times around and nothing yet. Darkness creeps over The Q. Snow looms in the headlights and splatters silently against the windshield. A death-like quite makes the air seem heavy. Both windows stay down so Roger and his sidekick can hear anything. It's so quiet your ears hurt. The bunkers still haven't moved, the fence is still standing, and terminal boredom has set in.

Suddenly, headlights pierce the darkness. Another patrol comes out of the night and fades away in the rear-view mirror. It's maybe the fifth time around. Near an intersection, his patrol partner jabs the brakes and yells, "LOOK! OVER THERE!" Roger stares into the brush by the road. In the near darkness, the figure in the bushes is hard to make out. Then is starts to move. "THERE'S ANOTHER ONE IN FRONT, AND TWO ACROSS THE ROAD!" The truck is nearly surrounded by six of a dozen or so deer that live in The Q. the buck and five doe stand motionless, staring into the headlights and searchlights. Finally, the animals drift away. For the two guards it's the most exciting thing that will happen all night.

THE DUTY. "Physical security duty is dull anywhere you go. You get bored to death working out here," Roger says. The athletic, 6-footer glances towards a tree line, then adds, "There's nothing to do but ride around in circles most of the time. "It can be very busy here,some days there are a lot of drops (alarms). There may be a drop tonight, sometimes you get when it rains and snows." No matter what triggers the sensors, each alarm is treated like the real thing. On-duty guards race to the danger point. Back-up guards pour out in waves, with guns ready to defend, attack or secure any point in The Q. There are so many protective layers over The Q, you'd have to be nuts even to think seriously about breaking in. If someone did mange to break in, there is little chance he'd get out alive.

Would Roger shoot to kill? "I'd follow my orders," he says. Rules call for guards to use the least amount of force required to overcome a threat. But when weapons are called for, he has orders, "to use,deadly force." "I don't like to kill anything, but I would if I had to. It's my job." Like the rest of the guards at The Q, Roger joined to be a cop. He got the military police MOS, but not the white hat. Handling physical security at sensitive sites is an MP mission that not many know about. Yet, half of all Army MPs wind up at remote areas, sitting in guard towers, patrolling fences or guarding gates. It's a job not many people like. "My recruiter said the MPs are a great way of life. "It's real glamorous," he told me, "and everyone loves an MP." "I thought I was going to be busting up fights and everything. When I got here, my heart fell down into my stomach," Roger says.

The green pick-up rolls past the nerve center for what seems like the 37th time, but may be only the sixth. Inside the building, dozens of guards work or take breaks. It's Sp4 Tim D.'s turn in "the pit," a windowless, underground room. In its own way, the pit is as silent and barren as The Q itself. The room has a chair, a clock and a rows of alarms linked to every part of the security complex. There's nothing else. When an alarm drops, it's Tim's job to report it. In a couple of hours, he'll go on roving patrol. For now, there are only the clock and the alarms to watch. As a rule, only the clock moves. "I don't mind being down here," he says, "It gives you a chance to think. Besides, this is where it's happening."

He makes a commo check and then goes back to watching the alarms. "This is not the best place in the world to be assigned. I like working with people. The only things you deal with here are deer and raccoons. You do the same thing all the time." After nearly 20 months in The Q, the specialist says, " I put my papers in for Korea, today." It may cost him an extension, but that's something he's willing to swap for a transfer to a regular MP unit. Upstairs, four MPs spend their break in a lively card game. Others man radios, keep watch, or wait for something to happen. It rarely does. Sp4 Steve R. recalls the night an intruder was reported by a passing driver. "He said he had seen a guy walking along the fence line, then saw him again inside the fence. "Man, that was the most excitement I had all year!" We had everybody out there! We combed the area for hour and didn't find a thing." Steve says. The intruder turned out to be a sawed-off telephone pole with a box mounted on it. Had it been a real person, it would have been a first. Officials say no one has ever broken into the Q in the 25 years it's been guarded.

Back in the barracks, the next shift starts preparing to go on duty. Some day shift MPs are getting ready for inspection. PFC Anthony S. turns in the .45 pistol he's cleaned and draws his M-16 rifle. "I've got an M-60 machinegun to clean after this one," he says. "I thought I'd come in the Army to get police experience, then I wound up in this dump. "But it's a serious job, it really is. If we weren't here, terrorists would try to overrun this place to get what's out there," Anthony says. "That could happen, but we won't let it. We can't. Somebody's gotta do this job. MPs are the one's who've got it. But what I'd like to see is physical security MPs being distinguished from the regular MPs. Maybe they could give us crossed pistols with a little wire fence around them. A sergeant who has spent 30 months in The Q says, "This place is not so bad. The guys who pull 12-hour shifts in guard towers in Germany have it a lot worse than we do. It's all part of MP duty, but 90 percent of these people will stay here until they get out. They'll never be MPs in a regular unit.

OFFDUTY: The midnight shift goes on and Roger gets relieved for the night. But there isn't much to look forward to. The Q isn't the armpit of the world, but some say it can't be far from it. Like most physical security duty posts, this one is isolated, small and doesn't offer a wide range of off-duty facilities. "I don't mind the work," Roger says, "The job's got to be done and I'm not complaining about it. But when you get off the job, there isn't much to do." The small library, club and recreation center are already closed by the time Roger gets his weapons locked up. The tri-weekly movie won't be until tomorrow. TV will go off the air soon. The messhall won't open until 6 a.m., and the nearest diner is 13 miles away. Most physical security MPs in the Army enjoy regular hours, freedom from field duty and a sense of purpose that goes with having an important job. Yet there are drawbacks:

*Getting ready for work, pulling duty and putting everything away afterwards often means the normal work day is really 11 hours long. *Ordinary leaves are sharply limited by manning needs and personnel shortages. *Low-cost apartments, or government quarters, are not plentiful. Sometimes they don't exist. MPs on sensitive sites must be top-notch just to keep their jobs. Booze, drugs or a court-martial can get them bounced out of the program. So can a contemptuous attitude toward law or authority.

There are some rewards. "Our people get plenty of time off, "says a platoon sergeant. "Every six days, they get a three-day break. "If you talk to some of the senior Sp-4s who have been to Europe, you'll find that a lot of them enjoy it here, except that it's out in the middle of nowhere. They get a lot of time off, compared to a battalion in Germany," he says.

During the breaks, Roger says, "I go home, it's only about 50 miles away. I try to get home as much as possible,usually every break." Getting home often helps a lot, says the MP company commander. "Thirty to 40 percent of my people live within 20 miles of the base. That aids their morale." "But the typical soldier coming in here is 19, straight out of school, and doesn't have a car. He's thirty miles from the nearest city, and there's no public transportation to speak of." "Too, he wants to be a regular MP. That's what he enlisted for," the commander says. A 20 month minimum tour at The Q is required before anyone can volunteer for a transfer. By that time, most volunteers have to extend their Army enlistment by a few months if they want to go overseas for more traditional MP duty. "I'm swamped with people extending to go overseas, or re-enlisting to get out of here," says the commander. "They don't reenlist to change their MOS, just to get to a regular MP unit."

THE THEAT. Despite the sacrifices that go with the job, MPs at this nuclear storage site express a certain pride in the heavy responsibility they carry. "My troops realize that the terrorist threat is real, " the platoon sergeant says. "It's here, it's in Europe, it's all over the world. "In Europe, people didn't really take it seriously until something happened, like the Baader-Meinhof gang. That type of threat is here, too. It could happen anywhere, anytime. My troops know that."

Physical security has not always gotten the emphasis it needed. There was a time when the theft of rifle ammunition, guns and conventional explosives happened far too often. "We lost so damn much stuff back in the late 60s and early 70s, that people really started to push physical security," says Maj. John Snodgrass, a physical security expert at the Army Military Police School, Fort McClellan, Ala. "Before that, I don't think anyone knew much about the program. "A lot of commanders lost their job for losing weapons, ammunition and equipment. And we saw things worldwide terrorists did: Lod Airport, Orly Airport, Munich, Rome. That's why we've started pushing physical security," Snodgrass says. It's not that way today. You just don't lose weapons anymore. "But you can never protect a nuclear installation to the point where you can be totally 100 percent, sure it can't be taken."

"The bad thing about terrorists getting a nuclear weapon is that they could use it to hold an entire country hostage, until their demands were met, or at least made their demands public. A nuclear weapon would be a terrible thing to hold a country hostage with, but by God it can happen!" Perhaps such a terrorist attack would have already happened, if it weren't for a handful of physical security MPs. It's not exciting, challenging duty. But world peace and the Nation?s security depend on the soldiers who guard America's nuclear outposts.

Used with permission of the U.S. Army.