Full Body Burden Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Given the constant ravages of wind, rain, and snow, the road out to Rocky Flats can be rough. Old-timers tell stories of flat tires and overheated radiators in the summer, black ice and whiteouts in the winter. Back in the fifties, when the plant was being built, the weather sometimes made it impossible to work. The wind alone could push a man off his feet, and cattle knocked down outhouses while men were still inside. That’s all changed now. The road is paved and the old guard shack is gone, replaced by a compound of more than ninety buildings, all hidden from the road by a bluff. Only the entrance gate is visible.
    May can be as cold as February, but this afternoon is tentatively calm. Cottony clouds rest their bellies flat against a blue sky. Meadowlarks sing. The dry brown of winter has given way to foothills spotted with a few pine trees, hardy grass, and fragile wildflowers. Beyond the foothills a sharp-toothed ridge runs from north to south, with the dark, flat slabs of the Boulder flatirons in the distance. The road is nearly deserted. Families are at home or church or waiting for tables at restaurants.
    Stan Skinger was twenty years old when he started working at Rocky Flats. He’d worked as a plumber during high school back in Illinois and traveled west for the wedding of a friend. His friend had a Colorado bride, but Stan fell in love with Colorado. He heard about the plant andapplied for a job. He didn’t know what he was getting into, and he didn’t particularly mind. He just wanted to be in Colorado.Rock climbing, biking, skiing, he loved it all.
    Like many employees, Stan started out as a janitor. The pay was good—no, great. And he didn’t mind being a janitor. He got a kick out of the old coal miners who worked in the bowels of the plant where the plutonium work was done—the hot zone, they called it. And he liked meeting the new college kids who came in all cocky about climbing the corporate ladder. He kept an eye on the job postings, and when a position in Plant Protection opened up, he applied and became a guard. Just when his paycheck was getting really decent, he was drafted. Stan served two tours in Vietnam, the second time in Special Forces. He didn’t like to talk about what he saw there. It changed him.
    His wife and his job were waiting when he returned. But after two years in Vietnam, Stan wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to Rocky Flats. He’d have to carry a gun and he felt a little jumpy. And he wasn’t naïve. He knew what they did at Rocky Flats. It was a bomb factory. Most employees didn’t want to think too much about that. No one used the word
bomb
. They had special words for the plutonium disks that rolled off the production line: triggers, pits, buttons. The bomb was called nothing more serious than a “device” or “gadget.” The workers were making the parts, not pulling the trigger.
    Stan wasn’t the only one who felt uneasy. Like some of the old-timers who had been in the Navy and seen the nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, or served in the Army and experienced some of the atomic bomb tests in Nevada, employee Jim Kelly—who started working at the plant in 1958, and eventually presided over the union—knew right from the start what they did at the plant. He knew the destructive power of the bomb. It was terrifying. He and other workers reconciled themselves with the notion that when the “device” left the plant, it couldn’t explode. That was technically true, since the nuclear bombs from Rocky Flats were sent down to Amarillo, Texas, where they were packed into a nest of conventional explosives.
    Jim admitted to himself that this argument was like somebody sayinghe worked in a dynamite factory, but he didn’t make explosives because the blasting caps were made somewhere else. It was a way to deny what they were doing. It bothered him, but he kept it to himself. He didn’t talk to his family about it, and like others he tried to repress the enormity