Poetry, Part Nineteen

The underground Launch Control Center consists of two, cement rooms: the LCC and the Launch Control Equipment Building (LCEB). The LCEB was a square room that housed the non-emergency equipment to power and cool the capsule (LCC) equipment. The reason that the LCC is referred to as a capsule is that it is also made of cement but was built in the shape of a hollow capsule. The room with the targeting computers and control panels and bed and refrigerator and chairs the crew sat on is a rectangular "box" that is suspended from the ceiling of the hollow capsule by four, giant shock absorbers.

The crew enters the underground LCC by first passing through a secure door upstairs, guarded by the flight security controller. He checks the crew's IDs and then buzzes them through. Once inside, they take an elevator down the 60 or so feet to the tunnel junction blast door, a huge metal door with pins that extend to keep it fixed in place. Once through the tunnel junction blast door, the crew checks the equipment in the LCEB and then waits for the on-duty crew to open up the LCC blast door, another large, thick, metal door. The two crew members duck to walk through a short cement tunnel behind the open LCC blast door, then over a short metal bridge, and then enter the suspended launch room to conduct change over with the departing crew.

On the outside of the suspended LCC, along the cement capsule wall at the far end, was a round metal door, bolted to the wall at an upward angle. Behind that round door, which the crew could reach from above the commander's console within the suspended launch center, was a corrugated metal tunnel filled with sand. There were tools affixed to the capsule wall, beside the round door, to unbolt the door, dig out the sand, and then remove the few feet of dirt between the tunnel of sand and the open air above ground. This sand-filled tunnel was the only other exit should the regular means of the two blast doors and elevator be destroyed. One caveat could block this final exit for the crew after a nuclear war: a nuclear blast produces intense heat. Intense heat can turn sand into glass. The crew might be stuck beneath the earth in the LCC with a large telescope of glass blocking their exit. After the food and water ran out, the crew could die in place of starvation. (I won't even get into the notion that one crew member might kill and eat the other to survive a while longer, especially if hope for rescue in a post-nuclear holocaust world might be slim indeed.)

But I always thought outside the box (or outside the capsule, if you will) during my years on assignment at Minot AFB. The following is a product of that kind of thinking:

Evidence

In your cringing helplessness,
will your buried missile men,
undisguised in this defense,
be blamed for all of the destruction?
Accused and unearthed in capsules
built only to save them
for the time it took to launch?

Gone:
Friends, support, the foe,
who will have vanished, doubting their resolve.

Proof could merely be detecting wreckage
to those living enough to care.
If the crew are eventually found trapped, intact, underground,
encased in concrete,
the trace left of all of us can too clearly show
who was at fault.

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