Command and Control by Eric Schlosser Page B

commander. Powell stepped forward, admitted to dropping the socket, and began to cry. He described how it fell and hit the thrust mount, how fuel sprayed from the missile like water from a hose. When he was done, the room fell silent.
    â€œHoly shit,” thought Holder.
    Captain Mazzaro told Powell to come over to the phone and tell the command post exactly what had happened. Powell got on the line and repeated the story. The details were incredible—but plausible.
    Things fell all the time in the silo: nuts, bolts, screwdrivers, flashlights, all sorts of tools. They always fell harmlessly into the
W
at the bottom of the silo, and then someone had to climb down and get them. You could drop a socket a thousand times from a platform at level 2 without its ever bouncing off the thrust mount and hitting the missile. And even if it did hit the missile, it would probably cause a dent, and nothing more, and nobody would ever know.
    Half an hour after the accident, everyone realized what they were dealing with—a major fuel leak, maybe a fire. The
Dash-1
didn’t have a checklist for this scenario. Now it was time to improvise, to figure out what could be done to save the missile and the warhead and the ten men in the underground control center.
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    S ID K ING WAS HAVING DINNER at a friend’s house when he got a call from the board operator at KGFL, the AM radio station in Clinton, Arkansas. It sounds like there’s something going on at the Titan II silo in Damascus, the operator said, a leak or something. King was the manager and part-owner of KGFL, as well as its roving reporter. His friend Tom Phillips was the station’s sales rep. Clinton was about seventeen miles northof Damascus, along Highway 65—and Choctaw, where Phillips lived, was even closer to the missile site.
    Let’s run down there and check it out, King suggested. Phillips thought that sounded like a good idea. They said good-bye to their wives and got into KGFL’s mobile unit, a Dodge Omni that King had fitted with a VHF transmitter and a big antenna. The nickname of the subcompact, the “Live Ear,” was painted on both sides, along with the station’s call letters.
    King was twenty-seven years old. He’d been raised in Providence, a town with a population of approximately one hundred, about an hour east of Damascus. His father was a jack-of-all-trades—a math teacher who also sold real estate, cut hair, and managed a movie theater to support the family and their small farm. King had an idyllic, small-town childhood but also dreamed of some day leaving rural Arkansas for Hollywood. At Arkansas State University, he studied radio and television, encouraged by a great uncle who’d been one of the first TV weathermen in Arkansas. During the summers, King was the drummer of the house band at Dogpatch USA, an amusement park in the Ozarks featuring Li’l Abner and other characters created by the cartoonist Al Capp. The house band played for hours every night, mainly Dixieland jazz, soft rock like “Joy to the World,” and show tunes like “Sunrise, Sunset,” from
Fiddler on the Roof
.
    Working at Dogpatch was a lot of fun, and King got a full-time job there after college. He fell for Judi Clark, a tap dancer at the park, and the two soon got married. Backed by a brother-in-law, King started looking for a good place in Arkansas to open a new radio station. Clinton, they decided, was the place. It was the county seat of Van Buren County, in the foothills of the Ozarks, with a population of about 1,600 and a downtown that attracted shoppers from throughout the area. In 1977, KGFL went on the air as a 250-watt “sunset” station, licensed to broadcast only during daylight hours. King wanted the station to assume the role that a small-town newspaper would have played a generation earlier. KGFL started each day with the national anthem. It played