Sign Here

When I was a Minuteman launch officer, the highlight of my day, at least in terms of creating stress, was crew changeover. When I first started on crew, that happened three times a day for two days. When the alerts were changed from 40 hours to 24 hours, it happened twice -- once when you arrived and the old crew departed, and once when your relief showed up and you left for home.

Most of changeover was quiet -- going through various housekeeping items -- but the thing that could always cause me to feel a little tense was signing for the coded documents. This was a sheaf of manuals -- I don't recall how many, but about twelve sounds right -- that were all classified Secret. We had to inventory each of them. In most cases, inventory meant we looked to see if the cover sheet matched what was expected from the binder title, and then signed a red sheet in the front of the binder to say yes, it did. Periodically, some wag would say that we could speed up changeover by just putting those cover sheets all in one binder, and by the weird logic of missile crews, it almost made sense. After a moment, you'd think No, that's not quite...right, although it would take you another moment to think of why it wasn't quite right.

The reason all of this would make me tense was that every so often, when I was bored, I actually would inventory the documents that I'd agreed were there, and every so often I wouldn't actually be able to find them. Sometimes the cover page didn't seem to have the right date, or an attachment couldn't be found. I would quietly panic. If, in the remaining hours of our alert, I still couldn't find them, I'd make sure to chatter a lot to my relief, so as to distract them until they signed for the documents -- and then, if I was coming back down again, I would look very carefully to make sure they were all there. Oddly enough, they always were.

Then we would inventory the launch authenticators, aka 'the cookies'. They let you confirm that a launch code is valid. (This assumes that you're not just going to say 'The hell with this, I'm keyturning anyway'. Followed quickly, at least in theory, by Launch Inhibit lights across the board. ) Once, the old crew walked out as we walked in. Turned out they had hidden the authenticators on us. We said we would refuse to take the alert until they told us where they were; they said 'fine with us, we're out of here!' as they rose in the elevator to the ground level. We called the cop upstairs and told him not to let them leave the room until they told us where they were. They were surprised.

Normally, the handover wasn't that dramatic.

Once the inventories were done, we signed a document in the changeover log Accepting The Alert. At that point, we were the Crew On Duty. The signed sheets were kept, essentially, forever -- I think that the ones more than six months old were taken back to the base and stored somewhere. On my very last alert, I flipped forward about twenty blank pages, turned it over, and signed the log as Mickey Mouse and as Donald Duck. It was a minor form of rebellion. Much later, I thought of the crew that was about to accept an alert who turned the page over to sign and found that. I smiled a little, thinking of their consternation -- and then I thought This was the Strategic Air Command. They had NO sense of humor. Those guys probably got into trouble. I felt badly about that. I guess, twenty five years afterwards, that doesn't count for much.

Okay, sign here.