The Guns That Didn’t Go Off

David Rask Behling

The first three-quarters of its century,
not a single pair of civilian feet
traversed this high hard balcony
of natural stone, iron and concrete:

Guns. The largest, we are told, weighed
almost 60 tons. But although the rounds
resounded over waters on the Strait,
not a shot was ever fired in anger.

All through the war to end all war
and through that other, bigger one,
someone stood, just as always before,
in hope and terror, watching the empty ocean.

clambered up the grey wall in front of me, clinging to the rusted metal ladder as I moved higher and higher. At the top I could see the whole complex, the turrets where the smaller cannons were, the massive installation for the main guns, the doors and gates into the warren of rooms and tunnels underneath me. When the main guns were here, 20" barrels, they were mounted on huge carriages that sprang forward to fire and then sprang back down to be reloaded, hidden from the enemy by the thick grey battlements, which stretched out from me on both sides, nearly covering the top of this side of the hill. Below me was the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, tiny on a map, huge in real life. Even though the cliffs and the beach and the sea were awesome reminders of human insignificance, the fortress on the hill, built by humans, was still an impressive sight.

I’m in this place because I’m at a writer’s conference, sitting in classrooms in the buildings of Fort Worden, at the bottom of the hill, officially known as "Artillery Hill." I just call it the fortress, and it’s my refuge, my place to flee to when the sitting or the talking becomes too much. It’s a tranquil place, despite its former use. Trees have grown up among the walls; flowers cover some of the concrete, nature reclaiming what we had borrowed.

The guns hidden behind these grey walls could fire on ships more than 20 miles away, but were only ever fired during target practice. Soldiers had built it, and run up and down the slopes of the hill around me with ammunition and gunpowder. Some of them died, it’s true; several hundred over the 75 years the fortress was in operation. They died of venereal disease, influenza, accidents, suicides . . . but none of them died in battle. These powerful guns and their thousands of human tenders didn’t sink a single enemy warship.

People were afraid when they started building this fort and its three nearby companions. They were afraid especially during WWII, when the imaginations of citizens in Seattle created fleets of Japanese warships lurking off the coast. But this is fact: Japanese submarines made it past the guns in WWII, made it all the way to the inner harbor of Seattle – Japanese sailors watched Americans walk and work along the city’s wharfs and docks.

Even though I don’t know how much money it took to build and maintain the fort, or whether it actually made a difference, I think I do know how much it cost – I can see the "price of freedom" in its massive walls and lethal weaponry. I can see the price of freedom in the cemetery where soldiers were buried far from home and family.

As I left the battlements behind me and walked back down the hill, back to the dorms and the sitting and the talking, a face appeared in my memories, the face of a guy named Mike. I don’t remember his last name anymore. He was an adult who helped with youth activities at the church in which I grew up, down in Tucson. He wasn’t one of the adults who got into the Bible studies or lectures about sex. He was cool and fun. He loved camping and playing capture the flag and Frisbee tag. He and his wife had been married for 10 years and didn’t have any children.

Mike lived part of each week underground, tending one of the Atlas missiles that was a few miles away from the homes and schools of Tucson. He sat in a room, a hundred feet under the desert, waiting for the call from Washington to push the button that would open the heavy doors of the silo and send nuclear destruction flaming into the sky. He knew that pushing that button meant that within 10 minutes the city a hundred feet above him, the city where his wife was waiting for him to come home, where the youth he inspired were looking forward to the next youth gathering, would probably be vaporized into fiery, radioactive dust.

Nobody in Tucson with even an ounce of common sense believed we would survive WWIII. We wouldn’t have to worry about the post-atomic horrors in science fiction stories. But Mike was one of the few that had an intimate relationship with the weapons that would do it. Sometimes, in my imagination, I pictured him sitting for hours at a time with his finger hovering over that trigger. For years he sat at his console. But he sat waiting for orders that never came. Those missiles were never fired, not even for target practice.

By the time I got to college, Mike and his wife had discovered that the reason they couldn’t have children lay in him. He was sterile. He kind of dropped out of things after that, and later his wife divorced him. I don’t know for certain whether being around radioactive weapons harmed Mike’s body; I don’t know if his wife really believed it had, or if that accusation was just an excuse. I also don’t know whether the missile in his silo that aimed destruction at cities in Russia or China made a difference. Maybe it did. What I saw was the cost we paid.

The silos in the desert by Tucson are gone now, except for one, which was left behind as a reminder of those dark years on the brink of nuclear destruction. Once, on a tour, I learned all sorts of interesting things, like how Mike would have worn a sidearm in case he had to kill the other soldier down there with him, if he had gone mad or refused to fire the missile when the order came. Mike would have known the other soldier carried a sidearm for the same reason. Was trust another price? Or is the evaporation of trust the price we’re paying today, in our "war" with terrorists?

The silo doesn’t possess the tranquility of the battlements on the hill. Maybe someday it will, and somebody will be able to sit deep in its domed missile chamber and watch the desert reclaim what we only borrowed, walk through fields of poppies surrounding it, sit in the shade of mesquite trees breaking up the concrete. Maybe someday, the only guns we have will be the ones that didn’t go off.