Last year I wrote about three fiftieth anniversaries. I titled that piece Fiftieth Anniversaries. One was about graduating from Rutgers. The other was about getting drafted into the Army. The third was about high school classmate Diane Van Doren.
In 1968 I finally got to go to California to begin my assignment as a physicist working with an Army group called the United States Army Corps of Engineers Nuclear Cratering Group. I was very happy to be working on a project that was close to a civilian group called Project Plowshare that was working to develop nuclear explosive technologies for peaceful civilian uses. I wish I could have gotten there sooner but at least I did eventually get there.
I was at first welcomed into the group. They were glad to have a bright young physicist to help them with their work. I still remember one of the first assignments I was given. I was told to research what would happen to radioactive materials after an underground nuclear explosion. They gave me three months to do the research. Since I had not taken any geology courses in college, I went to the Lawrence Livermore library and starting checking out and reading books on the topic. The more I read, the more difficult this assignment looked. I worked as hard as I could. Then two months into this work I went to a talk on a part of my topic given by a couple of Project Plowshare people. I thought I would learn more. At that talk I found out that the much larger Project Plowshare people had twenty people working on this topic for two years. They were making a progress report. After their good talk I walked up to them and introduced myself. I described my assignment and what I was going. I also asked for help. The look on their faces was quite sympathetic. They did mention that at least I was in California and not being shot at in Vietnam. I went back to my Army group and said rather angrily "Does anyone here know what they are doing?" I then brought up what I had learned from the Project Plowshare people. I simply stated that I had been given a task I could not do. I also added that perhaps no one could do. This started off conflicts between me and my superiors.
The conflicts escalated over the next few months. Then the people from basic training managed to get back at me. They told the Army that I was a security risk. This was, shall we say, not true. I might have been rebellious in some ways during basic training. I clearly did not want to be a soldier. I wanted to go back to civilian life and physics research as a young adult. But do something to help our country's enemies? Please. I might be an opponent of the Vietnam War and might have wanted better solutions to our conflicts with the damned Communists but I was hardly on their side.
These conflicts escalated to the point where I was kicked out of this group in the summer of 1968. My next assignment was the Presidio in San Francisco. I became a programmer there. Early in my assignment there I met just outside the gate a woman from a group known as the War Resisters League. This was a pacifist group that was part of the opposition to the Vietnam War. Oh -- they were also opponents of the Soviet Union. They even protested in Moscow when the Soviet Union reinvaded Czechoslovakia. It was a small protest and they were kicked out of the Soviet Union but it allowed them to show their opposition to the dreadful Soviet Union. The woman I met from this group seemed favorably impressed with me She gave me the address of their San Francisco office. That is where I finally began connecting up with Vietnam War protesters. Those protesters were also strongly in favor of free, democratic societies. These connections also led to conflicts with the leadership at the Presidio.
Enough for now. More on this topic next year.
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