Boomtown, U.S.A.

Bomb Squad (I)

Larry Lame, 54, a Vietnam War veteran, worked for a number of years in production at MCAAP and is now an accountant there. His father, Sammie Lame, died in the last fatal explosion at MCAAP, on January 25, 1971, at the age of 46.

"My father was killed on a Monday. There were six guys in the building that night. Three were working, three were in the break room. A guy with a forklift had two pallets of old 20-mm ammunition. It was real old stuff, black powder back from Vietnam. It went off. It blew the roof off the building. The three who were working were killed. The three in the break room survived. They never did tell me why it blew up."

From the outside, the factory buildings where the big bombs get made -- MCAAP's so-called A-line -- don't give away many clues about their function. In fact, the buildings look desolate. The only hint that something unusual might be going on inside them is that parts of the buildings are buttressed with carefully positioned mounds of dirt rising two stories, and long slides run down these berms from the buildings to ground level.

The slides are kind of an inside joke at MCAAP. If you need the evacuation slide, good luck getting to it. And if you did manage to get to the bottom in one piece, as one employee said with a laugh, "it would just give your body parts a head start" -- on the way to kingdom come.

Billy Don Cloud is a supervisor in the building that is at the center of the bomb-making process -- the place where gray PBX explosive is poured into steel bomb casings. Cloud has been at the plant for 22 years. "I started here when I was 28 years old," he says. "I came from the oil fields. Is it hard work? Yessir, it is. And dangerous. But you just don't think about it. You block it out -- like if you worked at a grocery store, handling groceries every day."

Just inside the building, Cloud and his group are wrangling a big green kettle the size of a hot tub into position. The group of eight look more like bakers than bomb makers. Everyone who works production at the plant wears white coveralls and a brimless white cap. The coveralls are designed to reduce the possibility of static electricity and are laundered in flame retardant. The plant-supplied clothing also protects street clothes from the ingredients of bomb making: paint, tar, and the gooey explosive itself, which spatters around during filling operations.

"Don't get any of the powder on your clothes," says Terry Moore. "You won't ever get it out."

The comparison to baking is not too far off. The enormous kettle, delivered from a mixing building, contains more than two tons of warm PBX, plastic-bonded explosive that is relatively stable and easy to handle. It's the dough used to make bombs; when filled, they will go to a hot room where they will cure for 48 hours. Cloud uses a small motorized cart to move the kettle down the tracks to the filling area. As the kettle rolls along, the wheels set off the occasional pop -- tiny flecks of PBX left on the metal tracks, even after clean-up, pop off when squeezed between the wheels and track under heavy pressure. The quantity of PBX in the kettle is enough to flatten this building, as well as the one up the line where bomb casings are prepped -- and the one down the line where finished bombs are touched up, inspected, and loaded onto rail cars.

Moore hops up on the moving kettle and with a gloved hand reaches in and scoops up a fistful of PBX. It's a good batch, one that will flow smoothly and quickly. The PBX looks like wet, gray clay. Moore, who has been at the plant for six years, says that the work did make him nervous when he first started. "You look around and wonder, How much explosive is in this one building? You worry."

A grinning Billy Don Cloud cuts in, "That's why we got a preacher!"

"They do try to spread us out," says Moore.

A 2,000-pound bomb does not contain 2,000 pounds of explosive. The prepped bomb bodies themselves weigh 1,500 pounds apiece. Their destructive force, in fact, comes in part from the hundreds of pounds of metal fragments that they generate. MCAAP -- which also makes all sizes of bombs filled with concrete for practice -- uses a clear designation to ensure that people know what's what. The noses of live bombs are circled by three bright-yellow stripes.

Once the kettle of PBX has made its way to the filling room, the process moves along with businesslike briskness. Except for lifting, everything is done by hand; even at this critical stage, nothing on the production line is automated. (The production buildings are also without air-conditioning. In the summer, inside temperatures reach 100 degrees or more, and everyone is still shrouded in coveralls.)