Boomtown, U.S.A.

In the filling room, Cloud's team fastens a pressure lid on the kettle and hoists it up 15 feet. Someone hops onto an industrial tug, like the kind used to move airplanes at airport gates, and pulls a train of bomb bodies under the kettle. Movable platforms are put in place around the bombs, and a couple of people climb up to do the filling.

The kettle has fittings in its bottom; the PBX is squirted through hoses into the bomb casings like toothpaste. Filling bombs with explosive is not as scientific a process as one might imagine. Experienced fillers on the platform use a flashlight to monitor the flow, and they eyeball the right amount of PBX, clipping off the hoses between bombs. It's a bomb, after all: A little more or a little less explosive isn't going to change its quality. Excess PBX is scooped up by hand and set aside in a regular cardboard box for disposal. The filling transforms what is an ordinary steel pipe into a bomb. "It's kind of simple, really," says Cloud. "There's not as much to it as you might think."

Bomb Squad (II)

Donna Kindred, 53, a supervisor, has worked at the plant for 24 years. Many members of her family also have worked, or now work, at the plant: her father, her mother, her husband, her sister, one son, two uncles.

"This place has supported my whole family. I'm proud of the quality work we put out. I wouldn't want our soldiers to be over there and have a dud. I had a son in Saudi Arabia [during Operation Desert Storm]. Some of what he saw there had McAlester Army Ammunition Plant stenciled on it. He could say, 'My mom helped make that.' "

McAlester, Oklahoma is home to Oklahoma State Penitentiary -- Oklahoma's maximum-security prison, which includes death row. The town also has a Boeing plant that produces parts for commercial aircraft, as well as a 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart. Despite the bombs, though, MCAAP is McAlester's employer of choice. For one thing, salaries in production start at $15 per hour -- a figure that Boeing, Wal-Mart, and the prison can't touch. And MCAAP offers relative job security, some chance for advancement, as well as health insurance, retirement benefits, and government vacation and holidays. The plant runs a four-day week, with 10-hour-shifts, and that schedule appeals to people who work on farms. Residents often try for years to get hired. Says Kitty Corder, who works for the state employment-services office in town: "If I had 15 people here in the office and one job at the plant, they'd all be applying for it."

And yet there is something reserved about the relationship between town and plant. There is no sign at the town line that says, "Welcome to McAlester -- we make the bombs that keep America free!" Not a single business makes even a glancing reference to the ammunition plant. There is no Boomtown Video, no Rocket City Hardware. The high-school team's nickname is the Buffs -- short for the Buffaloes. The reserve is an unspoken acknowledgment that making bombs is serious, not something to be brandished about cavalierly.

McAlester Army Ammunition Plant was born in the frantic mobilization after Pearl Harbor. The entire place -- nearly 3,000 buildings and hundreds of miles of railroad track and roadways -- was constructed in 18 months and opened for production in May 1943. Its dimensions are vast. The perimeter fence encloses 44,800 acres -- three times the size of Manhattan. The plant not only produces weapons for each service as the need arises, it also houses stockpiles of ammunition for all four services.

MCAAP is the Defense Department's largest storage facility. Its buildings have 6 million square feet of space, enough to make six large suburban shopping malls. That space is divided among 2,816 separate buildings. All but a handful of those buildings are ammunition magazines, or "igloos." You don't want too much explosive in a single igloo; you want igloos separated by enough open land that an explosion in one will not set off a chain reaction.

Just inside the plant's front gate is the first of MCAAP's many curiosities: a meandering stream called Peaceable Creek. The name did not come from some military official with high hopes that the bombs would remain in storage for good. The creek had its name long before the bombs arrived.

Alongside MCAAP's main road -- even in the heavily trafficked areas -- deer, turkey, and geese wander at all hours of the day. In more-remote areas, there are wild pigs, foxes, and bobcats. Just before the second security checkpoint is MCAAP's award-winning day-care facility. It has 41 kids, from 6 weeks old to 5 years old, and a waiting list. Underneath the center is a concrete bunker to protect the children -- not from bombs, but from tornadoes. McAlester sits in tornado alley.