Dark and Stormy Night

“What do you do down in that hole?” I would ask my mother.

“I catch up a lot on my reading,” she said.

“What do you do down in the hole other than reading?” I asked my mother a few days later.

“We have a ping pong table,” she said. “When I’m not reading I play ping pong with Lisa.”

“What do you do down in the hole when you aren’t reading or playing ping-pong?” I asked my mother a few days after that.

“We practice doing our job. We call them drills, like you should practice your multiplication drills,” my mother answered.

At this time of frequent Q & A, I was eight years old, my brother five, and my mother was part of a grand experiment in how to better protect the United States from nuclear annihilation. Captain Hudson was a missile woman who swooshed effortlessly between the surface world of mediocre report cards and Cub Scout den meetings, and the subterranean realm of launch and command duty of a Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo.

“What do you practice down in the silo?” I asked after one of our den meetings. I slid off my itchy, bright yellow scout kerchief.

“Lisa and I practice turning keys and checking codes against other codes,” My mother looked annoyed with my question. Tomorrow she was going back on alert and down into the hole for a three-day shift.

My mom’s back-and-forth duty lasted for six years and was part of an Air Force program called Project Hera. The idea of putting mothers down into ballistic missile silos was born from a fear among the high brass that men were not fully dependable when given the duty of turning the keys to launch their Minutemen and Titan II rockets. Launch would be requested via an EWO or Emergency War Order on the occasion that all-out thermonuclear war were to break out. One four-star suggested that perhaps mothers, threatened with the potential vaporization of their own children on the surface, would more likely launch the missiles in a timely fashion, perhaps early enough to catch their counterparts in the Soviet Union still mulling over whether to launch their own missiles from their holes in Siberia. Thus Project Hera was born.

During alerts, my school teacher father did his best to raise us with help from nannies supplied by the U.S. government. I was well cared for and the Air Force saw that I didn’t fall through any cracks or down any holes.

Mom was still a very present and engaged parent. After she slid out of her uniform, she would effortlessly take on the uniforms of wife and den mother. Both mom and dad would help me on school projects such as dioramas and adding to our growing fleet of model rockets - our family hobby and the most common activity of our cub scout den.

I recall being so proud of a two-stage rocket my mother and I built. It took us over two months to build and perfect the design, and we were hosting the debut launch for the whole pack out on the air base’s soccer field. Dad set up the launch pad while mom hooked up the wires of the ignition system to the battery in our Volvo wagon. The rest of my friends had taken up their positions behind large pieces of plywood, anticipating a large and fiery debacle. Mom had the arming and ignition switch in her hand while we crouched behind the open door of the Volvo.

10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . .

Capt. Hudson handed the switch to me, saying, “This is your launch, not mine.”

I turned the arming key and pressed the launch button even before the rest of the den reached “2.” The rocket shot into the blue, and we never found it again even though the pack searched the neighboring forest until the darkness came and young guts began growling.

So it was with great amusement that thirty years later, while walking with my mother back to her Volvo station wagon after attending our democratic party precinct caucus, that I again asked her that same old question.

“So what were you really doing down in that hole?”

Mom just looked at me. We were both fatigued from the confusing caucus process and our discussions with our precinct neighbors of who would be best to take that 3 a.m. phone call, whether the most qualified would be Barack or Hillary.

“Lisa and I would mostly talk about you and your brother. We wondered which one of you two would marry her daughter first.”

I have a faint memory of Capt. Lisa Bonasera’s daughter, though I can’t remember her name. We moved from that Midwest air base many years ago.

“Would you have done it mom?”

“Done what?”

“Turned the keys and sent the missile on its way.”

“Of course not.”

I was shocked by the abrupt answer, her admission of insubordination.

“Why not?”

The newly assigned legislative delegate for Hillary Clinton looked at me again, this time with a bemused scorn.

“Did you forget I am a mother?”

Project Hera is therefore an unqualified success.