Editor's Note: with the recent passing of George B Alvord, it was suggested that we reprint the article he wrote for the NWTA newsletter in 2008, we reproduce it here in its entirety.
I had intended to enlist in the military from the time I was a freshman in high school. Being an Army Brat, born and raised on an Army post may have had something to do with it. I wanted the military as a career and wanted to get into electronics, so I tailored my high school electives to boost my chances of being qualified. The required courses were also in the school's college preparatory curriculum, so if I changed my mind I hadn't "burned any bridges in front of myself."
In October 1953 I enlisted in the Air Force and went to basic training at Sampson AFB, NY. My preparation paid off, as my AFQT score and aptitude scores qualified me for any of the electronic schools offered. At the completion of basic training, I was sent to Keesler AFB, MS for radar maintenance school. The school consisted of 6 months of electronic fundamentals then a "sets" course on specific equipment. Those were the days of vacuum tube technology; transistors and printed circuits had yet to be invented. Radios, TVs, audio systems, fire control systems (and even nuclear weapons as we were to find out) all depended on this vacuum tube technology. By today's standards the equipment was maintenance intensive - tubes which contained filaments that heated the anodes, delicate wire grids and cathodes were always burning out or drifting out of parameters as they aged. A solid grounding in electronic fundamentals and troubleshooting was a must.
While waiting for a class starting date, a group of us were called to an office in Personnel. They told us they had been tasked to provide people with certain qualifications for a special class. The only information the could provide was the course involved atomic energy, we would have to have a background investigation completed for something called a "Q Clearance" (which turned out to be a special form of top secret clearance), would complete the six month electronic fundamentals course at Keesler and then be sent to a base at Albuquerque for additional training. They also asked if there was anyone in the group who had not had chemistry, physics and algebra in high school, if so they could leave now. Many of us in the group knew each other and all recognized that they had picked the people with high AFQT and aptitude scores. Many of us said, "It sounds interesting, let's give it a shot." That decision changed the direction of my 30 year Air Force career.
The electronics fundamentals course covered everything from basic Ohms Law though troubleshooting the Q-13 bombing radar, a B-29 vintage system. One of the first things we did was go to the school bookstore and buy slide rules and learn how to use them to keep up with the math in the course. Slide rules predated the handheld computers we all now take for granted. The small computers were still years in the future. Upon completing electronics fundamentals we shipped to Sandia Base at Albuquerque, NM. Sandia Base we were to find out was operated by the Field Command of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP). This was a joint services command and had Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force personnel assigned. We were later to find AFSWP's predecessor was the Manhattan Project of WWII fame.
Sandia Base was located next to, but separate from Kirtland AFB. (Sandia Base has since merged with Kirtland AFB and become part of Kirtland.) Sandia Base was operated for AFSWP by the Army – MPs on the gates and patrolling, PX instead of BX, Army mess halls, etc. Sandia National Labs operated under the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also located on the base. As Air Force students we were assigned to the 1090th Special Reporting Squadron. We were brimming with curiosity about what we had gotten into, but none of the people we knew from Keesler who had already started the course, would tell us anything. Finally our clearances were completed and we received our security badges for school. The Sandia badges of the time had the security clearance printed on the badge and badges for different clearances had different colors. The school was located in the Q Area – connection Q Clearance for Q Area. The first day we were issued our student notebooks, which were all classified and could not be removed from the classroom. The school had a snack bar and surprise; all the ladies working in the snack bar wore security badges indicating they had top secret clearances, also. On the second day they took us down the hall to the museum and there they were all lined up Little Boy, Fat Man, MK 4, MK 5, MK 6, MK 7, MK 8, MK 9 and the latest the MK 12. That got our attention.
The courses at Sandia were not long, 3 weeks was about average, but they were intense. The first difference from the course at Keesler was the class make-up. The class contained Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force Students and it included both enlisted and officers. The lowest ranking people in our class were A2C (E-3s) and the class leader was an Army LTC with an engineering degree who had been on the Operation Crossroads shots in 1946. Most of the enlisted students were recent high school graduates, while many of the officers had bachelors and masters degrees in engineering. The school gave a test each week; if you failed, you were out. If you had a borderline score there was a board, which decided whether to drop you from the course or let you continue on probation for the next week. To add spice to it, they marked on a curve. With college graduates holding engineering degrees as part of the classes, the curve was steep. Since we couldn't take the student notebooks out of the classroom, the school had a voluntary study hall on the schedule weekly after the supper meal. I had never crammed for a test, but decided along with a bunch of others it would be a good idea to attend the study hall the day before the test. When we got there, we found the entire class, including the LTC class leader.
The tests were different, also. No multiple choice where you could guess and maybe get lucky. Typically, the first or second question might provide a sheet of paper with electronic schematic symbols a tube, a resistor and maybe a battery or switch scattered on the page. The problem might be, "Draw the schematic diagram for the MK 7 Mod 0 fusing and firing system." They didn't want a block diagram, what was expected was all the major components correctly connected. The next half dozen questions would ask for voltages or signals at various points in the system at various times in the drop sequence. If you didn't know how it worked, you were in real trouble. If a subject was covered in the week's classes, there would be a question on the test.
At the end of three weeks, we graduated from the weapons fuzing system basic course, ABE-54. As I understand the course numbering system ABE was the fuzing system (electronic) course and ABM was the mechanical assembly course. The number indicated the sequence of the course, in our case ABE-54 was the 54th basic fuzing system course taught. We were awarded AFSC 33130 upon graduation. From this point, students went on to a course on a specific weapon, the T-7 radar test equipment or for a select few covering nucleonics, nuclear physics and the inspection and care of nuclear capsules. These capsule people became 33230s upon graduation of that course.
For a small group of about 10 of us, which also included Al MacElrath, we
went on to a course called GME-3. This course covered not only the electrical testing and assembly of the fuzing system for the MK5 warhead for the Matador missile, but also the mechanical assembly (M-Bay tasks). As we understood it GME-1 trained some staff people, GME-2 trained the people sent to the 1st Pilotless Bomber Squadron in Germany and this course was to train us to go to the 69th Pilotless Bomber Squadron, also in Germany. The Air Force hadn't yet decided what these weapons were to be called; they were calling them pilotless bombers. A year or so later they decided they were tactical missiles and so the units names changes to Tactical Missile Squadrons. A Master Sergeant and a Tech Sergeant (33170s) were transferred from the 2nd TDS at Langley AFB and joined the class. They were to be our NCOs in the shop in Germany. The reason we had to learn the mechanical assembly tasks also was that our 461X0s (later to be converted to 463X0s) were at Cape Canaveral loading the boost rockets and ballast warheads on the missiles completing their test firings on the Atlantic Missile Range. When we got to Germany one of our first tasks was to train them to perform the M-bay tasks. They would train us to load the boost rockets and warheads on the missiles. Load teams were to be made up of two 331X0 and two 463X0 personnel.
When we graduated from GME-3 we shipped our for our unit in Germany in October 1954 via Camp Kilmer, NJ (a left over replacement depot from WWII) and the MSTS General Patch troop ship bound for Bremerhaven. The tale of our arrival in Germany and life in one of the first missile squadrons in the Air Force is another story.