Idaho Falls Page 5

  The evening began innocently enough, with Byrnes and Legg joining twenty-five other Nukes at the White Elephant Supper Club for a bachelor party for a civilian who worked at SL-1. A mix of men turned out that night: young servicemen, a sprinkling of officers, some civilian engineers, a few health physicists. Tables were pushed together for dinner. Afterward, the drinks flowed freely. Cigarettes started to pile high in the ashtrays. And, of course, there were the usual toasts, from the heartfelt to the crude, wishing the engaged man happiness in his upcoming marriage.

  Later in the evening, as the party started to break up, a smaller group of men jumped into their cars and headed to the Boiler Room. The nightclub, in the basement of a building on Yellowstone Highway, featured strippers and as sleazy an atmosphere as you could find in a Mormon town. It was a favorite haunt of some of the young soldiers and sailors who worked at the Testing Station, and old-timers say it was tolerated by the conservative civic leaders. On that May night, the men pounded down drinks—tequila and whiskey mostly—as they watched the mostly imported talent bare their breasts. Sometime around 11 P.M., Jack Byrnes brought a young woman named Mitzi to the men's table, introduced her around, and encouraged her to join the group.

  A half-hour before the bar's closing, Byrnes, Legg, and two SL-1 sergeants decided to move the party to the apartment of Byrnes's friend, a civilian employee at the reactor and one of the men gathered around Mitzi. Byrnes asked Mitzi if she'd like to come along; she agreed to. The six piled into the cars and headed to the apartment. The men were drunk and boisterous, excited by the woman in their midst. Sexual tension was in the air. But the party didn't last long. Close to 2 A.M., the building manager pounded on the door and told the group that residents were complaining about the noise. The men, intrigued by the flirtatious Mitzi and emboldened by the booze, decided they didn't want the night to end. They got into their cars again—even though by that time they were thoroughly drunk—and drove to the home of one of the sergeants.

  Sitting in the living room of the small house near downtown Idaho Falls, the men gulped down more tequila and whiskey, a combination that surely lowered whatever inhibitions may have remained. Inevitably, their drunken banter turned to the subject of sex. Byrnes knew who Mitzi was, and the other men knew that proper young women didn't hang around strip clubs unaccompanied—at least not in Idaho Falls, and certainly not in 1960. An investigator who later had occasion to look into the evening of debauchery used a quaint phrase to describe Mitzi: “She proved to be a woman of easy virtue.” Much later, stories would circulate that she was a hooker from Las Vegas who, each year, worked the small Mormon towns in Utah and Idaho. Details about Mitzi, her life, and her presence in Idaho Falls on that May night have never been explained in official documents. What is known? For one, she was a poor negotiator. At some point, with the men crowded around her in the living room, reeking of booze and seething with base passions, Mitzi offered to have sex with them for twenty dollars each. That was a lot of money for the military guys, who were lucky if they made four hundred dollars a month. Haggling ensued, and the price dropped, and kept dropping. In the end, Mitzi sold herself for two dollars a head. Some of the men accepted her offer, while others abstained. Jack Byrnes visited Mitzi in the back bedroom; Dick Legg didn't.

  Sometime around 3 A.M., after Byrnes's quick assignation with Mitzi, he and Legg were standing in the living room behind a sofa, talking to one another. At that hour, and in the wake of the evening's events, the men were bleary-eyed and spent. Suddenly, the verbal exchange took a turn, and Byrnes and Legg started swinging at each other. Before either man could land a serious punch, one of their sergeants jumped up off the couch and pushed the drunken servicemen through the screen door and out onto the porch. The sergeant put himself between Byrnes and Legg before the fight could escalate and then pushed Legg toward his car. Byrnes walked back past the now broken screen door to a dying party. Afterward, neither Byrnes or Legg mentioned to coworkers what had provoked the scuffle. Later, when it became important, the sergeant who intervened between the two speculated that Legg made a snide comment to Byrnes about his liaison with Mitzi—either the morality or the brevity of it. Or maybe, he said, Byrnes had simply told Legg he was drinking more than his share of the communal whiskey.

  It was a tawdry night, one of those embarrassing evenings best forgotten. But it wasn't. Soon, the drunken carousing would loom large in the personal histories and fates of Byrnes and Legg. The altercation may well have been simply drunken rivalry between two young men. It may have been a clash between two visions of morality. Or it may have held greater significance. In subsequent months, a rumor would surface about a tryst between one of the men and the other's wife. Had the mention of a liaison sparked a fistfight between the SL-1 coworkers that night? Could a fistfight over a woman—or women—have set up a deadly rivalry between the men, one that would color the history of nuclear energy? Only Byrnes and Legg could answer that question, and that wasn't going to happen. When the issue became important, a few would try to discover the motivation for the row. Others who were further removed would speculate and gossip. Even now, the reason remains elusive.

  * * *

  It's unclear what Byrnes thought of his actions that night. Maybe he regretted the evening—the hooker, the fight—and maybe he didn't. At the time of the bachelor party, Jack Byrnes was working part time at Kelley's Texaco Station on the Yellowstone Highway. He pumped gas, filled tires with air, wiped windshields clean of splattered spring bugs. He was the kind of guy who needed to keep busy; the job was easy, and he could pick shifts that worked with his schedule at SL-1.

  According to one night operator at the Texaco station, Byrnes was well liked by the other gas jockeys; he fit in, he was just one of the boys. Except when his wife called the station. When that happened, it was as though a switch had been thrown in Byrnes. He invariably got angry and started to curse while talking with Arlene. His coworkers got the impression that Byrnes took the part-time job as much to get out of the house as to bring a few bucks home; they suspected Byrnes was having marital problems. But even a second job didn't seem to put enough distance between Jack and his home life. One gas attendant recalled a night in the fall of 1960. Byrnes came by with a buddy and asked the attendant to cover for him by telling Arlene if she called that he was working that night but out on a call. She did phone—several times. Finally, at 2 A.M., the gas jockey cracked. He had to tell Arlene that her husband was out catting around.

  Despite being stuck in the Mormon heartland, Byrnes had discovered a seamier side to life in the Snake River Valley. It wasn't in plain view—not like the strip of topless bars and tattoo parlors outside Fort Belvoir. But if you knew where to look, it was there. “There was a buttoned-up Mormon culture in Idaho Falls,” says one longtime Idaho resident. “Yet Idaho Falls was the most notorious city around for bars and dives and prostitution and all the other comforts. When you got away from Sunday, there were six other days of the week.”

  One of Byrnes's friends says that by the fall of 1960, Jack was hitting local nightclubs once or twice a week—and Arlene didn't like it. Stuck at home during the day with little Jackie, Arlene thought the least Jack could do was take her out occasionally to dance, see a movie, eat a nice meal. When she complained loudly enough, Jack would grudgingly take her out for an evening. But he much preferred going out alone or with his friends. And when he was out on the town without his wife, one friend later told officials, Byrnes would often dance with unattached women he'd meet at the clubs.

  A coworker at SL-1 remembered one particularly wild night. They were partying at a nightclub in Blackfoot, a small town thirty miles south of Idaho Falls. Byrnes decided sometime after 1 A.M. that he wanted to make last call for drinks at one of his favorite clubs in Idaho Falls, the Bon Villa. His friend couldn't talk Byrnes out of the notion; all he could do was hold on tight as Byrnes flung his Oldsmobile up the dark, two-lane Highway 91 at over one hundred miles an hour.

  As snow blanke
ted the local ski hills in December 1960, Byrnes resumed his weekly treks to the slopes, sometimes alone, sometimes with buddies. He flitted from the mountains to the reactor to the Texaco Station to the nightclubs—anywhere it seemed but home. When he was at home, the fights between him and Arlene were increasingly frequent, and louder. The wife of one supervising military officer later said the rows had a certain script: Jack would criticize Arlene for not cleaning the house, and Arlene would retaliate by venting her frustration at Jack for rarely taking her out at night. The couple also often fought about money; Jack didn't think he saw enough of his paycheck. But it was Arlene who worried about the rent, the utilities, the food bills. Indeed, she had been forced to take a job at Newberry's, the five-and-dime store, to bring in some extra money. But even with that job and Jack's shifts at the Texaco Station, money always seemed tight.

  A Testing Station worker who lived next door to the couple later told officials it seemed as though the two had a screaming match at least once a week; the noise carried through the duplex walls. Once the fights hit a certain frenzied state, Arlene had a habit of gathering up Jack's clothes and throwing them onto the lawn for all the neighbors to see. The wife of one of the SL-1 sergeants said the arguments became so routine that she felt compelled to talk to Arlene about it. The screaming matches, the older woman told her, were becoming the subject of gossip in the neighborhood, threatening to discredit the military folks who by then were being transferred to Idaho Falls in increasing numbers. Her words, she said, seemed to fall on deaf ears. The Byrnes's marriage, to outsiders at least, seemed to be crumbling. It wasn't hard to believe. Jack and Arlene had married young, having Jackie soon after. They had endured three moves in as many years. Perhaps they'd simply entered that stage where each was beginning to take the measure of the other, where romanticized dreams ran up against electric bills, dust on the furniture, and the same face every morning.

  Arlene's friend Stella Davis lays the blame for the tension in the marriage squarely on Jack's shoulders. He was handsome, bright, and personable when he wanted to be, she says. But he just wasn't able to own up to the responsibilities that came with having a demanding job, a wife, and a two-year-old son. He wanted to go out at night with his buddies, drink beer, and party. On his days off, all he wanted was to strap his skis onto his Oldsmobile and head into the mountains, where concentrating on the mechanics of skiing well would obliterate his worries and tensions. On the slopes, he could run as fast and wild as he wanted. If he did it right, he danced down the hill. If he didn't, he'd take a tumble, get up, brush himself off, and ride the lift back to the top to try it all over again. On the mountain, he was in control; he could do things his way. It wasn't like that down in the valley or out in the desert. “He was so young when he got married, and he was so young when he was a father,” says Stella Davis. “It was too much. Take a nineteen- or twenty-year-old boy and he's not ready for marriage, or especially for being a father.”

  Things were also starting to unravel at the reactor. By December 1960, Byrnes's supervisors at SL-1 had judged him “not ready” for a promotion. They weren't thinking about his personal life, though many of the close-knit crew knew that Jack and Arlene weren't getting along. They'd heard snippets of angry bickering and the phone receiver being slammed down when Arlene called SL-1 while Jack was on shift. A few of the managers knew about the bachelor party, the prostitute, and the fight with Dick Legg. Coworkers had heard stories about Byrnes's carousing. Usually, none of that would have mattered to them; life in the young, enlisted ranks can be a rough-and-tumble world, after all. But Byrnes was proving as immature inside the reactor silo as he was in the outside world, and his supervisors were disinclined to trust him with controlling nuclear fission.

  And they thought it a shame. Byrnes's supervisors recognized that the army specialist had above-average intelligence, that he was a cut above most of his colleagues. He was capable of doing good work. He was intuitive and curious, almost voraciously so. He wanted to know how the reactor worked; he was fascinated by the myriad systems needed to spark the atom, boil the water, spin the generator. In many ways, he was exactly the kind of young man the army wanted. But Byrnes had a few quirks when it came to his career. He disliked military authority—a real problem if you're a soldier. He was bullheaded and wanted to do things his way, an attitude that seemed presumptuous for a rookie. And he had an explosive temper, a potentially catastrophic characteristic for anyone routinely entrusted with radioactive uranium.

  The supervisor of the reactor's maintenance crew, army sergeant Robert Bishop, later said that the hold on Byrnes's advancement was entirely justified: Byrnes was immature and wanted to move forward faster than his capabilities warranted. Furthermore, the cocky kid wasn't above playing office politics. Bishop recalled with some bitterness that Byrnes purposefully stirred up trouble between himself and the military superintendent of the plant, Richard Lewis. According to Bishop, Byrnes fed stories about his bosses—often with the details distorted—from one to the other. Byrnes's rumor campaign soured his own relations with Lewis and fueled the inter-service rivalry that was already plaguing the plant's operations. It wasn't until much later that Bishop and Lewis met for a talk and discovered that Byrnes was playing them against each other in the hopes of personal gain.

  Byrnes was, in fact, establishing a reputation with all his superiors. Army sergeant Paul Conlon, the reactor's training officer, later told authorities that Byrnes “was a problem on the job . . . and was difficult to handle.” He said Byrnes liked to work on his own and demanded full credit for what he accomplished, a corrosive attitude on a job that required teamwork. Most distressing of all, Conlon said, was that when Byrnes was displeased, everyone in the reactor building knew it. The young man regularly raised his voice and thought nothing of throwing tools around to demonstrate his displeasure.

  That last shenanigan made an impression on army sergeant Gordon Stolla, who attended reactor school in Virginia with Byrnes and Legg and had been quickly promoted to chief operator at SL-1. He later recalled that Byrnes had moody spells a couple of times a week, during which he was morose, on edge, and angry. Everyone knew when Jack was having a bad day: in addition to chucking tools around the reactor building—a building filled with important pipes and gauges—his face would turn bright red. Byrnes was proving to be such a troublemaker that his immediate supervisors decided on a management technique likely unacceptable today. When Byrnes one day refused a direct order to make a scheduled check of the SL-1 plant, his immediate boss, chief reactor operator Sergeant Herb Kappel, got pugnacious. He offered to take the young soldier outside and “give him a lesson.” Byrnes declined the offer and grudgingly performed the check. Kappel later told investigators that the plant's military supervisor had approved a bare-knuckled approach with the belligerent Byrnes.

  Byrnes knew what his bosses thought, and it didn't please him. He had moved west expecting to quickly earn his reactor operator's license and then a promotion to chief operator and shift supervisor. Four months after arriving in Idaho, he had passed his operator's test—almost everyone did. But the promotion to chief operator didn't seem to be in the cards. Byrnes had done good work on the mechanical crew, keeping the reactor up and running. He was smart and inquisitive, and so he had a hard time accepting that he wasn't moving up the ladder. He hated that he was going nowhere fast, while most of his Fort Belvoir classmates were already in supervisory positions. Being passed over for promotion was more than just embarrassing; It was a blow to his pride, especially since he knew he was as intelligent and capable as any of his cadre members. It also meant less pay. And a lack of supervisory experience could hamper his prospects of landing a job at one of the big commercial nuclear plants that everyone knew were soon coming to America. Byrnes complained to anyone who would listen that it just wasn't fair. As December 1960 wore on, Byrnes's resentment was palpable.

  * * *

  On the surface, Dick Legg's nuclear career was progressing somewhat better
than Jack Byrnes's, which must have been galling to Byrnes. In September 1960, eleven months after Legg's arrival at SL-1, he passed examinations administered by a group of his superiors. He was designated a chief operator and shift supervisor, the job Byrnes wanted. The promotion added a few more bucks to Legg's navy pay, which was less than four hundred dollars a month. And Legg, like Byrnes, knew the promotion would pay dividends when he eventually went looking for work with civilian nuclear contractors.

  By December, though, Legg had joined Byrnes in falling out of favor with his superiors. They worried he might not have mastered the technical areas beyond his electrical background. Even worse, they suspected that Legg didn't have the temperament to oversee the operation of a reactor. Months earlier, when Legg first broached the subject of promotion to chief operator, he was told unofficially not to apply. The reason cited: He wasn't ready. When Legg finally appeared before the review board, composed of military, engineering, and health supervisors, as chance would have it, one of the regular board members wasn't there—a string of family deaths back home had taken him away from Idaho Falls. If he had been, the board member said later, he would not have voted to certify Legg as a supervisor or a chief operator.

  Supervisors, it seemed, had discovered Legg was almost as hotheaded as Byrnes. Bishop, former chief of the maintenance section at SL-1, worked with Legg for three months in the summer and fall of 1960 and found the young man unable to control his temper. Legg habitually flew off the handle and stormed about when things didn't go the way he wanted. Legg's temper tantrums became frequent enough that an older officer assigned to the SL-1 operation finally intervened, offering Legg some “fatherly advice” about controlling his anger. According to Bishop, the pep talk seemed to help; afterward, Legg make a conscious effort to keep his anger in check. Still, Bishop found Legg and a bad attitude were never far from each other. One day, the military supervisor of the plant entered the reactor control room and found Legg with his feet resting on the instrument console. He commanded Bishop to instruct Legg to remove his feet. It took two orders before Legg slowly and insolently dropped his feet to the floor. Legg later complained about the order and gave Bishop “backtalk” for the rest of the shift.