![]() “There’s no direct answer to what caused it that we know of,” insisted Floyd Lutz, who is eighty and owns a water treatment business in San Antonio. That’s how the device was supposed to work, after all. It seems likely that a detonator was accidentally bumped and then ignited, quickly setting fire to the sphere of highly explosive TNT and uranium metal. Over the span of almost six decades, memories have faltered and blurred, and the question of why one of the warhead assemblies in Igloo 572 sparked off remains frustratingly unanswered. A soldier, Sergeant Edward Joseph League, at a promotion ceremony at Lackland in the sixties. But they never made it all the way into Site King’s center. “We’d just go under the fence,” recalled Floyd Smith, who also grew up on the base at the time. (The authorities stopped the kids before they got to the second fence, aborting their mission.) Others, mindful of the barbed wire topping the fences, went low. One day he carried his Roy Rogers cap gun on a mission with his buddies to climb over the first fence around the property, foretelling the commando operations he would later lead as a legendary Navy SEAL commander. ![]() Reachable by way of a hard hike through tangled underbrush and across Medio Creek, the complex exerted an irresistible pull on young Bill McRaven, who lived at 212 Baseview Drive. For some Air Force kids, that all seemed to promise high adventure. Site King’s 88 acres were surrounded by three concentric rings of chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and K-9 units and armed guards patrolled the grounds. But the business of fighting a nuclear war was something adults generally didn’t talk to them about. After all, the droop-winged B-52s that carried thermonuclear bombs on their global readiness missions landed nearby for servicing, and the weapons designed to kill millions of people came in for regular refurbishment at Medina. Many of them knew that Site King had something to do with nuclear weapons. Most of the kids growing up at Lackland were insulated not just from the outside world but also from the base’s grim purpose: preparing to fight a civilization-ending nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Everyone else’s mom was looking out for you.” “Parents didn’t worry if we were out riding bikes. “It was such a sheltered environment,” said Claudia Petroski, now 67, who grew up there. At sunset, the soulful notes of “Taps” brought the day to a close. (On trips into San Antonio, the kids would gawk at “Whites Only” signs posted above public drinking fountains.) Officers’ wives attended white-glove afternoon teas and called the kids to weekday supper at five o’clock sharp. Because the community was integrated, like all military bases, Black and white kids played together in a way that was uncommon.
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