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Midnight requisitions at NORAD

By PAPPY MOORE
In 1969, I was a year out of East Texas and a year into the Air Force. I worked at NORAD headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain, just south of Colorado Springs.

We called it "the Bat Cave," and that's what it looked like. There was a long tunnel into the mountain facility protecting America's skies, about 20-25 feet high cut out of the granite. The area inside where the buildings are located is several times as high as the tunnel. I worked shift work, while the vast majority of the workers there worked week days.

The evenings, nights and weekends belonged to the shift workers. The buildings inside the mountain were deep inside the mountain, and the tunnel extends to the other side of the mountain. Workers ride a bus inside, and then are let off outside the first of two large bomb blast doors that are essentially like bank vault doors.

At that time, one of the two doors had to be locked at all times. The procedure was for the outside door to be opened while the inside door was locked. Workers would walk inside the first door, and stand in the holding area between the doors. This procedure meant there was always some time spent in the holding area between the two huge doors. One night, on the way home, I got stuck in there 4 hours, when neither door would open. I always thought it was a drill.

Once one got past the second vault door, it was a short walk to the buildings, ending with a walk up the stairs. The buildings sat on huge springs, all about four feet tall, like giant mattress springs. The buildings had no exterior at all, so the innards of the building that one normally never sees were exposed.

I worked inside a vault that was an adjunct to the Command Post, and only the dozen or so of us cleared to be in that vault were allowed inside there. We all had top secret clearances, and we all had crypto access clearances. We had access to all the electronic communications going into or out of the mountain. Days were hectic, but the nights were usually fairly calm.

Because we were there at night, when only a hundred or so of us held down the fort, we had the run of the place. Most offices and the Command Post were available to us. This was in a day before office supplies were kept in locked rooms or cabinets.

Getting an office properly stocked with supplies is always an effort in the military. One is always trying to get the best staplers, the best pens, the best pads, the best and most of everything needed. I don't know if it is still done, but in those days, the Midnight Requisition was the Order of the Day. Put bluntly, the needed supplies are located in the supplies of other units, and requisitioned. There's a rationale that we all work for Uncle Sam, and it's just a matter of which unit gets which supplies.

There were 33 generals assigned to the mountain when I worked there, and very few of them were ever around at night or on weekends. Once a week, they'd have a big meeting in the mountain, and there would be almost three dozen Air Force issue blue staff cars, each bearing the number of stars of the general it contained, each parked inside the mountain, each with an NCO driver standing by it. But most of the time they were gone, and I probably don't need to tell you that generals always had the best supplies.

It's a good thing those days were before video security cameras captured everything that happens inside the mountain. There was plenty of security for getting into the mountain in those days, but not much security inside the mountain, once past the two vault-like bomb blast doors. If we had been found out, I would surely still be doing time in the brig today for pilfering supplies on our weekly trips foraging the office supply cabinets of others. President Nixon gave us a presidential unit citation, and in early 1970 I shipped out to Southeast Asia. It was a strange but fulfilling time for a young man a year out of East Texas.

© 2007, Pappy Moore, All Rights Reserved. Pappy Moore is a humorist, a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home. oaktreefm58@hotmail.com