One of
the big highlights going to visit in Colorado was that my grandfather
worked for the Air Force and could take us to go see some really cool
stuff. He had been in the the Air Force as a pilot and he retired and
went back to work for him as a civilian, working on the computers
that controlled military satellites. When I was young he was working
on the base, that had something to do with the Star Wars program. I
want to remember, and by all means don't clear me up on this case is
not true, that he actually worked on the base that was building the
control systems for the Star Wars program. I have come to discover
that the whole program was almost completely an impractical money pit
for Cold War profiteering. It was cool to think of at the time, I
loved the real, galaxy far far away, Star Wars and so anything named
Star Wars no matter how misguided it was really got my attention. So,
after I had requested a tour 1.2 million times he agreed to take me
on base to take a look at where he worked. It turned out to not be as
cool as I thought it would be, not so as many hands on projects as I
would have liked and a depressingly sparse offering of
Laser-from-space-blowing-up-missles demonstration type stuff. The
base he worked on was a few weeks from being shut down to
non-employees so they had really stringent security protocols to get
in and get out. Around the perimeter they had these un-climbable
fences all around a no-man's-land and then another fence. The
no-man's-land was about 20' of loose gravel that the guard told us
was to stop a heavy vehicle if it crashed the outer gate. The same
guard pointed out an automatic machine gun placement and snipers in
towers. Of course for a young GI Joe fan this was mindblowingly cool.
When we went inside we had to be checked in and searched and
everything and I was only seven or eight so I don't remember exactly
but you had to go into an armored booth where they checked your ID
and then scanned your eye, and weighed so they could check if you
were carrying something stolen on the way out. If everything didn't
check out going in or coming out they would lock you in the booth. I
had to go into the booth alone and I was really scared that I would
do something wrong and end up in lock-down, but it went fine. It
turns out that that given my clearance level and pay grade I could
see absolutely nothing, we mainly walked down the hallways we saw his
office desk and computer which was not to cool, and he showed us the
doors of a couple rooms where he worked but couldn't open because
they were secret. The actual highlight was eating lunch in the
cafeteria, we left that base and went to the Air Force academy for a
tour, that had some fighter jets to look at at least. The big pay off
was that I had pictures for show and tell of me in a nd around a very
scarily secure military base with the implication of my inside
knowledge into the Star Wars firmly in tow. I would show the
pictures around an dimply that the really cool stuff was shown to me
on a strict for your eyes only protocol. I would have loved to go
into more detail but then I would have to kill them.
