"There was a lot of pride about being on a Nike site," remembers Thomas Garcia, who served at the Presidio Nike site from 1957 to 1974. "You knew what you were doing was important."
Bud Halsey watches over the troops like the Army colonel he still is, making sure the operation is running smoothly. High above the barbecue, a few wisps of late-afternoon fog dance along Wolf Ridge -- what the Army called Hill 88 -- where once a radar tracking unit swept the skies for enemy planes.
"These soldiers watched those radar scopes 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for 40 years," says Halsey. "I guess it paid off because no one dropped anything on us."
If you want to get a sense of what it was really like for Nike crewmen to keep their lonely vigil in the Headlands, try spending a night at Bicentennial Camp, just over the ridge from missile Site SF88L. Campers will be disappointed to discover that the Park Service has done a poor job following through on the camp's bicentennial theme. You might have expected the grounds to feature fire hydrants painted to look like Revolutionary War soldiers, or be patrolled by park rangers wearing cuffed bell-bottoms and wide ties, or maybe have a 40-channel CB radio continuously squawking out "Convoy" by C.W. McCall. But no dice, not even a pair of fuzzy ones. Clearly, this camp has a long way to go before it deserves the name Bicentennial.
Once you get past that, spending the night at the edge of a fog-shrouded missile site is an experience that leaves lasting impressions. The summer fog in the Headlands is often so dense, it practically takes on the properties of a solid; Nike vets referred to the area as "Pneumonia Gulch." Boxed in by swirling gray walls, you can feel completely cut off from the rest of the world, as the Nike crewmen no doubt felt staring blearily at their radar screens, waiting for an enemy who never came.
Missile men saw themselves as sentries at the front door of Fortress America, a heroic duty worthy of the mythic names the Army bestowed on the missiles themselves. Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, was worshiped for embodying the attributes of both Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Zeus, the chief god -- not a bad pedigree for an anti-aircraft missile. Nike-Ajax was co-named for a brawny, stolid warrior who was one of the heroes of the Trojan War. The later Nike-Hercules missiles combined a sense of victory with the fabled physical prowess and cleverness of Hercules. A planned third generation of missiles, Nike-Zeus, never made it into production, which is just as well, since when you get to Zeus, there's nowhere left to go, mythologically speaking.
For now, at least, the Greek chorus in the Headlands has been silenced. The gods of war have been knocked off their hilltop perch, leaving behind the fog that outlasted them all.
The Nike Missile Site at Fort Barry in the Marin Headlands conducts tours on the first Sunday of each month from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. Nearby Bicentennial Campground is available by reservation. For more information on both sites, call (415) 331-1540.
