The man who had X-ray vision

Army veteran Darrell Robertson, reflected in a window, recalls an X-ray experience as a participant in tests of nuclear blasts in the late 1950s.

By T.J. GREANEY
Thursday, June 11, 2009

On the Fourth of July weekend of 1957, Darrell Robertson was on a train from Fort Lewis, Wash., to southern Nevada. He was one of hundreds of young men with orders in hand to take part in a training exercise that they were told was crucial to the fight against communism.

The native of Lamar was headed deep into the burnt landscape of the Mojave Desert, to a place called Camp Desert Rock. There, between 1945 and 1958, the U.S. military conducted 106 atmospheric nuclear tests.

At the time, Robertson said, military brass believed a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets was likely. They were intent on developing a group of troops hardened by repeated exposure to radiation. They thought exposure to radiation was like sunning on the beach: First you burn, then you tan.

“Today, you think, ‘How would you ever harden troops to that?’ ” Robertson said in an interview this week at the Tribune. “It’s not something that you can become accustomed to or environmentally be exposed to and continue to go on. That’s just not a fact. But see, they didn’t know that then.”

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http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2009/jun/11/nuclear-blasts-toll-lingers-for-one-man/

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Today, as he and his wife commute regularly back and forth from Lamar to Truman Memorial Veterans’ Hospital and Ellis Fischel Cancer Center in Columbia for his treatments, he sometimes daydreams about seeing just one more blast. Only this time he’d like to bring along world leaders such as Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel and others.

That’s because, he said, if they ever saw a nuclear bomb detonate with their own eyes, they’d never, ever want to dream of ordering one dropped in combat.

“I do believe it would change their minds,” he said.