Donald McCreary was a lieutenant with the U.S. Army Air Defense Command from April 1961 to April 1963, during which time he was involved in the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. McCreary began his service career as an Army air defense missile officer while in the ROTC program at the University of Florida. A college baseball player, McCreary even played a professional season with the New York Yankees organization, and he hoped to remain at Fort Bliss, Texas, as a baseball athlete and instructor. Then the crisis unfolded.
‘My orders, directly from the Pentagon, specified that I was to report for duty to an air defense installation on Turner Air Force Base in Albany, Georgia. At that time, Turner was one of our country’s most important strategic air command bases, housing a large number of B-52 long-range bombers carrying nukes. A new air defense command post was being installed there, and my job was to be a tactical air defense director operating this new command post. The command post was the first of its kind, and we were going to be conducting evaluation and acceptance tests. We were also charged with writing the Army operations manual.
I had my own crew, whose job was to operate and maintain the radar, electronics and communications equipment. All of the personnel were highly trained technicians and operational specialists who had top-secret security clearances. Our job was to protect Turner from potential air attacks, whether from airplanes or missiles. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this base was the closest strategically important target to those nuclear armed missiles that the Russians had placed on the island of Cuba. If that crisis had escalated, it would have been our job to shoot down those missiles and any aircraft that might be launched from Cuba.
The Russian missiles were discovered by U.S. high-altitude reconnaissance planes (U-2s) in October 1962. Shortly after that, the entire North American air defense command was placed on very high alert status. I was the duty officer at the command post when that alert came down to our defense. I will never forget those words: ‘Delta Mike (me), you are ordered to (classified) alert. This is not a drill!’ We had practiced for this but, when I heard the last part and knew it was the real thing, a chill ran down my spine. I was a 23-year-old lieutenant at the helm of a very sophisticated air defense system, charged with defending a strategic air command base from a potential nuclear attack.
We were prepared to rapidly locate, target and track any potential enemy airplanes and/or missiles, and launch our own long-range and powerful Nike Hercules missiles to destroy them. As we all know now, that attack never came, but we didn’t know that then and this high alert status continued 24/7 for quite a few days.
We did have one especially tense period when an unidentified aircraft (potentially enemy but not confirmed) flew directly toward our defense from the direction of Cuba. We were tracking this aircraft for quite a while and giving it our full attention because of its speed and altitude. It was flying at close to 70,000 feet, obviously military because this was far above where anything else could fly.
It continued to advance close to the point where we should be engaging when NORAD (our higher headquarters) changed its classification to ‘friendly.’ No one ever told us, but we speculated that this object was one of our own U-2 observation planes returning from a mission over Cuba. Our military had in place an awesome system of defense for America, and I still thank God that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not escalate any further.’
Abby Weingarten may be contacted via email at Abby_Weingarten@Yahoo.com.