Idaho Falls (eBook)

Nuclear Apprenticeship In late October 1959, United States Army soldier Jack Byrnes,twenty years old, set off from his hometown of Utica, New York. A trunk was tied to the roof of his black Oldsmobile, his wife, Arlene, was beside him in the front seat, and his son, Jackie, not yet two, was squeezed in the back among the couple's possessions. They were headed west to Idaho for a new adventure, a more promising future. A reel of eight-millimeter film the couple shot in Yellowstone National Park,not far from their new posting, snared them in celluloid. Jack is handsome and well built, his blond hair just starting to darken. Arlene, blinking at the camera, is thin, pretty, and vivacious. She dotes on young Jackie. Yellowstone is devoid of tourists. Old Faithful erupts on cue. Born June 22, 1939, in Utica, John Byrnes III was the oldest of four children in a Catholic family. His father was a hardworking real estate salesman. By the early 1950s he was making a pretty good living-good enough to buy a cabin nestled amidst New York State's Finger Lakes. During summer and winter vacations, the elder Byrnes introduced his son-everyone called him Jack-to water sports and snow skiing, expensive pastimes even then. Soon Jack, a naturally athletic kid, was blasting watery arcs offshore from his dad's cabin and carving hairpin turns on the icy slopes of local ski hills. Bright and easily bored, the teenaged Byrnes didn't have a lot of interest in school. He liked girls, he liked driving fast, and he liked going out with his buddies to cruise Utica's hot spots and those in the nearby town of Rome. 'He was just a happy-go-lucky guy,' recalls one acquaintance. 'He was one of those daredevils. He'd try anything.' Others, though, say the young Byrnes was more complicated than that, even in his adolescent years. Away from his friends, Jack was a serious, intense young man. He liked to do things his way, and when that didn't happen, his temper could flare. During his high school years, he met Arlene Casier, who attended Rome Free Academy. Arlene, whose father had died, was living with her mother, a quiet, dignified woman. According to a good friend of theirs, both Arlene and Jack yearned for security and the good things in life, and both were in a hurry to get them. Byrnes, his father said years later, was a kid who wanted to grow up fast. At seventeen, he fudged his birth records and joined the United States Army. By the time he was nineteen, he had married his eighteen-year-old sweetheart and begotten a child. After Jack's basic army training, Jack and Arlene plunged headfirst into the stressful world of military life, where the pay is low, moves are frequent, and extended family is always too far away. The couple quickly discovered just how little control they had over their new life. Their first posting in Newfoundland, a sea-and wind-battered province on Canada's east coast, could hardly have been more remote. During his stint in Canada, the Byrnes's first and only child, John-called Jackie by family members-was born. While adjusting to fatherhood, the young GI was assigned to mechanical training and spent his first year and a half in the military learning how machinery worked, how to maintain it, and how to fix it. Sometime in 1958, Byrnes became aware of a new nuclear program run by the army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just south of Washington, DC. The army had built a small teaching reactor and was recruiting men from all three branches of the military service to learn the science of coaxing heat and electricity from atoms.