When armies collide, the toll of war is obvious. For most of its history the geographical entity that is the United States has been spared that price, yet in preparing for foreign conflicts the U.S. military has subjected our own land and our own people to a taste of the destruction it can inflict. Richard Misrach’s new polemic, Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, is a look at the history of that war at home.
A monolith of volcanic rock stands in the middle of one of the alkali flats of central Nevada. The Northern Paiute Indians called it Wolf’s Head; white settlers dubbed it Lone Rock. The only relief for miles, it remains a striking landmark.
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A fighter bomber doing 2,000 miles per hour covers a lot of ground very quickly, so training exercises require large areas. In addition, modern flight trainers emphasize that pilots should be adept at flying close to the ground, the better to avoid antiaircraft fire. “The next war will be fought down among the trees,” said one Air Force pilot.
Holmes and Bargen found the Navy unresponsive to their objections, and to the complaints of numerous other area residents, who were, as they wrote in a petition to the local base commander, “completely fed up with the ear splitting, nerve-racking, and heart-rending noise of these bombers. . . . It is impossible to eat, sleep, work or relax due to the constant noise.” Residents of the nearby Dixie Valley, in fact, had moved out of their homes after Navy planes caused more than 500 sonic booms in the valley between 1982 and 1987. Worse, the jets and cruise missiles often roared over at treetop level. The Navy paid compensation, but residents say they received only 10 to 30 percent of their properties’ real value.
“It was also the most graphically ravaged environment I had ever seen. I found myself at the epicenter, the heart of the apocalypse. Alone, no sounds, no movement. No buildings, no roads. No indication of life, no promise of civilization. Only the smell of rusted metal. Bombs and lifeless holes. Side by side were great beauty and great horror.”
The Indians. The Numa or Northern Paiute Indians regarded Wolf’s Head as a sacred site. When the marsh waters withdrew in 1984, hundreds of graves of Native Americans, some more than 3,000 years old, were revealed. When the Navy went before Congress in 1984 to have its use of the bombing range reauthorized, it conceded in its environmental statement that some archaeological artifacts had been found at Lone Rock in the 1930s. The Navy claimed that the bombing would prevent unauthorized persons from collecting these artifacts.
The craters and twisted metal and spattered mud create, of course, a landscape of devastation. You can imagine the screaming explosions. You can also imagine what is there now–the silence, as if everyone had died and now there is only the vast space of the desert.
