Nuke material guards gather for LV reunion

Tuesday, May 14, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

The Marines who once guarded Lake Mead Base and its nuclear secrets gathered in Las Vegas 42 years later without the atomic cloud hanging over them.

Most of the 600 were young -- like Fred Staples -- and arrived in the hot Southern Nevada summer of 1954 from Camp Pendleton, Calif.

"It was desert out there, sagebrush, sidewinders and scorpions," Staples of Mt. Hood Parkdale, Ore., said Monday night at the reunion of about 70 members of Able and Baker Companies at the Rio hotel-casino.

Between making sidewinder sandwiches and ducking the sand blown across the area east of Nellis Air Force Base, these Marines helped guard nuclear materials on their way into atomic weapons exploded at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Although Staples had been trained for under-sea demolition, he ended up at Lake Mead Base, part of the security forces that trained and took care of America's nuclear and non-nuclear arsenals in the early '50s.

"That's about as far away from underwater demolition as you can get," he said, as men all around him hugged and slapped each other's shoulders in greeting.

Former Clark County Sheriff John McCarthy was part of the unit that arrived to open the base. Now of Dallas, McCarthy said it was great to see old friends. In 1978 he ousted former Sheriff Ralph Lamb as sheriff and today works as a civilian with the Dallas Police.

Joe "Chief" Escarcega, former sergeant of the guard, arrived from Tombstone, Ariz., for the reunion.

"They couldn't pronounce my last name, so they called me 'chief,"' he said, cheerfully recording the scene on his video camera.

For John Spurgeon of Mt. Grove, Mo., the photographs of the softball team brought back memories of athletic triumphs. Between games, Spurgeon cut hair for 50 cents at the base.

Charles Brintlinger of Chicago said he spent his days as a former sergeant and clerk, typing reports, but remembers four layers of security at the base, enough so that nobody knew what was going on.

"We were so young, and we did what we were told," he said. "Young kids today wouldn't put up with that."

Jim Hamann of Dayton, Minn., spent three years at Lake Mead Base, from July 1954 until the end of 1957. He also visited the Nevada Test Site about four times, during Operation Teapot, a series of above-ground nuclear weapons experiments.

Hamann, a member of the National Association of Atomic Veterans, warned fellow Marines that some of them had been exposed to radiation "without realizing what you were exposed to."

He urged the men and their families to go for medical checkups.

The Marines are returning in a little more than a year. They plan to hold another reunion in Las Vegas, said Ray Eicher of Las Vegas.