The Military as Litterbug

Armies are machines designed by and large for human destruction, but they are also generators of huge piles of junk. Even in peacetime, military decisions to scrap costly and complicated systems constantly add more litter to the pile. As a result of 30 years of hot and cold wars, the U.S. Department of Defense has become cumulatively--and with a sense of considerable embarrassment--far and away the nation's biggest litterbug.

Oil-Drum Culture. The hardest hit of all the states has been one of the most remote. Alaska's Aleutian Island chain is littered with an enormous potpourri of debris. More than 2,000 World War II-vintage Quonset huts still poke like ugly blisters above the desolate landscape of Amchitka, the site of this month's scheduled underground nuclear blast. Bomber tails and ruptured fuselages litter the island. An estimated one million fuel drums are scattered on Alaska's north coast. At least 100,000 drums, left by builders of DEW-line radar sites in the 1950s, disfigure the shores of the Beaufort Sea, within the boundaries of the nation's largest wildlife refuge. Some have been only partially emptied by the departing military and are leaking oil, which is toxic to wildlife. Barrel pollution is also responsible for a strange phenomenon: what is known as an "oil-drum culture" among Eskimos living on Point Barrow. Discarded oil barrels are used for garbage containers and toilets; once filled, the malodorous barrels are dumped onto the ice to be carried out to sea when the ice melts. But all too often they drift back to shore.

Ghosts and Rats. The military's detritus is not confined to the frozen north. Camp Kilmer, near Edison, N.J., is a decaying ghost town of fire-gutted barracks and shattered glass. Unfenced, it is a tempting playground for exploring children. While squirrels and kangaroo rats nest in the bomb craters that pock 10,000 acres of California's Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the area is off limits to human visitors because it contains unexploded bombs and rockets left there 30 years ago, when the Navy used the park as a test-firing range. Although much of the ordnance is buried deep beneath the desert sands, a civilian team sent to salvage scrap five years ago disappeared suddenly in a cloud of smoke.

Angel Island, a wildlife preserve in the middle of San Francisco Bay, could be a priceless military museum as well. Instead, it is a monumental eyesore. An abandoned Nike site sits in a tangle of weeds. The remnants of a Japanese internment camp, a crumbling Civil War hospital and dilapidated WAC barracks are nearby. Shortly before the island was turned over to the California department of parks and recreation in 1963, says a parks official, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pointless damage was done by the military itself. Fine old marble fireplaces in the turn-of-the-century Army officers' quarters were smashed by soldiers, and windows were shot out for sport. Bill Allison, Angel Island's manager, shakes his head at the "sheer vandalism of it all" and estimates that it might cost as much as $500,000 just to clear up the litter.

Rusting Junk. The problem is that no one seems to be responsible for what the military leaves behind. The Defense Department stoutly insists that it is not a litterbug, that it makes every attempt to sell its discarded hardware and find new uses for abandoned bases. It is true that when the military packs up it transfers jurisdiction for bases and materiel to the General Services Administration. But it may be years before the GSA can find a buyer for these properties; by then they may be reduced to mounds of rusting junk and broken buildings. Even the Environmental Protection Agency, the organization responsible for policing the nation's environment, backs away from the litter problem. Explains a top EPA aide: "We have the legal responsibility for air and water pollution. Littering just hasn't been a high priority for us."

Fortunately, the GSA can sometimes find intelligent and even ingenious ways to use the bases and equipment it has received from the military. Abandoned Nike missile sites around Pittsburgh now house a medical research center and a police and fire academy. A shut-down naval air station in Sandford, Fla., is now a shopping center. Ghetto children vacation in a deserted military camp in the Sierras, and other phased-out bases have been "recycled" into factories producing everything from house trailers to lumber and frozen potatoes. In Alaska, the Navy has shown that it, too, has a social conscience--by helping to clear Point Barrow, where it has a research laboratory, of its horde of barrels. It plans to crush and bale the barrels, then sell them as scrap in Seattle. The Navy is also planning to build an incinerator to burn the gook in the barrels, thus giving the Eskimos an alternate way to get rid of their garbage.

Plentiful Resource. Such efforts are certainly commendable, but the military does not seem to realize or take advantage of its most plentiful resource: an almost unlimited pool of manpower. As the old joke goes: "If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it." A lot of military leftovers that now litter the American landscape could well be picked up--by the idle hands of thousands of GIs or gobs. Most of them would probably much prefer that kind of work to chipping paint or making a routine "clean sweep-down, fore and aft."

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