One of the great benefits of military service is seeing places you would never otherwise see. Sometimes you find yourself in a truly remarkable place. Visiting Site R was one of those truly remarkable experiences of my service.
I served as the Staff Judge Advocate (SJA) at Fort Detrick, Maryland for two years. Fort Detrick is in Frederick, about fifty miles northwest of Washington, DC near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
My SJA staff told me early on that Fort Detrick was responsible for supporting Site R. My staff explained that Site R was an underground command center carved out of a mountain in southern Pennsylvania. I couldn't wait to get a look at this place. So, within a couple weeks of my arrival, I took one of our civilian attorneys on a visit to Site R.
You won't find Site R on your maps. Its existence is not a military secret, but the Department of Defense (DoD) does not advertise its existence or location. If you did not know which turn to take from a state highway winding through the mountains of southern Pennsylvania, you would miss it and never know you were near the place.
We knew which turn to take onto a well-maintained asphalt road that was unmarked except for a sign informing us we were entering a U.S. Military Reservation. The sign also told us we were subject to search and that trespassers would be prosecuted. A tall chain link fence, topped by barbed wire, ran along both sides of the road.
We parked at a closed security gate and showed our identification to one of the Military Police officers there. He verified we were expected and activated the gate. We passed through and continued driving through the heavily forested hillside.
We parked in a visitors parking area and walked downhill to a new brick building with a sign identifying it as the access control point for the Alternate Joint Command Center (Site R).
Security officers rechecked our military identification; verified we were expected; and issued us visitors badges. that enabled us to enter the Site under escort. Our escort arrived shortly and led us to the entrance.
He explained that Site R was constructed inside a monolith, meaning the mountain was essentially one, giant rock. This made it very stable for supporting caverns excavated deep inside. Its designers hoped it was stable enough to withstand a nuclear strike.
We followed an asphalt road into a tunnel in the mountainside big enough to accommodate large trucks. Massive doors, their thickness measured in feet, stood on either side of the entrance. They were beveled to fit the tunnel entrance so that a blast outside would simply seat them more securely in the opening.
As we walked into the tunnel I felt like I was passing into another world. The tunnel walls and ceiling were rough-hewn rock. There was a pedestrian sidewalk on both sides of the roadway that sloped gently downward. The roadway angled to the left before making a sharp turn back to the right and another sharp left turn back to our original direction. Our escort explained these sharp turns were designed to dissipate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation outside the entrance.
After about fifteen minutes walking we approached another, massive steel blast door this one only open wide enough for a person to pass. We walked through and a Military Police officer checked our badges.
We passed through an air lock into what seemed like an ordinary military office building. Except upon closer examination, the building was rather different. The halls were narrower and the ceilings lower than usual, giving the impression that we were aboard a ship. Many of the offices appeared trapped in a time warp from the 1960's. There were lots of old-style steel desks with matching chairs.
Our escort led us to the Site commander's office. He was a Lieutenant Colonel, like me, and was particularly interested in legal assistance for his soldiers inside "the Rock."
The commander showed us a map of Site R and explained its history. The Department of Defense built the Site in the 1950's and 1960's, during the height of the Cold War with the old Soviet Union. Workers excavated five enormous cavities in the mountain and separate caverns for a freshwater reservoir and duplicate power plants. Each of the five largest cavities housed a three-story building. The entire complex was self-contained and possessed communications vans designed to help the DoD reestablish world-wide communications following a strike against the nation's capital.
Site R had been mothballed in 1991 when national leaders concluded it was unnecessary and insufficiently hardened to survive an attack with improved nuclear weapons. However, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1994 and Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 along with the potential threat of nations like North Korea convinced later national leaders to restore the Site.
Our escort led us outside the building to the Site's support areas. We were in another rock-walled cavern, but this one hung with air ducts, water lines, and electrical conduit. We walked past fire trucks, an ambulance, and utility trucks. He showed us one of the generators the site would activate if cut off from outside power. He also led us to the Site's freshwater reservoir. We climbed a steel ladder to a catwalk over an enormous, deep, greenish-blue pool of water that stretched back into a black distance. Underwater lights showed the same rough-hewn rock walls as the rest of the cavern. It was one of the most unusual sights I have ever seen.
It was time to leave, so we signed out and began our long walk back to the normal world. Visiting Site R felt like being a part of a science fiction movie. At the time it seemed a fascinating facility whose potential usefulness had passed a couple decades earlier.
That first visit was in August 2001. The DoD activated Site R the following month on Sept 11th and flew many senior military leaders to the Site as a part of the response to the terror attacks that day, including the strike against the Pentagon itself. I was wrong about Site R's potential usefulness.
Copyright 2009. William D. Palmer.