An Anti-C Story

I was in the second-to-last class to go through prototype at S1W. As most of you know, this was the first Navy prototype, ever, so it had been around a while. In fact, about one out of every five “drills” was often the real thing; that plant had the worst attitude I’d ever seen in the program, and that includes my own.

One of the things we all had to do before we graduated was an “end of the world” drill in full anti-C’s. These were typically huge productions with twenty or so students actually playing, several staff guys supervising, and everyone from IBO on down monitoring. Since we couldn’t all fit in hull, they always ran the drill on the starboard floor inside the main building, where a lot of the auxiliary systems were located.

When my section got to run the drill, they had us suit up in the outhull building and then muster for a pre-drill briefing before going inside. The novelty of wearing anti-C’s (a.k.a. “Devo suits”, if you’ve never had the pleasure) had yet to wear off, and we were all pretty excited. Besides, it beat studying for checkouts or trying to look busy for twelve hours.

Just before the briefing started, we were joined by one other student in anti-C’s, a relative newcomer to our plant: Miss L. She was one of a handful of civilians going through the officer version of prototype. Back when I went through school, there were no female nucs, (and there were only two women at the site, period; the other worked in the cafeteria) so she always got noticed anywhere she went in the plant. We blueshirts were under strict orders from our TC to be polite, but avoid unnecessary contact with, Miss L. This wasn’t much of a problem; although she was quite the little flirt (especially when trying to get a checkout), she only seemed interested in the officers.

So we got down to business in-hull, cleaning up the spill and trying to put on a show for all the people watching. Inevitably the spill was located in the dirtiest place they could find, probably to maximize the field day potential of a bunch of enthusiastic nubs with kimwipes. While the cleanup was fairly easy, removing your anti-C’s correctly once it was over (and while thirty or so guys are watching for any screwup) was a real pain.

But the drill got interesting when Miss L set the radiac off while she was doing a survey, and it was traced to her anti-C's. This was not unusual at our site; S1W was out in the middle of the desert, and there are lots of natural sources of short-lived radiation in the ground. Since we’d just surveyed the heck out of that little patch of the plant, we weren’t especially concerned; you just take off the anti-C’s like always and frisk out. That was until Miss L. started frantically whispering with the staff guy who was monitoring the control point.

Apparently, rather than putting on her anti-C’s over her clothing like normal, she’d instead stripped down and was wearing nothing but skivvies under her suit. While humorous, this wouldn’t have normally been a problem, except now that we had a real situation they couldn’t just stop the drill and let her go change somewhere else. And she sure wasn’t planning on taking them off in front of half the plant.

With the clock ticking and IBO glaring, the staff guys came up with a quick improvisation: they extended the boundary to a nearby bathroom and had her change into a paper poopie suit there. Our shift’s lead ELT was sweating bullets; if she needed to be decontaminated we were up the creek, since there were no female ELTs to do it on site, and the nearest civilian rad techs were a half hour away. Not to mention they’d have to survey the whole bathroom once she got done.

Luckily she frisked out clean, but they never let her play in this kind of drill again. And, from then on out, whenever we were training on donning anti-C’s, the staff always reminded us in a pointed fashion to put them on OVER our dungarees.