The Plutonium Files Read Free Page B

plutonium injections. Thanks in large part to the massive releases of material that began in 1994, my thin manila envelope had grown to eight filing cabinets. As I sat on Main Street, listening to the late-afternoon, end-of-summer sounds and the deep silence of the country, I wondered what the people of Italy thought of Elmer’s story.
    Though it was not yet six o’clock, nearly every store on Main Street was closed. City Hall was locked tight. So was the Uptown Cafe. But several women were talking quietly in the Magic Mirror Beauty Salon, one of the new businesses that had come to town. When I asked them if they had ever heard of Elmer Allen, they all began talking at one.
“I read something about that in the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram.”
“Didn’t they test something on him when he was in the Army?” “His widow still lives here, I think.” “Isn’t she rich on account of that?”
    Fredna did still live in Italy and had received a substantial settlement from the government. But she had not moved out of the small house that she shared with Elmer for so many decades. She had aged rapidly and had begun using a walker to get around. While she was still gracious, a guardedness had crept in and she no longer gave interviews. But Elmer-ine, who as a child had been sent out to Italy’s fields with her brother to pick cotton, had become more outspoken than ever. She often said she couldn’t imagine going through life without knowing what had happened to her father. Although theirs had been a complicated and combative relationship, the knowledge had helped her better understand him.
    On my way out of town, I swung by the cemetery. Sitting astride a lawnmower, a man in a broad-brimmed hat was working his way around the headstones. Down a hill behind this beautifully manicured swath of green is another collection of graves where Italy’s African Americans are buried. Elmer Allen is there. On my first trip to Italy, Elmer had been dead only a year and the grass had not yet grown back over the chalky soil where he was buried. Now the grass lay thick and undisturbed. At the head of his grave was a beautifully carved tombstone that wasn’t there during my first visit. Next to the Allen family name, the inscription read:
    ELMER
J AN. 26, 1911
J ULY 18, 1947
“ CAL-3 ”
J ULY 18, 1947
J UNE 30, 1991
ONE OF AMERICA’S
HUMAN NUCLEAR “GUINEA PIGS”
    The inscription was his family’s shorthand way of telling visitors how Elmer had been transformed by the U.S. government from a man into a number after he had been injected with plutonium. This was the story of injustice that Fredna, Elmerine, and I had pieced together at the kitchen table. Strangers, though, might have a hard time deciphering the tombstone’s meaning. Even in Italy, the story was already fading from memory.
    Would any of what we had learned from the thousands of documents made public over the last several years be remembered? I don’t know the answer. The granite, at least, will last.
    Eileen Welsome

Albuquerque, N.M.

March 1999

PART ONE
The “Product”

PART TWO
Atomic Utopia

PART THREE
The Proving Ground

28
C ITIZEN V OLUNTEERS
    The military maneuvers at the Nevada Test Site captured the nation’s imagination. Letters poured into Washington, D.C., from citizens throughout the United States who wanted to witness the fury of an atomic bomb. The commission had a stock response for the letter writers: “The Atomic Energy Commission does not deliberately expose any human being to nuclear radiation for research purposes unless there is a reasonable chance that the person will be benefited by such exposure. 1 Needless to say, we are interested in exploring all possible means of evaluating the biomedical effects of atomic blasts, but we have restricted such experimentation to laboratory animals.” The following are excerpts from some of those letters:
    Dear Sirs: Please inform me how to apply for a job in the experimental department (guinea pig). Yours