Interview with William Marvin Swena, October 29, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with William ( Marv) Swena October 29, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Joan Leavitt © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with William ( Marv) Swena October 29, 2004 Conducted by Joan Leavitt Table of Contents Introduction: born Utah ( 1938), family background in Colorado and Utah, first jobs in construction 1 Work at the NTS ( hired 1964), Pile Driver ( 1966) 5 Work on reentry, mine rescue team, safety and accidents at the NTS 8 Tasks of drillers and miners at the NTS 9 Opinions about lab people and laboratories working at the NTS 12 Radiation exposure and RADSAFE at the NTS 16 Importance of documentation re: safety concerns 18 Retirement from NTS ( 1993) 21 Feelings re: Soviet scientists on the NTS ( Joint Verification Experiment, 1988- 89) 22 Protesters at the NTS, commuting to and working at the NTS 23 Remembrances of various co- workers at the NTS 25 Public perception and protest at the NTS 29 Feelings about Cold War and U. S. vs. USSR 33 Development of non- nuclear technologies at the NTS 35 His Downwinder experience living in Utah and contaminated milk 36 Mormons working at the NTS, and reputation of NTS miners 37 Conclusion: talks about the best time of his life, and family background in mining 43 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with William ( Marv) Swena October 29, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Joan Leavitt [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Joan Leavitt: OK, would you start by telling me your family background, your father, your mother, a little bit about them, their names? Marv Swena: My father came from Golden, Colorado, where his father worked in the mines a little bit. And they had a homestead. Your grandfather had a homestead in Colorado? Yes. And he worked in the mines and got the homestead all developed as a ranch. And then the Depression hit and he had to go back in the mines. He lost the ranch and he had to go back in the mines because when he filed bankruptcy and lost it he went to the people that he was in debt to and says, You will all be paid. Don’t worry about it. As soon as I can get to it, and he did. He paid them all. He owned the feed mill, the homestead. Did it take him a lot of years? Right up till just before he died. Really. Really. He didn’t believe in discharging a debt. It was to be paid. That was the way I was brought up. If you owed a man five dollars, it was your obligation to pay that five dollars. And if you told a man something and you shook hands on it, it was as good as a signed affidavit because a man’s no better than his word. That was the way I was brought up. And my great- granddad worked in the mines in the early Colorado on claims and made enough money that he was in the first graduating class from the University of Colorado. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 My father was kind of the black sheep of the family. He never had a formal education, as did the ones before him and his brothers. I had an uncle that was brew chief for Coors Brewery. I had one that was a master mechanic for Coors Brewery. Coors was a prominent employer for your family then? I had an aunt that worked with Coors Brewery for seventy- four years. Is Coors in Colorado? In Golden, Colorado. That’s where it started. Old Man Coors used to live just through the block from my grandparents. And my mother’s father, his family came in with the Mormons into Salt Lake City. The pioneers? Yes. Back in the 1800s? Yes. His name was Kirkham [ sp] and he died fairly young. He was a rancher there. He was a dairy farmer, and he had beef cattle and a few horses and stuff. And as I [ 00: 05: 00] remember, going to my grandmother’s house, she had chickens and guinea hens and turkeys. Now where did your grandmother live? In Francis, Utah. Oh, OK. Is that where your mother grew up, then? Yes. Woodland, Utah and Francis, Utah. They had sheep and some cattle and some milk cows. I can still remember them taking the wheat to the old grist mill, having it ground for flour. Spices and salt and pepper and the rest of the spices is about all they went to the store and bought. Yeast. And sometimes they didn’t even buy that. Sometimes my grandmother cooked sourdough bread. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 It sounds like they were very self- sufficient as far as living off from what they produced. Yes. They made a good living off what they produced. Now was this before the Depression or after the Depression? It was after the Depression when I can remember it because the Depression was over, I think, before I was born in ’ 38. And they were always a close- knit family. I mean they would kill their own beef. They killed their own pigs and chickens and turkeys and geese and ducks. So your mother’s family was into farming and your father’s family was into mining? Yes. And my dad worked in the Park City [ Utah] mines for years and then he got into the timber business. He sold his timber to the mines. Yes, that makes sense. Of course. Mines use a lot of timber. Then before I got out of high school when I was a senior in high school they were building what they called a one- ship dam, and I went to work for Utah Construction. I worked night shift— swing shift down at the dam and went to school in the daytime. Not much sleep? Not very much sleep. Then I went to the— through my dad the guys at the mine that was in charge knew my dad and when I got out of work I went there and they hired me and broke me in as a miner. And it was warm in there, and dry, mostly. The mine was? Yes. There was water running under your feet all the time but we wore rubber boots. But it was warm in there and the temperature never changed. I fell in love with that. Oh, did you? The fact that it was warm? The fact that it never changed? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 Yes. So from then on I left the mines and I went to Green River, Wyoming and worked on a [ 00: 10: 00] thirty- foot dam under concrete shafts. We sank it and did development work on the bottom of a trona mine for San Francisco Chemical. Do you know about what year this was? Nineteen sixty- one. And I went from there back to the mines. Then there was a tunnel job opened up and I went to Steamboat Springs, Colorado and all around in Wyoming. I ended up between Columbine, Colorado and Baggs, Wyoming and we drove a tunnel through a mountain. Are any of those tunnels on I- 70 [ Interstate 70] or are those just mining tunnels? No, this was a water tunnel. I went [ into] construction then. I was working construction. It was way off the good highway. It was dirt road all the way. And the fishing and the being— I loved the outdoors and we were up in the mountains, fifteen feet of snow in the winter. And you were doing construction during this kind of weather? Yes. We were on a camp job. We went in and stayed for six weeks, then we came out for a week. We had CATs and snowmobiles, or they called them snow CATs then. We stayed right in there and for the six weeks we worked twelve- hour shifts and all the overtime you could stand. Get the job done and get out of there? Well, we finished the job that spring. But that was sure beautiful country. Then I went to work on a couple of different tunnels on the Causey Dam [ Utah]. We drove the tunnel and run the spillway race through. And that got over so I went and worked on another tunnel job and we drove that one, and I did stay for part of the concrete on that job. Now were you single during this time? No, I was married. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 You were married? Did your wife travel with you on these jobs or was she located somewhere else? Well, they were right around Heber [ Utah] and I’d go down and live at a boardinghouse for a week and come home on the weekends. And then there was a guy come by— one night when we were stopped in to a place in Echo, Utah and we were having a hamburger and a malt and stuff on the way home from work one weekend— a guy came in there and promised us six [ 00: 15: 00] months’ work if we come down to the [ Nevada] test site. Six months? No, before that I went to Wheeling, West Virginia and worked on a highway tunnel, twin tunnels, and we came within just a little bit of breaking the world record on a thirty- foot heading. Then I came out here, went down and worked on that job, and that guy came and hired us. We came down here and I plugged in the union hall. They must have been expecting this because I took my union card and I plugged in the union hall and paid my dues and they handed me a clearance to go to the test site. Was that a Q- clearance? No, a union clearance. And I went out to the test site and I worked. The first job was Pile Driver in Area 15 in gray granite, and the granite was harder than my head. In Steamboat Springs we had a red granite, and that’s the only granite that I ever came in contact with that was harder than what I was doing out there, harder rock. It was harder to get to break. Well, I was just looking up Pile Driver, and that was in 1966. So was that the first test you remembered, then, was Pile Driver? Yes. I worked on it for a couple years before they detonated it. How long did it take? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 Quite a while. That ground was hard. I was working back there with my partners that came down here with me, old Charles Johnson and Charles Davidson. When we came up that night I said, The only way they’ll get me off this job is run me off. Now why did you say that? Because the boss came back and— I’d set up a jackleg and I was drilling-- and he got mad at me. He said, You don’t drill down here without a chuck tender. What’s a chuck tender? That’s a guy that helps the miner, the guy that tends chuck, changes steel for him. And I was doing it. Was that union- type rules, then? Union and safety. So when I went up that night I said, The only way they’ll get me off this test site is to close it down or run me off. And I worked there till we developed— in the bottom and poured the concrete. And they brought that superintendent that I’d worked with on construction. Jim Van Tassel was the superintendent then. He was good with concrete and grout. I had worked with him in other jobs and his brother was my uncle so when we got into the concrete Van Tassel made me a shifter. Now what’s a shifter? That’s a foreman over a crew of men. My job was to set up all the concrete pours because I knew just exactly how he wanted it set up. Now is the concrete for the hole? Is that what that is there? Yes, they would take it down in the ground, put it in a Moran [ sp] car. A Moran car? What’s that? That’s an agitator car, just like a cement truck, only instead of it having a big belly, it’s just round and long— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Is that what mixes the cement? Is that what you’re saying? No, it’s mixed when it gets there. That’s what they transport it with underground. And that particular deal, they would bring it down in a bucket in the shaft and then put it in the Moran car, then haul it back and then pump it in to line the tunnel with. Now was that a tunnel shot, then, Pile Driver? Yes. You would go down the shaft and then the tunnel work was in the bottom of it. [ Reading] Pile Driver, tunnel. So did you mainly work on tunnel shots, then? No, I worked on some of the shafts. I worked on U3v and U5i. There was a couple other shafts that I worked in. I didn’t like the shaft because when I was in Green River, Wyoming years before that, when I first started, I fell thirty feet. Now that was before the test site? Hurt my back a little bit. Did it take you a while to recover from that? About three days. And then I put on a wide leather belt about this wide [ indicating size] that I used when I was riding barebacks and Brahma bulls when I was a kid. I just put that belt on and went back to work. This was when you were a teenager? Where you working the swing shift, is that when you fell? No. This is when I quit the Park City mines and went up to Green River to work on that shaft. OK. So you prefer tunnel mining over the shaft mining, then. Yes. Tunnels or raises. A raise is just like a marketplace out there— this building that was 150 feet of solid rock and you’d drive that tunnel right straight up through till you hit the surface, drive that raise right up through till you hit the surface or till you hit another level in the mines and stuff. I liked that kind of mining but I wasn’t too overly enthused about shaft [ 00: 25: 00] UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 work. When they shot I went to N Tunnel and worked for a while. I went to E Tunnel first and worked for a while, then I went to N Tunnel and worked, and then they took me back over to [ Area] 15 on the reentry and I worked driving back through that rubble and into the cavity that the shot made and drove a tunnel right back over top of ground zero. Now your work was more before the shot, is that right? No. I did all phases of it. I was on the mine rescue team. Now was that to help when there was a problem, an accident of some sort? That’s what we was trained for but you had to go through that, oh, Bureau of Mines and pass the breathing apparatus. Did you ever have to participate in any rescues? Nope. Did you ever have to be rescued, other than that one time when you fell? Nope. Wow. Hard head. You were just lucky? I was lucky. I got hurt a few times but I never had to be rescued. I had an axe fall down out of a raise one time. Did most people have your kind of luck? I mean were accidents seldom? No. You get a mashed finger, something like that. But when I got to the test site they were just beginning to push safety real hard. And one of the only things that I didn’t have at that time was earplugs. I used to tear up bits of rag and stick them in the ears. And then they got cotton earplugs. And then they got these molded earplugs, and when they came out with them I was one of the first ones to get them. I think someplace I’ve still got that original pair out there because I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 knew that I— and I always wore safety glasses. When the company started furnishing safety glasses I always wore them because I know I just only had two ears and I only had two eyes. You’d be surprised how many people lose their eyes, and I almost lost my hearing. And I had a reputation out there after we ran that drift in Pile Driver for handling bad ground. You were able to handle it, is that what you’re saying? Yes. Then it got to the point to where whenever they, at one of the tunnels, hit real bad ground— What do you mean by bad ground? Hard ground? No. Bad ground. Ground that will fall in and kill you if you don’t catch it. Oh, OK, so that’s unstable? Yes. And I had a reputation for my timbering ability and for keeping ground caught up— knowing how to [ 00: 30: 00] run crown bars out over it and one thing and another— and how to handle bad ground and drive the tunnel anyway. Now is there any way to determine that it’s bad ground beforehand? Are there any signs of it or do you just all of a sudden discover that when you’re there onsite? Yes, that’s more or less how it’s determined. When you drill around, you should have a feel with that machine. You don’t take any core out or anything, but when you’re drilling around you should be able to feel the way it’s drilling, whether your steel plugs up how hard or how soft it is. Well, can you tell me the difference between a miner and a driller? Yes, a driller works on drill rigs outside. And the miner works in the tunnels. Is that the difference? Yes. And then they have a diamond drill crew and they core this stuff and they know approximately where that bad ground is. But you can walk in and look at a place and an experienced eye can tell you whether you better get it timbered up or whether you— UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Do miners drill inside the tunnel? Yes. And load it with dynamite and blast it. OK. And drillers don’t deal with dynamite, is that right? No. So drillers do mostly the hole work, is that right? Yes. OK, and then once the hole is drilled and they need rooms kegged out, that’s when the miners begin to go in there? And so are you lowered down into these shafts? Yes, you’re lowered down into the shaft and as you go down that drill hole, you set the guides for the cage to ride on. Sometimes they’re wooden if it’s a big shaft. Sometimes if it’s a cased drill hole you’ve got the air line for one guide and the water line for the other one. So they pump water and then they pump air down into these tunnels? The water in the horizontal tunnels, they have to pump in. But the air’s done with, what they call, ventilation. They have fans. How was the temperature in those various tunnels? Did they keep it at a reasonable working temperature or does it get uncomfortable or—? That depends. Sometimes when you’re pouring concrete and that concrete’s curing, it gets hot. I don’t care what time of the year it is, it’s hot. But as a rule, after you get about thirty or forty feet underground, your temperature stays pretty much the same. What makes it cold in some of the tunnels is the amount of air they suck out and the cold air coming in. After you get back in there a while, it’s pretty much the same temperature except when that concrete— Is being poured. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Well, it’s after it’s poured. It’s when it’s curing, and it can get awful hot. I guess I’m one of the few guys that really like what they were doing. Really? Why is it you liked it so much? [ 00: 35: 00] I don’t know. One engineer asked me, he says, How come you like working in that bad ground, and going to Africa hunting, and going to Alaska hunting? He says, You must like to live on the edge. Do you think you do? Well, I don’t know. My answer was to him, If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too damn much space. Well, you didn’t have a comfort zone did you? You liked a little bit of adventure. I guess that comes with my love of the outdoors. Now I eat everything that I hunt, but I don’t hunt to kill. I kill to have hunted. I don’t know, I guess that’s just the way I was brought up. And miners are a pretty unique bunch of people, so to speak. When that job’s running full, they take care of themselves. If there’s a miner that gets hurt, the rest of them get in their billfold and take up a collection and give it to that man so he doesn’t lose his home or his car or to help pay his rent. There’s quite a brotherhood there, then? Yes, and if somebody that they don’t like, like one of the experimenters or something, they won’t have too much to do with him, but if he gets in trouble underground they’re the first ones ready to go get him. Quite a bit of loyalty, then. How many miners are in a crew that would be working—? It varies. On day shift underground I’ve seen it range from five miners on a crew. When the experimenters moves in and you’re pouring concrete and you’ve got everything going, I’ve seen it go to 250 people underground. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Who are the experimenters? Are those lab people? Yes. OK. So sometimes the lab people are in the tunnels checking things out. Yes, they have to set their experiments and stuff. You know a lot of those experiments are— I wouldn’t say the experiment itself is classified on most of them, but the results are. And I’m not an educated- enough man to know what the results were unless they would choose to tell me. So you just went in and did a job. They said do that tunnel and you did that tunnel and prepared the ground zero and you just did what they wanted done. Transported their stuff underground for them. Did you have an opinion about lab people? Some of them were just like anybody else. Some of them were beautiful people and some of them weren’t my favorite people. But it was individuals. It wasn’t the group as a group. Some groups had a lot more likeable people in them than the others. Well, did you see a difference between [ Lawrence] Livermore [ National Laboratory] or Los Alamos [ National Laboratory]? If there were more likeable people in one lab group than another? Yes. You would see Sandia [ National Laboratories] that kind of catered to the miners. And the miners all really liked Sandia. [ 00: 40: 00] You felt just more respect from them or something? Yes, we felt a lot of respect for them. Well, we respected all the experimenters because intellectually they’re educated people and they didn’t understand what was underground and the dangers of underground. They would get underground where there was no light, no darkness. It was the same all day, and they’d lose track of time. As a walker you had to keep track of that UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 because some of those people would stay right there and they’d get engrossed on working with their experiments and they would go so long without eating that they would pass out. They really get engrossed and they’re really educated people. Well, I have discovered that they are workaholics, work hard, play hard, you know, very, very task- oriented on a job and excited about it. So you would notice that they would lose track of time and wouldn’t eat and probably wouldn’t know that it was quitting time? No. On Friday nights when you’d close it down for the weekend, when I was walking I’d take my three foremen and we would start in ground zero. I’d take my three foremen and three men and we’d start in ground zero, and every alcove or experimenting room or whatever they had, we would walk out and bring everybody with us. So that’s what you mean by being a walker, then. Well, that walker was— They keep track of who’s in these different alcoves and tunnels and— He was assistant superintendent. He ran the shift. Then it was his responsibility to see that these people were taken care of. And then the biggest complaint I had, some of them wouldn’t sign out when they’d go out. Are these experimenters or are these miners? Experimenters. Why wouldn’t they sign out? Why didn’t they eat lunch? [ laughter] They didn’t want to quit, is that what you’re saying? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 I don’t know why, but on a Friday night when we closed down and locked the tunnel gates, it was our responsibility to make sure every man was out from underground, and we’d check that logbook where they logged in to go in. When we came back out we checked that logbook. And if it wasn’t signed out you would say there’s a man still in there? If he wasn’t with us, then we’d have to go back and see if he was in there. So did you go in there sometimes and they had just not bothered to sign out? Sometimes. Were you able to get that straightened out? I mean that would be frustrating because that would tie up your time trying to keep track of those men. Well, that was part of your job along with making time cards and filling out the logbook and making sure that everybody had what they wanted to work with. And sometimes it was a little trying. I had a sign on my desk, above my desk, that showed a little cartoon of a guy in a vise and a big old guy giving her a twist. You felt twisted sometimes one way or the other? And underneath that sign, that little guy in that vise is saying, “ Go ahead and give it another twist, you S. O. B., I work better under pressure anyway.” [ 00: 45: 00] Oh, what a cute little cartoon!. So you liked Sandia. What did you think of Los Alamos? Some of their people are beautiful and some of them were [ pause] less than desirable, I thought. Did you feel the same way about Livermore? [ Pause] Some of their people were beautiful and some of them were pretty raunchy. Now that Ballistics Research Laboratories [ BRL] they was a fine bunch of guys to get along with. Real fine. And that, if I could think of it, LANL [ Los Alamos National Laboratory], they had some UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 real super guys and they had some of them that was kind of shady. And you had to know how to handle them. I called Bud Edwards once— he was the division manager— and I said, Bud, I need to talk to you for a while. I said, There’s this guy here and I’m having trouble with him and I need to talk to you and get your opinion. Is it me? Is it him? Because I’m going in fits trying to get this job going. And he said, Well, I don’t see any reason for you driving all the way from Area 25 up to Area 12, he says, because there’s a lot of people that has trouble with that guy. Oh. Oh. That reputation can follow you, doesn’t it? Yes. And Bud Edwards was a beautiful man, as far as I’m concerned. He could come underground and if you needed chewing out, he would chew you out. And he never raised his voice. He would chew you out something horrible and then he would just turn around and walk off. Well, there you are, when it finally dawns on you exactly what Bud Edwards has said to you, he’s gone, you can’t argue. He had a gift for that and I admired him for it. He didn’t get into an argument? Oh, sometimes he did. Now, Bud Edwards, was he with REECo [ Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company]? Yes, he was just under Bill Flangas. And I think he had a mining engineer degree because he flat knew what was going on and most of the time he would take the miners’ part against the engineers when we was having a little set- to because they would come up with something that they wanted to try and we would tell them it wouldn’t work. And how would they respond? [ 00: 50: 00] Some of the engineers were terrible to get along with. They didn’t want to know that it wouldn’t work unless it failed, huh? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 Some of the ideas that they came up with, as long as I worked there on the back end of it, we had already tried and knew they wouldn’t work. Interesting tension, then, between those who actually do the work and those who are planning it and designing it and using theory to prepare these tests. Yes, and you get those engineers out of school and before they have a chance to get any practical experience, if it’s not in the book it won’t work. If it’s in the book it’s going to work. And there’s circumstances both ways where it will work and it won’t work. Well, you said you were in Pile Driver and this said that there was an accidental release of radioactivity on it. Do you remember that at all, or being aware of that at all? No, I think that was— It says Pile Driver. Unless it happened during the event itself. I know we did hit some pretty hefty radiation when we broke into that cavity. We had about that much [ indicating amount] glass that we went through but we plastered it over. And I got some pretty good exposures to radiation. But that RADSAFE [ Radiological Safety] outfit and the radiation as far as it was, they was always there but it wasn’t always logged the way things happened. They had monitors there that were collecting money for being monitors, and several of them— I know the miners had to show them how to read the Geiger counters, read their instruments. They would either have them on a high setting or a low setting, and the miners would set them where they was supposed to be, and then if they was monitoring a place, they would take a Geiger counter in there and turn it on and it would be registering so much in three days. It’d go way, way down. Well, the reason, they weren’t changing the batteries. So are you saying some of their records wouldn’t be accurate, then? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 17 Some of the stuff wasn’t even logged. Now RADSAFE monitors, are you saying they didn’t get as much training as maybe they should have? Well, some of them I think you could have trained them for twenty years and you still wouldn’t have had a monitor. Did you feel you were at risk by their maybe not being as—? At the time, no, but I look back on it now and yeah, everybody was at risk on account of some of those people. And they had some of those people that didn’t appear to be very smart but they could read the instruments and they could figure the isotopes, and if they knew the isotopes on the radiation they could figure everything. For instance, I had one monitor that had to run down to [ Area] 12 to get some new instruments. And that man never left underground before he came [ 00: 55: 00] and told me he was leaving. And you know I appreciated that. He told me about how long he would be back and what he was going after and where he was going. And I think that’s the way it should have been run. And he logged everything like it was. He didn’t change it a little bit so it would look a little better. So you liked him. That’s the way you thought it should’ve been done all the time. Yes. And they had several monitors that were that way. Quite a several. But later on down the line when the monitors had worked their way up and they were up here and they would bring the new monitors in down here [ indicating levels], when they brought those guys in new, they were good monitors. I mean if you were working reentry you didn’t go any place without a monitor. And they stayed right with you till you came out. And it was written in the logbook the way it should have been. Now did REECo hire the monitors? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 18 I don’t know. I suppose they did. Whether they worked for REECo or who they worked for, I never did— I think they did work for REECo, but I didn’t get into that because that was none of my business. There were some things out there you can do something about and there were some things up there you can’t, and you just have to learn to change the things that you can do something about and live with the things you can’t. That’s a fine line, isn’t it? Yes. But I can tell you right now, always document everything. When I had my— they changed to Bechtel [ Nevada] when I left up there, I had all my stuff, a lot of it, shredded because it was nobody’s business but mine. I prided myself on having a memory and just as quick as I’d have a conversation with one of the experimenters or something, I always documented it and wrote almost word- for- word everything both of us said. Now did you do that when you worked at the test site? Is