This story, part of a series of reporting projects by Military.com on service member and veteran health, was supported by the Pulitzer Center. You can read our first story on missileer cancer concerns here.
It’s the radiation that most people think about. Shut in 60 feet underground not far from the massive nuclear weapons, missileers keep careful watch of the projectiles designed to bring about Armageddon, doing small repairs and staying alert for long, sunless hours of duty.
But when more significant maintenance needs to be done, when something bigger breaks, support personnel such as Kimberly Cross are brought in at a moment’s notice and for hours at a time to keep the missiles working. For those maintainers, it’s the long list of hazardous substances and chemicals, sometimes oozing from equipment, that is the real risk.
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Cross would arrive for a job in an olive green T-shirt and battle dress uniform pants. She’d pull on her safety gear — the same well-worn pair of oversized rubber gloves seemingly meant to fit the burly frame of a man, not her delicate and slim arms. That gear wouldn’t do much when it came to radiation, but the maintainers knew other toxins lurked in the mass of electronic and hydraulic systems that would let the missiles fly.
On one service call at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, Cross — then a…
