Salute to a Veteran
His Assignment: Move Tons of Nerve Gas to Be Destroyed in the Pacific Robert D. Wilcox hen Dennis Benchoff was accepted as a cadet at West Point in 1962, he could scarcely imagine that he would one day become a three-star general. Or that he would have under his command the weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands of enemy troops. But in 1988, when he was a brigadier general and commanding general of the 59th Ordnance Brigade in Europe, he got the order that was to present him with one of the most monumental challenges of his 36-year military career. At a depot in Clausen, Germany, we had amassed 100,000 artillery shells filled with deadly VX and GD nerve agents capable of killing hundreds of thousands of enemy troops. They were so dangerous that a mere drop of the VX or whiff of the GD could kill a person, blocking the nerves
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between the brain and the Soviets ever used the lungs and chemical weapons to preventing the lungs attack us.” from functioning. By the summer of Anyone who came 1988, however, anywhere near those President Bush had shells always wore decided that the other protective equipment. weapons we had at But hadn’t the our disposal provided Geneva Convention more than enough outlawed the use of deterrent to any such such chemical move by the Soviets. weapons? So he took the bold “Yes,” Benchoff step of deciding to says, “but not the destroy the entire ability to have them, cache of chemical LTG Benchoff at his retirement should the need to weapons. ceremony in 1998. use them ever arise.” The only facility He adds, “We, of course, had no equipped to destroy such weapons was thought of starting a conflict with Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. Therefore, chemical weapons. But, on the other the first question to be answered was hand, we had to be able to respond if whether the weapons should be shipped
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50plus SeniorNews •
there to be incinerated or whether a new such facility should be built in Europe. Johnston Atoll is a 1-square-mile atoll that is about 750 nautical miles west of Hawaii. It had no indigenous inhabitants, and in the mid-1980s, it became our facility for chemical weapons disposal. It housed what was essentially a huge furnace that was used to incinerate such weapons. For considerations of time, money, and geography, it was selected as the place to dispose of the chemical weapons we had at the Clausen Depot. That choice of Johnston Atoll was rather easy, and even sending the weapons by ship from Germany was rather straightforward. The problem was how to get the huge stockpile of weapons from Clausen to Nordenham, the German port from which the vessel would leave on its trip
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