COLUMN ONE : Harvesting the Silos of Destruction : Nuclear missiles are being pulled out of fields across the heartland. They leave behind bittersweet memories for the crews that waited underground and the farmers who lived around them.

The warheads were long gone. The doomsday keys had been removed to the safety of an Air Force vault. Racks of classified electronic communications panels that once spewed out coded messages from hidden war rooms had been carted off as salvage.

At Mike 10, an underground nuclear missile silo that has stood poised north of the Black Hills for three decades, all that was left to do was pull the plug and turn out the lights.

On a crisp November morning, a disarmed 1.5-megaton nuclear missile was hoisted up from its darkened cocoon 70 feet beneath the barren prairie. Erect for a few moments under a cloudless sky, the 36-ton Minuteman II gingerly was laid down onto a truck bed bound for a dismantling plant in Utah.

Several miles away at Mike 1, a room tucked at the bottom of an elevator shaft 60 feet underground, Lt. William Murphy was preparing for his own departure. The launch chamber where missile crews once safeguarded doomsday keys designed to ignite the annihilation of Soviet cities was now as innocuous and spare as a broom closet.

Murphy paused by a reinforced concrete wall where previous missile crews scrawled mushroom clouds and left messages for the ages: “No one leaves unaffected.” “I never saw a real key.” “R.I.P.” Murphy added his own: “The REAL last alert.” Minutes later, he took the final shuddering elevator ride to daylight.

One by one, a lethal crop of Minuteman IIs buried a generation ago in the farm fields of America’s heartland are being plucked from the earth, their silos left sealed and abandoned. Under terms of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) ratified this year, the Air Force must remove and disarm more than 300 missiles based in South Dakota and Missouri, remnants of a line of defense that once stretched from Odessa, Mo., through Kansas and Nebraska to the hinterlands of western South Dakota.

American soil is not yet rid of ballistic weaponry. More than 500 newer ICBMs, Peacekeepers and Minuteman IIIs will be kept underground in several Western states. But the removal of the aged Minuteman IIs has begun liberating the Midwest from its most enduring and omnipresent symbol of the nuclear age: lonely one-acre squares of earth lined with barbed wire that made targets out of scores of U.S. farming communities.

“They were both part of our landscape and something alien,” says David Miller, a regional historian at Black Hills State University. “It wasn’t benign like a haystack or a barn. We always knew what they could do--and what they could do to us. But there’s still a lot of mixed emotions as we watch them go.”

The missile pullout signals a bittersweet end of an era for many young Air Force “missileers”--struggling to adapt to post-Cold War realities--and for the growers and ranchers who lived uneasily in the missiles’ flight paths for 30 years. The farmland will remain scarred long after the Minutemen are gone.

Lt. Col. Jim Davis never believed the day would come. A 17-year veteran of missile alerts, he commands the 68th Missile Squadron, one of several silo crews assigned to the 44th Missile Wing at Ellsworth Air Force Base, near Rapid City.

Davis, 39, spent so much of his life in the spare metal-womb launch chambers that “they became home to me.” He grew accustomed to the hours of tedium, the redundant Teletype machines that ticked out identical messages, even the few moments of inner terror when it seemed as if the world teetered on the verge of nuclear meltdown.

Twice, in 1979 and in 1980, Davis descended into missile launch chambers just hours after early warning systems erroneously indicated the United States had been fired upon by Soviet missiles. As Davis carefully reset launch panels and coded high-frequency communication equipment, he recalls, he mused about how close the missiles had come to ignition.

“It made you realize how possible it was,” he says. “That’s not something you forget too soon.”

In July, Davis’ squadron, the Red Eagles, will cease to exist. Without missiles to monitor and keys to wield, Davis’ young crews--most in their 20s--will be scattered to posts across the country. Davis will seek work in another missile command, while older officers look toward retirement.

“We’re no longer needed because we succeeded so well,” Davis says. “We protected the country. We’re going out on top. But I have to admit, it doesn’t make it any easier to take.”

The deactivation of Ellsworth’s remaining 600 crew members, who staff 29 missile sites--shrunken from a force of 1,500--has tangible fallout on surrounding communities.

Stores and service stations in towns like Sturgis and Spearfish can no longer rely on business from traveling Air Force crews seeking everything from coffee to snow tires. Remote country roads and bridges that were paved and repaired for years by the Air Force because of their proximity to missile sites will become the burden of local governments.

Rural electric power cooperatives that were paid handsomely to supply steady current to missiles and elaborate communication systems will have to pass on rising costs to consumers.

“There are buried cables and phone lines all over this part of the state,” Miller says. “They’re all going dead. That’s one hell of a blackout to absorb.”

The pullout began in September, 1991, when then-President George Bush took the Minuteman IIs off alert. A year later, the Air Force began disarming and removing the 1.5-megaton warheads from the three-stage missiles, trucking them to dismantling plants around the West.

The missiles will all be gone by spring, leaving gaping shafts in the earth to mark their memory. Next July, under the terms of START II, the Air Force will separate the 71-ton blast doors that top the empty silos. Explosives will be detonated inside the upper 30 feet of each site. The rubble will be bulldozed into the exposed hole, then capped with concrete.

The launch chambers will also be rendered useless, their massive steel doors welded shut and elevator shafts filled with sand and seven feet of topsoil. Above ground, the shacks that housed military police, maintenance crews and cooks will be offered for resale to the landowners who sold the properties to the Air Force 30 years ago.

As silo after silo has shut down in recent months, many of those landowners have come out to the Minuteman sites, invited by the Air Force, for one last look. For some farmers, it is the first time they have seen the missiles.

“We figured they might want to see what’s been sitting under their properties all these years,” says Col. Roscoe Moulthrop, commander of the 44th Missile Wing. “We want to leave here and have these people think of us as good neighbors.”

“I was scared of those things when I was a kid,” says Bill Reynolds, 30, a farmhand who wandered out to watch a recent missile pull on the farm where he works. “It was kind of a relief to see that truck take it away.”

Air Force officials are also considering bringing the landowners together for a commemorative dinner, coming full circle from a similar dinner they held for farmers more than 30 years ago. And Moulthrop has invited President Clinton to the base next March for the 44th missile wing’s deactivation ceremony.

These are grand gestures, but they will not easily soothe the love-hate relationship that has ebbed and flowed between South Dakota farmers and the Air Force.

There are many western South Dakotans, politically conservative and admiring of military culture, who would prefer to see the missiles stay.

“It’s still scary out there in the world,” says sheep farmer Stan Bricker, 35, whose ranch house sits less than 500 yards from Mike 10. “Maybe it makes me a target, but I still think there’s a place for these missiles. I don’t see much order in the new world order.”

The military has had a visible presence in the Black Hills since the days of Gen. George Custer. The last federal horse cavalry was still riding out of Ft. Meade in the late 1930s. Ellsworth Air Force Base remains one of Rapid City’s largest employers--even though its planned reduction of 2,000 employees is expected to shave the town’s population by a tenth.

“The Air Force seems like good people,” Bricker says. “When they come out to check on the missile, they wave to us. They buy food from our stores, they help us out when we get stuck in the snow. I’ll be sorry to see them go.”

Yet there are many other farmers, just as conservative, no less respectful of the armed services, who pined for the day the Minutemen would disappear. Some of them, particularly those whose properties hosted the missiles for decades, have brooded over the silos’ presence. And their bitterness will not waft away soon after the sites are abandoned.

“When the last Air Force crew goes over the hill, I’ll be the first one to throw rocks after ‘em,” shouts farmer Tom Davis, 51, above the lowing of cattle in a muddy feed pen on the edge of his 23,000-acre farm.

A few minutes earlier, a B-1 bomber streaked out of the northern sky, screaming over his property and spooking his cows. The planes regularly home in on silos during practice bombing runs--a common occurrence on Davis’ farm, which hosts two missile sites.

Davis has resented the Air Force since the early 1960s when the federal government, flexing its use of eminent domain, ordered his family to sell several plots to house Minuteman sites.

He recites a litany of slights he claims to have suffered over the years: Air Force technicians dug up his land to splice communication cables, then paid him “only a pittance” for damage to his fields. Military police threatened him with guns during an alert. One of his steers was found dead with an armor-piercing slug in its carcass. Gates were repeatedly left open. Sirens have wailed at all hours.

“We’ve taken a lot of hell from them over the years, and it ain’t over yet,” Davis says.

Landowners worry that the abandoned silos will mar their properties for generations. For years, farmers have had difficulty plowing near the sites, and with the Air Force insisting that the barbed-wire fences continue to surround the lots, their work will not get any easier.

“That missile site probably adds 30 hours of work each year to our lives,” says Gene Williams, who works a 5,000-acre farm near Interior, 80 miles east of Rapid City. “It puts eight extra corners in my field, and every corner you have means extra turns--and more time--on your tractor.”

The Air Force will offer to sell the missile site land back to the original owners. But under START II, the land cannot be farmed and must remain sealed indefinitely to assure pact monitors that the silos are never used to sheath nuclear missiles. Many landowners are likely to oblige, just to keep outsiders off their farms.

Some farmers fear the explosions that will be used to seal the silos. Williams and other farmers with high ground-water tables worry that the detonations could contaminate aquifers.

Earlier this year, Williams and 30 other South Dakota landowners lobbied elected officials and the Air Force to consider converting the silos into water wells or grain storage bins.

Air Force officials categorically rejected the bid, insisting they are bound by the terms of START II. Instead, they have hired private contractors to detonate test explosions at missile sites in Kansas to “reassure people that their wells and aquifers are not in danger.”

There is nothing, Moulthrop adds, that the Air Force can do about the farmers’ interest in acquiring the silos.

“It’s written in stone,” he says. “We’re doing everything we can to answer environmental concerns. But the missile sites are going to be sealed. Those are our orders.”

Only one Minuteman site may escape its fate. U.S. Park Service officials are mulling whether to save one of the silos and launch chambers as a monument to the Minuteman’s 30 years of service.

“It would be nice to have one around, just to let the American people know what we did down there,” says Lt. Col. Davis.

Almost every week, another missile is pulled, another silo readied for peace. With winter approaching, Air Force officials are hurrying their pace. In South Dakota, there are 29 missiles left out of the original 150.

Mike 10 did not go easily. Raking 60 m.p.h. winds and swirling snow hampered visibility the day of the missile pull, followed by 11 more days of logistics snafus and bad timing. Finally, on a sunny Tuesday, everything came off smoothly. After a few hours’ work by a crew of technicians, the silo was empty.

Down in the launch chamber at Mike 1, two-member missile crews came and went every 24 hours over the final week. They waited in a room that had been methodically stripped down to a mattress, several communication monitors, a television, a VCR and a refrigerator.

Among those pulling the last shifts were Air Force Capt. William Ward and Lt. Todd Younkin, each a three-year missile veteran. The sense of danger they once felt, that “hole in your gut,” as Jim Davis describes the awesome responsibility of overseeing a 1.5-megaton missile, had long dissipated.

All that was left was numbing routine.

The airmen spent their final hours at Mike 1 poring over business textbooks, boning up for finals a few weeks away. Ward, 26, a Ft. Ann, N.Y., native, has volunteered for a job on an AWACS jet based in Oklahoma; Younkin, a 25-year-old Nebraskan, hopes for a finance position.

And, like all the others who took the elevator down into the bowels of Mike 1 in its final days, Ward and Younkin signed their names on the wall outside the launch chamber.

“You think anybody will ever dig down here and see this?” Younkin wondered aloud.

“If they do,” Ward said, “they better be Americans.”