May 18, 1980 was a very busy morning. I was part of a two-man mobile patrol called Security 2 at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington. Our job that morning was unusual. We were chasing people away from the end of the runway. Just 132 miles away, Mount St. Helen’s had exploded. The as h cloud initially looked like a massive, gray cauliflower on our southern horizon. It boiled up and up until it was more like a nuclear weapon mushroom cloud. When it reached 60,000 feet, it started to drift to the southeast, as if an artist had used a scraper to smear the top of his composition across the canvass. The Tacoma area is heavily forested, making it difficult for anyone to get a good view of the eruption. At the end of runways is an area called the glide slope, where vegetation is cut down to facilitate to takeoff and landing of aircraft. That made the end of the runway the perfect spot to view and photograph the largest volcanic eruption on the continental United States in recorded history. With a volcano come volcanic ash, which is like dust but filled with particles of rock and glass. It’s very bad stuff for jet engines, so most of the aircraft at McChord were being evacuated, mainly to Alaska. That being the case, we couldn’t allow people to congregate at the end of the runway for a multitude of safety, security and avionics reasons. So Airman Fitzgerald and Staff Sergeant Steven Lang told people to leave. You watch cop videos today and people argue whenever they’re told what they can’t do. It was less so in 1980, particularly when the asker was carrying an M-16. All the while, Lang and I continually had an amazing view of a historic and devastating event. Fifty-seven people were killed and 200 homes, 47 bridges, 15 miles of railways, and 185 miles of highway were destroyed. Lakes disappeared. Rivers were clogged with fallen timber. The ash cloud dropped deposits throughout the western United States. In Puyallup, on the other side of Snoqualmie Pass from St. Helen’s, there were several inches of the stuff. In Tacoma, just over 100 miles away, we got just a dusting because the prevailing winds blew in our favor. The volcano had been in the news for weeks before I arrived at the base in early April. There had been smaller eruptions prior to the big one, which proved to be just burps. We started to wonder if the mountain would actually erupt or if the small eruptions would relieve the pressure in time and a major eruption would be avoided. I remember driving by the mountain on our way to McChord. Having been raised in Colorado, mountains were nothing new, but this one was different than our beloved Rockies. Our peaks rise from about 9,000 feet of altitude to their 14,000-foot summits. St. Helen’s rose to 9,677 feet from nearly sea level, which made it look much larger than what we are accustomed to seeing. Its sudden and majestic rise from the surrounding landscape made it look a bit like Japan’s famous Mt. Fuji. After May 18, more than 1,300 feet would be gone from the mountain’s peak. Its beautiful dome shape became a horseshoe as the entire side of the mountain slid away amid the blast. The destruction was immense. The show was spectacular. And, ironically, I was provided a front-row seat because I was tasked with denying the same to others. Doug Fitzgerald ...read more read less