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By Root 937 0

job, the CIA gave us air medals,” Trapp says. On his way back down to Area 51 in the helicopter, Trapp would fly around the different mountain peaks. “Once, I came across an old graveyard. In a helicopter you can hover and look. The graves were made of piles of rocks. I remember two of them were really small. They must have been kids’ graves.” The mountain had a psychological pull with many of the men at Area 51 during the Oxcart years. It was also the only place the men were allowed to go that was technically “off base.”

Down on the tarmac, every time an A-12 Oxcart took off, it was Trapp’s job to hang out airborne, two hundred feet above the runway and off to one side, “in case the aircraft crashed,” Trapp explains. “My helicopter contained firefighting equipment, and I always had two PJs with me, para-rescue jumpers, [who perform] like a Navy SEAL. It was a lot of work having us airborne and I told the boss, Colonel Holbury, that I could be airborne in less than two minutes’ time. So the policy changed.” Instead, Trapp was on standby in the event of an accident, “which meant I got to drive the only golf cart around the Area 51 base.” The golf cart came in handy at night. “We played a lot of poker in the House-Six bar,” Trapp explains. “The loser had to do the late-night cheeseburger run over to the mess hall. With the golf cart, you could get there and back in five minutes.”

For all the technology that was around at Area 51, entertainment was decidedly old-school. “We did a lot of arm wrestling,” Trapp says. “Some guys played racquetball and other guys played three-hole golf.” When Trapp gained ten pounds eating so many late-night cheeseburgers, he was ordered to lose the weight or risk losing his job. To assist in the effort, Colonel Holbury challenged Trapp to weekly rounds of squash. Once, someone brought a sailboard out to Area 51, and the pilots pulled rank and got the men in the machine shop to affix wheels to the bottom of the board. “We took the thing out to Groom Lake when the wind was blowing really hard,” Trapp recalls. “It didn’t go that fast but we didn’t care.”

Of all the pastimes, the unanimous favorite was flying model airplanes using remote control. “We had two areas for flying model planes,” Trapp recalls. “Out on the grass by the golf course, and on the tarmac out on the dry lake. Sometimes the airplanes would go so far and so high they’d get lost. A guy would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, when you’re out in the helicopter, can you keep your eye out for my model plane? It’s got a five-foot wing span and yellow wings.’ We found ways to entertain ourselves at Area 51. We had to; there weren’t any girls.”

The man who took the model airplane flying most seriously was Frank Murray. He was also the chase pilot with the most flying time during Project Oxcart. “You could always find Frank sitting in his room gluing model airplanes together,” Colonel Slater recalls. “That was his idea of fun. Or maybe he was the only guy at 51 who wasn’t half-drunk at eleven o’clock at night.” Which is how Murray accumulated the most flying time. “If somebody’s kid got hurt in the middle of the night, which happened more than you think, and I need a pilot to get someone off base fast, I’d round up Frank,” Colonel Slater explains. When master fuels sergeant Harry Martin’s grandfather died, it was Frank Murray who flew him back east so he could get to the funeral in time. “Frank was always willing to do the job,” Colonel Slater explains. “Most people require time off from flying. Not Frank.”

Murray flew model airplanes to keep his head clear for flying real airplanes. “Everyone had their different thing,” Colonel Slater says. “Bud Wheelon from CIA used to want to play tennis at midnight when he was on base. Some liked to go hunting up in the mountains by the old Sheehan mine. Holbury used to like to make the guard dogs run. Some guys threw rocks at rattlesnakes. I liked to drive around in the jeep and find petrified wood.”

As an Oxcart chase pilot, Murray spent his days and nights chasing the Mach 3 airplane in the