Steve Jonak, math teacher, was a second lieutenant in the Air Force studying to become an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) officer at Vandenberg Air Force base in Lompoc, Calif.

“About two weeks before the school, ended, I was, ah, removed form the school,” he said. “Here’s the deal. When you get to missile school, you spend the first two or three days watching classified weapons effects movies, movies that nobody’s ever seen about weapons effects, and at the end of that, you’re given a piece of paper. It’s an official U.S. Air Force form, a Department of Defense document, basically blank, and in the middle of it, it has a sentence that says, ‘I, put your name there, will to the best of my knowledge launch a nuclear weapon given a valid order by the president of the United States,’ and you sign it. You don’t sign it, you go back home, find a different career field. So, you sign it, and you start the class. At the very end of the school, the last thing you do before you leave is to sign a similar document, only it doesn’t say ‘to the best of my knowledge.'”
Only two weeks from graduating first in class and with top secret cryptological clearance, Jonak felt uncomfortable faced with signing the final document, so he arranged to speak with an officer.

“I didn’t want to just call him and walk into his office because I didn’t know what the consequences would be. So I drove into Lompoc, went to a pay phone, put in my money, called his house, and he answered. I said, ‘I think I’m going to have issues with the final document.’ Of course, they all knew what you were talking about. And he goes, ‘Well, can I ask who this is?’ Of course I said, ‘Not yet.’ I let a couple minutes pass and then I hung up because I didn’t want the call to be traced. I drove to another phone and I called him back and we carried on our conversation, and I said I wasn’t comfortable with giving him my name yet. And I said, ‘What would be the next step if I actually did come into your office?’ Click. I hung up again, drove to another phone. I spent an hour driving around town, running out of pay phones in Lompoc.”
The next day, he decided to meet the officer in person.

“I go into this building and I go to his little office,” he said, “and he’s got his door open so I stick my head in there, and he looks up and says, ‘You’re him,’ and I said, ‘Yes sir, I’m him.’ After that, it got pretty bizarre. They didn’t quite know what to do with me.”
Moved into private, monitored quarters, Jonak had a military policeman guard with him at all times. It took about eight months for his situation to be resolved.

“They were afraid that I was a runner,” he said, “that I was going to get out of missile school, hop on the first flight to Moscow and start spewing information. The information I had was all fairly new and recent. I had to go talk to a chaplain to determine if I’d had a religious conversion of some kind. I had to go talk to a couple psychiatrists to see if I’d lost my marbles. I had to go talk to a lawyer to find out the legal ramifications of the whole thing. So I went and talked to all those people, and in the end, they still didn’t know what to do with me, so after about a week there they sent me back to my home base here in Missouri. So then, I just waited. Eventually, it went to a committee somewhere in Congress, and they had to decide what to do with me. I didn’t know if they were going to reassign me to a different career field or if they were going to send me some place safe for them. There’s a wonderful air force base in Thule, Greenland.”

Although tedious, most of the eight months went easily.

“The only guy in the whole process who was maniacal was the base commander in Vandenberg,” he said. “I was being escorted around with my little buddy, so I go in to see the commander and he sits outside the office door. Usually when you report to a superior officer, you walk up to his desk, you salute, he returns your salute, and he says take a seat. I walk in and salute. He doesn’t even look at me. He gets up from his desk, turns around, walks over to his window and wheels around, screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘What the hell is the matter with you, lieutenant!’ And I’m not trying to be a smart aleck, I’m just trying to answer the man. I say, ‘Well sir. I don’t think I have a problem.’ Apparently that was the only wrong answer I could have given. He just starts screaming at me. Country and blah blah and patriotism and blah and what a lowlife I was and all this kind of stuff. So he finished his tirade, and I walk out of the office and my little airman escort guy is sitting there with his eyes this big. He says, ‘Wow, sir. I didn’t know they yelled at you guys.’ I say, ‘Well, yup. Yup they do. Wanna go get a pizza?” And he says, ‘Yes sir!'”

Eventually, he received his paper work from Strategic Air Command that told him his “influence would be better left to the civilian populace,” and shortly after, he was honorably discharged and briefed.

“You ever see the movies where they have like the table and there’s like six or seven colonels and generals and there’s a little wooden chair out in front? It was like walking into a movie,” he said. “I sat in the little chair, and they basically told me what I could and couldn’t do for the next few years.”

Discharge wasn’t the end of his problems, however. When he tried to apply for a government job with the Defense Mapping Agency in St. Louis, he learned his name was on the national security risk list. Still, he remembers class fondly.

“I loved the school,” he said. “I was top of my class. It was all just playing with computers, like a game. You have these 10 missiles that you’re in charge of and each missile has a row of lights that indicates its status. Your job when you were down in the capsule was to keep all your missiles clean and green. Thousands of things could just happen and you’d get these warnings, and you’d have to sit there and figure it out. It was like a puzzle. I enjoyed the training. I just didn’t actually want to do it.”