Environment: The Military as Litterbug

Armies are machines designed by and large for human destruction, but they are also generators of huge piles of junk. Even in peacetime, military decisions to scrap costly and complicated systems constantly add more litter to the pile. As a result of 30 years of hot and cold wars, the U.S. Department of Defense has become cumulatively—and with a sense of considerable embarrassment—far and away the nation's biggest litterbug.

Oil-Drum Culture. The hardest hit of all the states has been one of the most remote. Alaska's Aleutian Island chain is littered with an enormous potpourri of debris. More than 2,000 World War II-vintage Quonset huts still poke like ugly blisters above the desolate landscape of Amchitka, the site of this month's scheduled underground nuclear blast. Bomber tails and ruptured fuselages litter the island. An estimated one million fuel drums are scattered on Alaska's north coast. At least 100,000 drums, left by builders of DEW-line radar sites in the 1950s, disfigure the shores of the Beaufort Sea, within the boundaries of the nation's largest wildlife refuge. Some have been only partially emptied by the departing military and are leaking oil, which is toxic to wildlife. Barrel pollution is also responsible for a strange phenomenon: what is known as an "oil-drum culture" among Eskimos living on Point Barrow. Discarded oil barrels are used for garbage containers and toilets; once filled, the malodorous barrels are dumped onto the ice to be carried out to sea when the ice melts. But all too often they drift back to shore.

Ghosts and Rats. The military's detritus is not confined to the frozen north. Camp Kilmer, near Edison, N.J., is a decaying ghost town of fire-gutted barracks and shattered glass. Unfenced, it is a tempting playground for exploring children. While squirrels and kangaroo rats nest in the bomb craters that pock 10,000 acres of California's Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the area is off limits to human visitors because it contains unexploded bombs and rockets left there 30 years ago, when the Navy used the park as a test-firing range. Although much of the ordnance is buried deep beneath the desert sands, a civilian team sent to salvage scrap five years ago disappeared suddenly in a cloud of smoke.

Angel Island, a wildlife preserve in the middle of San Francisco Bay, could be a priceless military museum as well. Instead, it is a monumental eyesore. An abandoned Nike site sits in a tangle of weeds. The remnants of a Japanese internment camp, a crumbling Civil War hospital and dilapidated WAC barracks are nearby. Shortly before the island was turned over to the California department of parks and recreation in 1963, says a parks official, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pointless damage was done by the military itself. Fine old marble fireplaces in the turn-of-the-century Army officers' quarters were smashed by soldiers, and windows were shot out for sport. Bill Allison, Angel Island's manager, shakes his head at the "sheer vandalism of it all" and estimates that it might cost as much as $500,000 just to clear up the litter.