Biker takes on the military.

Sparta, Wisconsin

Dick Smith is not your typical tree-hugger. He's a hard-core biker who for twenty years operated a Harley bike shop with his twin brother in Madison, Wisconsin. His kind of political activism included organizing anti-helmet-law rallies around the Capitol, drawing like-minded motor-cylists from all over Wisconsin.

But when he moved back to his hometown of Sparta to help care for his ailing father, Smith noticed a strange, fifteen-foot, cone-shaped object near land he and his companion Violet had purchased. His investigation into the object revealed a history of radioactive fallout testing at Fort McCoy, a sprawling military base in southwestern Wisconsin, and turned Smith into an environmental crusader.

At the height of the Cold War, in 1961, the Army launched a $250 million series of radiation tests at what was then Camp McCoy The Army wanted to learn how to decontaminate its facilities should a war occur. Radioactive lanthanum (a gamma-ray emitter with a forty-hour half-life) was blended with sand and spread around base facilities. One declassified photo shows someone using a lawn spreader to cover the roof of a building with the simulated fallout. Army and civilian employees scooped, vacuumed, scraped, and swept up the radioactive material, before burying it on the base.

Smith discovered that the cone-shaped object near his land was a radioactive incinerator. The Army had painted boards with radioactive lanthanum and burned them in the cone, measuring the escaping gases for traces of radiation.

With the passage of years and the conclusion of the tests, the Army forgot about the cone and even denied its existence when Smith began asking questions. Finally last summer, after two years of prodding, military officials visited the wooded site near Smith's home and confirmed his story. New revelations about McCoy's fallout tests are unfolding as Smith and others uncover more information.

"Fort McCoy," says Base Commander Colonel Scott Hyatt, "is a power projection platform for the armed forces of the United States." In an average year, 100,000 troops pass through the base's gates.

The Army has practiced war at Fort McCoy since 1905. Currently, on a 7,000-acre zone called the Northern Impact Area, artillery gunners pound targets, planes strafe the land, and tanks fire nonexplosive slugs. The landscape is littered with shrapnel, metal casings, and unexploded ordnance.

"A moonscape" is how Smith describes this area. His aerial photos reveal thirty-foot wide craters surrounding the Lacrosse River, which cuts through the heart of the zone. And ground-water tests hint at broad contamination in the area from a mix of heavy metals and toxic chemicals.

Fort McCoy casts a big shadow over this part of Wisconsin. Its work force numbers 2,000 civilians and 300 full-time Army staff, and its economic significance to the area exceeds $200 million a year. Some area residents have accused Smith of seeking to close the base, a charge he hotly denies. "Hell no," he says. "This base will never get cleaned up then. They'll put this in a special file and forget it."

Smith's goals have changed since he began learning about Fort McCoy and fighting to get something done about the contamination. "I'm not talking clean-up," he says. "I just want some [environmental] assessment in my lifetime. If this doesn't begin now it's going to be another hundred years."