While, yes, we are awash in axioms about power, its virtues, its drawbacks and its responsibilities, there can be no doubt that they are, from the witty to the corny, all profoundly true. For power does attract the avaricious, and it does corrupt the young, and it does burden the few with the problems of the many. Which is why, above all other things, it must be both feared and respected. It's tendency to corrupt must be recognized; it's eagerness to be wielded must be checked; and its willingness to be used as a shield against numerous grievous sins mustn't be ignored. For to do so is to acknowledge, to everyone, that we are ruled by power and, as a result, by those who wield power. And yielding ground, both moral and societal, to them is to consign ourselves to lives in which we are deceived, dissembled and dismissed by the authorities who claim to act in our interests. This is a point movingly made in Ms. Iversen's captivating memoir.
For nearly four decades, the Rocky Flats nuclear facility operated less than fifty miles from Denver, Colorado, one of America's most populous metropolitan areas. A manufacturer of Plutonium triggers for the nations' arsenal of nuclear bombs, it was a privately operated, government-funded site whose true purpose was concealed from the public on the grounds of national security. It harbored hundreds of employees drawn from nearby towns to work its cafeterias, fill out its first-responder teams, staff its cleaning services and guard its premises, all in the name of securing the national defense. And yet, for much of the 30-plus years it was operational, it burned, spilled, dumped and discharged, into the environment, some of the deadliest particles known to science.
Ms. Iversen was raised in the shadow of Rocky Flats. She drank water in adjacent streams, rode her horse through nearby fields, and suffered in her neighboring house the dignities and the sorrows of growing up in a home fractured by alcoholism and broken dreams. While she went to school and attended parties, learn to ride and kissed boys, Rocky Flats was being grossly mismanaged, enduring two massive fires, first in the 1960s and then later in the 1980s, either of which could have resulted in Chernobyl-level contamination to the surrounding area. The 1969 fire
was particularly bad and could have easily rendered the greater Denver area uninhabitable were it not for the bravery of the firefighters who battled the blaze and the good fortune of a few random events that kept it from raging out of control. Later, when Ms. Iversen moved away, to attend school, marry, have children and live her life, many of her childhood acquaintances, along with employees at the facility, would suffer cancer and worse. And though no official investigation would ever be launched, by the government or otherwise, it seems likely that at least some of these cancers were caused by the criminal laxness that was standard policy at this most secret institution.
Though at times plagued by awkward framing, Full Body Burden is an emotive document that demonstrates the extent to which the intersection of power and complicity can give rise to extraordinary crimes. Ms. Iversen, an author of non-fiction and a professor of literature, draws upon interviews with numerous key men at the heart of Rocky Flats' many disasters to describe, in chilling detail, how the government's desire to create a ridiculous number of nuclear bombs lead to the passage of a law that inoculated the companies contracted to make said bombs from any responsibility for the environmental damage that resulted from their processes. The natural result of this cart-blanch protection was mass-negligence on the part of the facility's operators, negligence that lead to the secret mass-dumping of highly hazardous materials into an inhabited environment. Despite an FBI raid that caught the facility red-handed, no prosecution of the facility's operators has yet stood, allowing them to escape entirely from a noose they, in all their blithe ignorance, happily fitted about the necks of unsuspecting victims.
Ms. Iversen juxtaposes her emotionally charged childhood with a surgically cold history of Rocky Flats to create a rare fusion of history and memoir that is both effective and moving. But though her walk through the facility's history is profoundly instructive, documenting the fires, the raids, the grand juries and the cleanups, her decision to weave herself into this tale is, at times, problematic. There's no doubt that the aching humanity of her difficult adolescence serves to lend a human face to what would otherwise be a cold story about a corrupt institution at a monolithic remove from the people it harmed. But after Ms. Iversen leaves home to go to college, her half of the story falls away for some fifteen years, leaving the formerly bipedal narrative to limp along on one leg for a considerable portion of the work. Ms. Iversen is welcome to her own privacy, of course, but having included what seemed like every detail of her life up to the age of 20 and then to essentially return to us in her mid-thirties is unavoidably jarring.
Notwithstanding its rough edges, Full Body Burden is, at times, mesmerizing and eviscerating, a captivating demonstration of how men and women, companies and governments, are willing to stoop to any level in order to cover up their sins. This is going to linger with me for some time. (4/5 Stars)
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