"Scraphogs" Invade Hawthorne

By Alessandra Stanley

Locally they are known as "scraphogs," and a few wear T shirts with a cartoon of a wild boar grinding a bomb in its teeth. Just after dawn each day, about 40 gather at the hillside, pick up pails and sift through the dirt and sagebrush for rusted metal and twisted steel. They occasionally dig up the nozzle of a Polaris missile or the casing of a 1,000-lb. bomb. Under the pitiless Nevada sun, each averages 1,000 lbs. of scrap metal a day. "It's rough work," says Billy Marshall of Hawthorne, Nev. "When I started, young guys would spend one day, say it was too rough and leave."

Marshall is one of a few dozen locals who have stuck it out as a scraphog at a 743-acre site near the Hawthorne Army ammunition plant in northern Nevada. Succumbing to public pressure to clean up its old demolition ranges, the Army last year turned over to a civilian contractor the tricky business of clearing the Hawthorne site, which had become a sprawling dump for more than 30 years' worth of defective or leftover bombs. The winner of the $3.2 million contract was a small new firm based in Washington named UXB International. (UXB, which stands for "unexploded bomb," was in the title of a BBC and PBS television series.) The company was set up by a former Navy lieutenant, Phillip Hough, who served two tours in Viet Nam as an explosive-ordnance specialist.

Hawthorne (pop. 4,000) does not have a Burger King, but it does have a casino, a legal brothel nearby and 9% unemployment. Locals and drifters thronged to UXB's headquarters the first day it was open, eager for jobs that paid $8.50 an hour. But the company had trouble finding workers willing to be a scraphog for more than a few days at a time. So two months ago, UXB decided to look beyond Hawthorne for additional hands, stirring up what seemed to be an undercurrent of prejudice and resurrecting some old resentments from a painful era.

The UXB program director called a wartime comrade, Quan Le, who commanded the South Vietnamese explosive-ordnance forces during the war, escaped from Saigon in 1975 and settled in Dallas. Le, 54, rounded up 19 strong, young Vietnamese and Laotians from the area and piled them into three cars that arrived in Hawthorne in two days.

Trouble began soon. "We're a close-knit community," says Sheriff John Madroso. "We take a strong look at outsiders." The outsiders were not only Asians from out of state, they were living five to a motel room, cooking native dishes in their kitchenettes and making good wages. "Jobs are a real emotional issue in a small town," explains Karen Wilson, head of Hawthorne's employment agency. "A lot of people voiced concern about the outsiders."

In May about four Asians went to a high school dance at the convention center, thinking it was open to the public. The police came and sent them away. A few nights later a group of teenagers headed over to the Asians' motel, and a scuffle broke out. Dan Phi Vo, 31, was arrested for allegedly attempting to stab a local boy, jailed for two days, duly sentenced and fined $200. To the sheriff, the Asians had tried to "infiltrate" a high school dance and "mess with our kids." To Le and his UXB colleagues, Vo was a victim of small-town prejudice and misunderstanding. "It was a setup," insists UXB's acting project manager, Carolyn Reck, a former Army captain.

Just a handful of Vietnamese have chosen to remain in Hawthorne, but tension lingers. "There is nothing racist or slurist about it," insists the sheriff, "but we don't like outsiders telling us who we do like and who we don't." Vo still works as a scraphog under Le's supervision. "I've been in the U.S. for six years, and the first time I came to Hawthorne they put me in jail," says a bewildered Vo. "They have a bad feeling about Vietnamese people here."

Only at the range site, where more than 12,000 unexploded bombs have already been safely disposed of, do the tensions seem to fade. There outsiders and locals--whites, blacks, Asians and Indians from the nearby Schurz reservation --work in syncopated drudgery. "They're a pretty nice bunch of guys," says Mike Cook, 31, an out-of-work miner from Tombstone, Ariz., who lives with his wife and four kids in a car to save money. Hoisting a 40-lb. piece of metal, he adds, "You have to be pretty crazy to be a scraphog."