Guard Tower: Camp Redmond

🕐11 min read

Tower Watch at a Dead Post

Camp Redmond is not its real name. I’m using that because I’m not interested in having this traced back to a specific installation, a specific unit, or specific people who would rather not be associated with what I’m about to describe. Anybody who’s done tower guard at a decommissioned post will recognize the setup regardless. Those of you who haven’t: let me explain what it was like.

This was during my third year of service. I was a specialist, infantry, and my unit had been tasked with a ninety-day caretaker rotation at a training installation that had been deactivated. The post was technically on standby — buildings maintained, utilities running, perimeter secured — pending a Department of Defense decision about its future. That decision was taking a while, as those decisions do, and in the meantime someone had to be there.

Caretaker rotations are not glamorous. There’s no mission, no training tempo, no purpose beyond presence. You maintain the facilities, you guard the perimeter, you fill out logs, you wait. For a junior enlisted soldier used to constant movement and structure, it’s a particular kind of grinding boredom that I wouldn’t wish on a lot of people.

The installation had four guard towers. We ran two-person shifts during the day and solo shifts at night, which is unusual — standard Army practice is always two-person for night security — but with our reduced manning and the low-threat environment of a domestic caretaker post, command had made the call. Solo tower, four-hour shifts, radio check every thirty minutes.

Tower Three was mine on the second Tuesday of our rotation. Midnight to four AM.

The Setup

Tower Three sat on the northwest corner of the perimeter, looking out over a field that had been used for vehicle maintenance training — there were still berms and obstacle features out there, silhouettes against the sky on clear nights. Beyond the field, tree line. The post itself was at my back: empty barracks, a motor pool, the old headquarters building with its windows dark. Streetlights on automatic timers, some of them burned out, throwing the interior of the post into uneven pockets of light and shadow.

I had a radio, a flashlight, a night-vision monocular, a rifle, and a log sheet. The log sheet had entries for vehicle and personnel traffic, but on a caretaker rotation at oh-dark-hundred, those fields were always blank. Nobody came in or out of a decommissioned post at three in the morning. The only personnel on site were my unit: twelve soldiers, one of whom was in each tower on rotation, the rest in the barracks.

My radio check at midnight came back fine. I logged it. I drank my coffee from a thermos and looked at the field and the tree line and listened to the wind move through the empty buildings behind me.

At 12:47 AM, I saw someone cross the perimeter fence on the south side of the field.

The Figure

With the night-vision monocular, I could see the field clearly. Green-grey world, everything flattened, the tree line a dark mass at the far edge. The perimeter fence was chain-link, eight feet tall, topped with three strands of wire. You could see the line of it running across the field of view.

Someone came over it. Not at a gate — not at any designated entry point. They went over the fence the way someone goes over a fence when there’s no other option: grab, climb, one leg over, the other, drop. It took maybe ten seconds. Then they were on the inside, moving toward the center of the field.

I keyed my radio. “TOC, Tower Three. I have a personnel breach, south fence line, Field Alpha. One individual, moving toward center of field. Requesting backup for intercept.”

The TOC — the tactical operations center, our duty NCO — came back in about fifteen seconds. “Tower Three, copy. Describe individual.”

I looked through the monocular. “One person, appears to be in uniform. Moving at a walk, no apparent hurry. Heading northwest.”

“Copy. Stand by.”

I watched the figure move. They were walking deliberately, not running, not skulking. The walk of someone who knows where they’re going. In uniform — though night-vision washes out details and I couldn’t have told you branch or rank or anything specific. The shape of military dress: squared shoulders, the way people carry themselves when they’ve been trained to stand a certain way.

“Tower Three, TOC. We’re doing an accountability check. Stand by.”

The figure reached the center of the field and stopped. Just stood there. Facing — I tried to orient it — facing roughly northeast, which was more or less the direction of the headquarters building. Just standing.

I kept the monocular on them and waited.

Accountability

The accountability check took eleven minutes, which felt like an hour. What they were doing was physically confirming that every soldier in our unit was in their bunk or on post. Twelve people. It shouldn’t take long but you have to go room to room, tower to tower, get confirmations from each position.

During those eleven minutes the figure in the field did not move. Stood in the center of Field Alpha, facing northeast, motionless. I kept the monocular on them the whole time. I did not see them shift their weight or move their arms or turn their head. Just still. The way a person stands when they are very practiced at standing still, or when they have been standing in one place for a very long time.

The TOC came back on the radio. “Tower Three, accountability complete. All assigned personnel accounted for. Repeat: all twelve personnel confirmed on post.”

I was quiet for a moment.

“Copy,” I said. “I still have a visual on the individual in Field Alpha.”

“Understood. Can you confirm they are still stationary?”

“Affirmative. Stationary, center of field. No movement in eleven minutes.”

Another pause on the radio. Then my duty NCO’s voice, a little different from before — not scared, the Army trains the scared out of your voice pretty effectively, but careful. “Tower Three, this is Sergeant Okafor. I’m going to come out for a look. Stay on visual. Do not leave your post.”

“Understood, Sergeant.”

I watched the figure. They did not move.

Sergeant Okafor

He came out the back of the headquarters building with his own rifle and flashlight. I watched him cross from the building toward the field — I could see his flashlight, on, moving. He got to the edge of the field and stopped. I could see him from the tower. I could see the figure in the center of the field.

He stood at the edge for probably a minute. Then he keyed his radio.

“Tower Three. Where is the individual?”

I looked through the monocular. The figure was there, center of field, same position. “Center of field, Sergeant. About ninety meters from your position, due north.”

A pause. “I don’t have a visual.”

I lowered the monocular and looked at the field with naked eyes. Dark field, no moon, not much. I raised the monocular again. The figure was there, clear as anything, standing still.

“I have them in the monocular, Sergeant. Center of field.”

“I’m going to step into the field.”

He did. I watched him move in with his flashlight cutting a beam ahead of him. He walked toward where the figure was. I watched both of them through the monocular — Okafor moving, the figure still.

He walked to the center of the field. He swept his flashlight. He turned in a circle.

“Tower Three. There is nobody in this field.”

I looked through the monocular. The figure was gone.

I had not seen them move. I had been watching. They were there and then they were not. No movement, no departure, no climbing back over the fence. The field was empty.

“Confirmed, Sergeant,” I said. “Visual is gone. Field is clear.”

I heard him breathing on the radio. “Copy,” he said, finally. “Continue your watch.”

The Log

What I wrote in my tower log for that night: 0047 — Observed possible personnel breach, south fence line, Field Alpha. Reported to TOC. TOC accountability check confirmed all assigned personnel on post. Individual no longer visible by 0059.

What I did not write: what the figure looked like. The way they stood. The specific stillness of them. The fact that in eleven minutes of observation they had not moved in any way that a living person would move — not a shifting of weight, not a glance around, not the minute adjustments that bodies make when they’re just standing still in a field in the middle of the night.

What I did not write: that when Sergeant Okafor and I talked about it the next morning, briefly, in the motor pool, he told me he hadn’t been entirely sure he didn’t see something. At the edge of the field, before he stepped in. Something in his peripheral vision that resolved into nothing when he looked directly at it.

What I did not write: that before Camp Redmond was a training installation, before the Army had it, it had been something else. I looked into this afterward. The land had a different use in the forties, during a different kind of military presence. I won’t be more specific than that. But there were people who worked that land and didn’t come home from it, and their names are somewhere in records that I found in an afternoon of looking.

I don’t know if that’s relevant. I’m not an expert in that kind of thing. I’m an infantry soldier who stood in a tower and watched something through a monocular for eleven minutes on a November night.

I know what I saw.

After the Rotation

We finished the ninety days. The installation never got its reassignment decision — it’s still sitting there, best I know, maintained but empty. I went on to a second tour and then I got out and that was that.

Sergeant Okafor made staff sergeant about a year after the rotation. We’ve talked a few times since. We’ve talked about the rotation in general, about the boredom of it, the food, the one week when the heat went out in the barracks. We’ve never once talked about Field Alpha.

I think that’s a deliberate choice on both our parts. There’s a kind of respect in not picking at something that has no resolution. You observed what you observed, you logged what you logged, you did your job. The Army asks you to maintain a perimeter and I maintained it.

Against whatever was in that field — something in uniform, something with a soldier’s posture and a soldier’s stillness — I had no protocol. No rules of engagement for that. No procedure.

So I kept my eyes on it until it was gone.

That’s the job. You keep your watch. You radio in what you see. You wait for morning.

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