But exist they do.
What is urban legend is the concept of a vast network of tunnels that could hold a division of combat troops and military gear, or tunnels leading to Robert Gray Army Airfield where soldiers and airmen would fit nuclear warheads onto aircraft.
“Those don’t exist,” said Chuck Lauer, director for West Fort Hood’s Underground Training Facility. “We’ve heard hundreds of different stories about what people believe.”
“If you search the Internet, you’ll find we’re doing mind control experiments,” joked Brent Truitt, site manager for the Underground Training facility.
While the stories may be pure fiction, the tunnels that played such a vital role in 20th century American history provide enough fascination merely by existing.
Dug into the side of the Texas blackland hillsides of West Fort Hood and meandering a few feet underground are hundreds of feet of concrete tunnels, 8 to 12 feet wide and anywhere from 12 to 15 feet high, that were constructed in the early stages of the Cold War.
The bunkers, which like the tunnels were dug into the hillsides, are much smaller.
They consist of a long passageway with a single room at the end, which housed the highly explosive materials that surrounded the plutonium core used in the atomic bomb.
Known today as Tunnel 50 and Tunnel 26, the area that is also dotted with former bunkers for highly explosive material was known as Killeen Air Force Base.
Back then, soldiers, airmen and government contractors babysat a small portion of America’s nuclear arsenal.
From 1948, when construction was completed on the tunnels, until the last nuclear weapon was removed in 1967, the tunnel complexes housed some of America’s deadliest deterrents against the Soviet threat.
The tunnels continued to be used as a testing facility by the Operational Test Command until about 1979 when the facility was finally closed.
And even though they’ve been closed for a long time, there is a chill that overtakes the senses of anyone familiar with Cold War history.
The steel door that guards the entrance to Tunnel 50 from the sunlight is about 6 inches thick.
The hinges on the old door squeak as Lauer pulls the heavy door open, and as visitors in a golf cart drive into the darkness of Tunnel 50, the temperature drops about 20 degrees.
The smell of mildew and dampness is overpowering, as much so as the sheer length of the tunnel.
Inside the tunnel are many rooms and passageways that lead to offices and the important storage areas that kept the facility in continuous operation for so long.
There were cavernous storage areas where the bombs were disassembled and reassembled, and around each bend, there were heavy doors, called blast doors, which were in place to protect those who guarded the weapons from any type of nuclear calamity.
Of course the heart of the facility - the place that held the nuclear material - was housed behind a vaulted door that would be common in a modern day bank.
Inside those vaults were compartments referred to as the birdcage where nuclear components were shelved.
The facility even had painted murals on the walls in some areas that very well could have been called 20th century cave paintings.
Now, more than 40 years after the last weapon was removed, the Army is finding a new use for the Cold War relic.
“Currently, our mission is two-fold,” Lauer said.
That mission is to provide a venue that trains soldiers to conduct combat operations underground, and provide an area for research and development to create and test new sensory devices and equipment.
Underground warfare and sensory research and development have been an ongoing military endeavor since the first Gulf War in 1991.
“A lot of our possible foes are going underground with a lot of their facilities, so we are trying to really, for lack of a better term, sell the idea to the military that we need to conduct tactical operations underground,” Lauer said. “Because it’s different.”
The Army didn’t begin to seriously consider using the tunnels as a training ground for warfare until 2002, but now many of the Army’s top brass have become convinced that Fort Hood could become the nation’s hub for underground warfare training.
Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, former III Corps commander, envisioned the underground training center becoming something similar to Fort Irwin’s National Training Center or Fort Polk’s Joint Readiness Training Center.
“There are a lot of things involved in underground operations,” Lauer said.
And it’s a work in progress because there are so many issues that need to be addressed before the Army considers the program viable.
“Right now this is a special operations project, but we are more concerned with getting the conventional Army involved,” Truitt said. “We call ourselves the next IED problem.”
Lauer said that is because underground warfare could be an obstacle, much like IEDs have proved to be in the Iraq conflict.
“If we ever have to go into a fight where we’re underground, it’s going to be a problem because these guys are not ready for it,” Lauer said. “That’s why we are trying to advance the idea that you really need to train underground.”
The greatest concerns are with the soldiers’ safety in this kind of training environment, and that is especially true when they are using weapons of any kind in an enclosed area with little or no ventilation.
When a weapon, such as an M-16, is fired it produces carbon monoxide and depletes the area of oxygen.
The concussion that results from light weapons fire inside the tunnels can cause trauma to the nervous system.
“The human body can only take so much,” Lauer said. “We have to understand this and develop tactics, techniques and procedures to deal with this now, rather than wait.”
