California Engineer
By William Wetherall
26 December 2025
The fall of 1962 was a big year for me. I had graduated from Sierra College in June 1961, and was accepted by the Department of Electrical Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. I was supposed to start my studies as a junior that fall, but was granted a 1-year leave of absence to work for the Department of Navy at San Francisco Naval Shipyards at Hunter's Point, where I had worked the summers of 1959 and 1960.
At the shipyards I was an engineering aid in the Fire Control section of the Electronics Division. I job was to assist the civilian "yard bird" engineers who installed and tested fire-control radar and sonar systems for state-of-the-art ship-launched guided missiles and torpedoes, and antiaircraft batteries, on new, refitted, and vintage warships, from submarines to aircraft carriers, and occasionally a minesweeper or transport. Most of our work was on ships tied up along a quay or sitting on blocks in a dry dock, but now and then we'd go out on a ship on sea trials along the coast outside the Golden Gate.
Engineering students at Berkeley were "red hots". We were proud of the 12-1/2-inch Keuffel & Esser Log Log Duplex Decitrig slide rules we carried everywhere, often slung from our belts, though not (contrary to folklore) strapped to our legs. We were loaded for any bear of a problem our profs and TAs could throw at us, so long as we could reduce it to an equation, into which we could assign values to all variables, and crank out an answer on our slip sticks. We knew next to nothing, and were taught even less, about the social and political complications of life, like girls and Cold War politics.
Then came the Cuban Crisis. We should not have been shocked. The campus was dotted with bomb shelters and other "Civil Defense" facilities. Like many other engineering students, I had studied radio activity, and had even taken part in field exercises in which we walked a grid in a park with a Geiger counter, measured the level of radiation at each point, plotted the data on a map of the park, and located the hot spots. It was an Easter egg hunt, in which the eggs were vials of radioactive material the instructor or a TA had buried in the ground.
Not a few engineering students, myself included, became totally disillusioned by the prospects of working for the "military industrial complex" as Eisenhower had called the symbiotic parasitism of the armed forces and the weapons industry. We knew that roughly 70 percent of all electrical engineers did work related to the defense industry. Glamorous aerospace jobs were satellites of the defense industry. The technology that would out-orbit Sputnik was the same technology that would put the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the ICBM race.
I stopped going to lectures in the College of Engineering and began auditing courses on subjects ranging from archaeology to zoology. I read a lot of fiction, from Ayn Rand to Zane Grey. I read several volumes on information theory and the history of science and technology. I read Walden Pond.
My report card for the Spring 1963 semester was full of withdrawal Fs, as I had not sat for my final exams and skipped the make-up exams. Early in the summer, while working as a surveyor for the Tahoe National Forest, I received a letter from the assistant dean of the College of Engineering informing me that I had been put on academic probation for a year, during which I would not be allowed to enroll.
Late that summer I was ordered to take my Selective Service physical, the first stage in the process of being drafted into the military. In order to be able to choose an occupational specialty, I enlisted in the US Army and indicated my desire to be a surgical technician. I was in infantry boot camp when Kennedy was assassinated. After finishing training as a medic and truck driver, I drove an ambulance in a Strategic Army Corps medical battalion. I spent one-month participating in a field exercise called Desert Strike.
In the heat of the Mojave in California and Arizona, a couple of active Army divisions and Air Force groups fought over the Colorado River. I was on the side that wore Roman crests on their battle helmets. The object of the umpired maneuvers was to test the ability of US forces to fight a desert war. But the ambulance support was not simulated. In addition to the real blisters, crotch rot, and other military malignancies, soldiers were bitten by scorpions, killed in vehicle accidents, crushed by tanks in night operations, and blistered to death in the unforgiving sun. But Operation Desert Storm would not come until twenty years after another war had been fought, and lost, in the hot steamy jungles of Vietnam, on the other side of the same Eurasian continent.
I cannot remember precisely what went through my mind in late October and early November 1962 as I watched, in the common lounge with the students who lodged and boarded, or like me just boarded, at Arch Place, the news reports on the showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev over the buildup of Soviet offensive missiles on Cuba. All I recall is that I wondered what kind of career awaited me, and what sense it made, if any, to devote my life to the design, manufacture, sales, and service of devices that could destroy the entire planet.
I had already launched my writing career, as it were, with letters to the editor of the Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus paper. I had also published a critique of Nevada County Education and Culture in The Union, a hometown paper, which had also run a column I wrote while at Fort Ord called Life in the Army.
But the Cuban Crisis, and readings of books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, compelled me to write longer and deeper about the contradictions of technological development and civilization. I read, and wrote, from sanctuaries in various US Army posts, but did not finish my first essay until around the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964. Though I was soon to be caught up in what would became a full-scale and very nasty war, at the time I had little understanding or interest in what seemed at first to be just another minor skirmish in a far off corner of the world I was challenged to locate on a map.
What shall we do with Andromeda?
I finished What shall we do with Andromeda? while studying to be a medical laboratory technician at the Sixth US Army Medical Laboratory at Fort Baker just north of the Golden Gate Bridge between the bridge and Sausalito. The laboratory was directly across San Francisco Bay from Letterman Army Hospital in the Presidio, where we also did some training.
I was, of course, delighted that the California Engineer accepted my manuscript. For it was, to say the least, a very unconventional piece of writing. Nothing quite like it had ever appeared in the magazine. I wonder if the editors were as overwhelmed then, as I am now in hindsight, by its cocky rhetoric. Whatever they thought of it, they touched not a word -- not even its odd neologisms, which fortunately never made it into a dictionary. Did the editors think of looking them up? Or did they just feel that Wetherall seems to know what he's talking about, and besides they had a nice ring to them?
Fifty years later, while reflecting on the pompous rage that drove me to write the piece, I am aware of how much of that youthful anger, though now much quieter and more moderate, still simmers in the furnace of my brain, and still fires my gravest misgivings about the human condition, but as well my deepest hopes.
Global conditions haven't improved but arguably have worsened. Whatever glimmer of hope I once had that technology might come to the rescue, has vanished in the rush of governments and corporations, bent on global domination, to consign the killing fields to drones, and replace humans with AI agents and robots.
Cybernetics and semantics
In the fall of 1965, except for the fact that I was in still the Army, I was a very happy trooper. What shall we do with Andromeda?, my first magazine article and the cover story of the March 1965 issue of the California Engineer, had been published. It caused a bit of a stir for a magazine not known for its interest in the social consequences of technology, and the editorial of the October 1965 edition credited my article with inspiring "three more views on the relation of contemporary technology to man and environment" in that issue.
While still serving in the U.S. Army, deployed as a laboratory technician at the Ft. Ord U.S. Army Hospital, I proposed an article on Cybernetics and Semantics and was encouraged to write it. The editors had decided to make "Communications in the Modern World" the focus of its January 1966 issue, and my article, which was all about communications, would fit right in.
I had already started compiling notes and writing paragraphs on the Smith-Corona portable typewriter I packed around everywhere. I worked in the bay of the barracks I shared with a couple of dozen other hospital personnel. I bummed a number of books from the Ft. Ord Library, where I had once worked part-time reshelving books and attending the checkout desk. And I bought a few older and newer titles at book shops in Monterey.
Then orders came down for me to report to the 106th General Hospital at Fort Bliss in El Paso. The war in Vietnam was heating up. The 106th, I was told when reporting for duty, was gearing up to be sent somewhere in Asia to support the war.
The ambulance company I had been with at Fort Ord before being sent to Fort Baker for lab tech training was by then in Vietnam, and I was corresponding with a couple of other medics I had worked with. The medical battalion to which the ambulance company had been attached, and the evacuation hospital to which the battalion had been attached, were also in Vietnam, where I would have been had I not been sent to Fort Baker.
The 106th General Hospital was a field hospital and was prepared to set up and operate in tents anywhere in the world on short notice. At the time we had no idea where we were going -- probably not to Vietnam, but definitely to a neighboring country to which the wounded who survived their treatment in evacuation and MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) hospitals in Vietnam could be airlifted. While at Fort Bliss, the 106th was a component of the William Beaumont General Hospital, where the 106th's resident staff worked to maintain their technical skills.
Newly assigned personnel like yours truly, however, would bide their time in the barracks, to do chores around the company area or elsewhere on the base, for the few weeks before the 106th received its orders to move out. I used my time to continue writing, but not for long. Lab techs were in short supply, and I got seconded to the medical laboratory at the new McAfee Army Hospital at White Sands Missile Range. Though I had less time to write during the day, I had no other duties, and so feverishly wrote in the evenings and on weekends.
I was at Ft. Bliss for about 2 months from mid October to mid December, and all but the first and last weeks of this period I spent at White Sands. As I recall, the deadline was the end of November, and I mailed my manuscript out, with a few hand corrections, just in time.
There was no email in those days. All my communication with the California Engineer was by postal snail mail. I never personally met or talked on the phone with any of the staff. By the time I returned to Berkeley in 1967, as a student of Oriental Languages in the College of Letters and Science, the then incarnation of the magazine had stopped publishing. I would like to think it was not because of my articles.
In the fall of 1965, I was also more than a little full of myself. Reading my California Engineer articles today, but especially Cybernetics and Semantics, I shake my head in utter awe at the magnitude of my "attitude" -- for that's what it must have been. It's still there, I assure you. But in the subsequent decades, I've worked very hard at suppressing it, or hiding it behind a veil of writing that even I can understand.
"Our Far-East Correspondent"
What amazes me, though, is how Richard Sullivan, the editor of the California Engineer, justified including, much less leading with, my article. Was it to get the worst over with? Or to scare readers away from the rest of the issue?
Sullivan even listed me as "Staff" on the masthead and called me "our Far-East Correspondent" on the "About the Authors" page. This was the first and last time that I would ever have such a title.
One thing I will say about my writing then -- after quitting my engineering studies, and before embarking on my language and literature studies -- is that I really knew how to pile it higher and deeper. When I read today what I wrote then, I have to reread some phrases to parse their seamless, practically comma-free streams of pretentious thought.
I can generally still figure out what it was I was trying to say. And I can generally sort the wheat from the chaff. From my vantage point half a century later, there was mostly chaff. And bloopers like "somantic" not being a corruption of "semantic".
Someday, when I have time, I may try to rewrite the essay in clearer and simpler terms that an editor today might agree is good prose. The sentences will be half as long and say twice as much. And I wouldn't have to look up my own words in a dictionary and discover that don't, and have never, existed.
Alternatively, I could compile a glossary of neologisms, and outright Wetherallisms and BS, to aide reading, and markup each word in the glossary to display a pop-up annotation on mouseover.
The extinction of civilization
While doing bacteriology and parisotology at the 106th General Hospital, I fired off a third manuscript to Sullilvan, certain he would like it. He never acknowledged receiving it, but I don't think it was lost in the mails. He and his staff surely read it and rightly concluded that Wetherall had gone mad.
I do not have a copy, and cannot remember the title, but it must have been gloomy. The story likened the spread of science and technology, and the industrial revolution, from Europe to the Americas and elsewhere around the world, to a pathogen that colonizes every part of the world and depletes the continents and seas of all their resources. Without nutrition, and exhausted, the colonies implode on themselves, and the pathogen becomes extinct.
Looking back, I have to thank California Engineer for showing good judgement and restraint. It was not in the business of publishing dystopian science fiction. But was the analogy wrong?
Last revised 28 December 2025