On a typical Sunday afternoon in 2011, I was driving down Interstate 25 to head back towards Alamo-no-go (er.. Alamo-ghetto… um… Alamo-whor… ah, nevermind…). The weekend trips up to Albuquerque were totally day trips, with a 3 hour drive up to the city, a few hours to go shopping or sight-see, and another 3 hours back to the Tularosa Basin.
Not fun for any stretch of the imagination.
For anyone who has driven between those two cities, there’s a few ways to get there and back. I’m lazy… or linear (and predictable)… and usually just headed north on Highway 54 out of the ‘burg, catch Hwy 380 in Carizozo, and boogie westward to I-25. On the way back, just reverse.
But on this October evening, I saw something after immediately turning off the interstate toward San Antonio.
For those of you who don’t know… and the rest of you who don’t care… this truck sitting atop a low-boy trailer is a Soviet-era MAZ-543 transporter erector launcher (TEL) for a SCUD missile.
I expect to see these things dotting the landscape while playing my Super Nintendo version of “Desert Strike,” or while looking at historic photographs during Desert Storm (1990/1991). But never would I have guessed I’d see THIS in New Mexico, parked innocuously on the side of the road.
This was me back in 2011, posing in front of this piece of Commie hardware, solely as “proof of life,” so no whipper-snapper can call Grandpa a nut-job… when I eventually have grandkids.
There was one other person there taking photographs like I was. We both laughed at our intense interest in this tarp-covered surprise, both knowing it was out-of-time and definitely out-of-place. He pointed out the tires, shown here, and we guessed they were original based on the Cyrillic lettering on them.
I know that the military bases within New Mexico each do some wacky and weird things. (I will not go into specifics here). So the presence of a MAZ-543 with SCUD missile (look closely at the tarp coming off) isn’t the strangest thing I’ve seen in the Land of Entrapment. But the process of getting a REAL Scud TEL to New Mexico, covering it half-assed under a tarp, and taking a burger break at the Owl Cafe is… fucking weird.
Back in the 1990s, the collective exercise called ROVING SANDS used “Scud Hunting” as one of their mission objectives. And since (almost) every TEL was either blowed up or covered in some nasty chemical shit, it was easier to simulate a Scud missile launcher, as seen here:
The simulators may have been effective for the aerial hunters during ROVING SANDS, because they made a bunch of them.
But my experience in finding the MAZ 543 on the side of the road begs the question: who did it belong to, and where did it go?
For you history buffs, here’s a video on Scud Hunting during Operation Desert Storm:
Joseph T. Page II 