'We're all moving on.' The crew grumbled. Twenty workers filed into the Pilot Plant's little conference room as 'the boss' stood just inside the doorway in front of them. On the chilly afternoon of March 26, 1986, Gepp called his crew together. Amid the concrete floors and exposed beams of the Pilot Plant, they found a refuge from the 'paper pushers' elsewhere at Aberdeen.
When a filter needed to be changed or a pipe welded, they did it themselves. Long ago, they had chosen the Army's chemical weapons program over the glossier world of private industry, and they were wedded to their reactors and distillation columns like prairie farmers to the land. Like Gepp himself, his crew of engineers and technicians preferred overalls to suits, pipe wrenches to computers. He loved it like a boy loves his basement workshop - as a place to tinker and to dream. THE PILOT PLANT AT THE ABERDEEN PROVING Ground, the Army's weapons testing and development facility in northeastern Maryland, had been Carl Gepp's domain since 1975.
