In 1967, Bill Evans volunteered for the U.S. Army, not something many 20-year-olds would have considered prudent at the height of the Vietnam War. But Bill had a plan: Soldiers who entered Army Air Defense Command — the men who worked with Nike missiles — could choose where they were posted.

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       Bill’s choice: just a few miles from his childhood home in Silver Spring, Md., in the fire control center of a Nike site in Gaithersburg called W-92. There, he waited for a phone call indicating Soviet bombers were on the way.

       Answer Man’s recent column about a 1955 Nike mishap — a missile accidentally launched from Fort Meade exploded over the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — prompted memories for many readers.

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       Julia Hart grew up in Anne Arundel County in the 1950s and ’60s. “I believe just short of the ‘new’ Bay Bridge, on the north side of Route 50, there was a missile installation in a field,” wrote Julia, who lives in St. Michaels, Md.

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       There was indeed. That was installation W-26 on the Broadneck Peninsula.

       Wrote Julia: “I still look over that way, thinking about it.”

       Such memories loom large in the minds of Cold War kids.

       What was life like for Nike warriors?

       After basic training at Fort Bragg, Bill Evans was sent to the Edgewood Arsenal in Aberdeen, Md., for more training. But the real education was on the job.

       Bill’s position was to handle the early-warning plotting board. “It was just a big graph you plotted information on,” he said.

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       Other positions in the integrated fire control center included computer operator, acquisition radar operator and target-tracking radar operator.

       “You’d get assigned to one of those people, stay with them and be trained,” said Bill, 75.

       About a mile from the control center were the missiles themselves, maintained by a crew trained in their own specialties. For early Nikes, that included carefully fueling the weapons with propellant.

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       How do you practice something you hope to never do? It’s not like taking a pistol to a shooting range. Once a year, every Nike battery had something called SNAP: short notice annual practice. Given a week’s notice, one complete crew was selected from each installation and sent to a range in Texas. There, they had to set up everything — including the missiles and the various radar units — calibrate the equipment and fire a missile.

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       The radar operators practiced in other ways, too.

       “What we would do often is track aircraft around the D.C. area,” Bill said. “With three airports, commercial airliners were flying all the time.”

       Fortunately, no surface-to-air missiles were accidentally launched toward the Eastern Shuttle.

       Each Nike site was staffed by about 100 men. That included military police.

       “The signs posted around the periphery of the area said, ‘Use of deadly force authorized,’？” said Bill. “That meant, ‘If we catch you climbing the fence, we don’t call the police or your mommy. You get shot.’？”

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       Bill is working with the city of Gaithersburg to prepare signage for a park on the site of the old fire control center he worked at. It’s on Route 28, about a mile from the missile launch site for sale by the General Services Administration.

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       Even after more than 50 years, Bill is mum on whether Gaithersburg’s Nike site had nuclear warheads — not every site did. But he did describe something he spied in a classified room: a piece of equipment with lights and switches, about the size of a few stereo system components.

       It received signals from Fort Meade that designated specific targets, “so everybody’s not firing randomly at whatever moved,” he said.

       Those signals came over a phone line.

       Said Bill: “It was the great great great granddaddy of all the modems we’re using now.”

       Farrel Becker of Laytonsville, Md., recalls the grandfather of the Nike, or at least one forebear.

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       “Starting in the late ’50s and into the early ’60s, my friends and I would play at what we called the ‘Army base’ near where we lived in the Rosemary Hills area of Silver Spring,” Farrel wrote. “We had no idea what it was or what it had been, but for some reason we called it the Army base.

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       “A few years ago I finally found out that it had indeed been an Army base. It was an antiaircraft battery.”

       Indeed. Before Nike there was Skysweeper, introduced in the early 1950s. These antiaircraft cannons were “essentially advanced versions of what was used by the military during World War II,” said Cold War historian Christopher Bright.

       Skysweeper used radar to track targets and fired 75mm projectiles. But those projectiles were not guided. After a few years, the system was deemed obsolete.

       Skysweeper sites were deployed closer to the center of Washington than were Nikes, so many installations have been overtaken by suburbia.

       Wrote Farrel: “I wonder how many people know that their very backyards were once antiaircraft sites defending the Nation’s Capitol?”

       Twitter: @johnkelly

       For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.