December 1, 1989

December 1, 1989, was the Friday morning when the U.S. Army’s Reston operation moved from preparation to entry into the monkey house. The date’s defining action was the insertion of a civilian-clothed team into the building: personnel worked in Racal suits to control the outbreak, while the ordinary suburban setting—rush-hour traffic, office workers, and children at a nearby day-care center—made the biological emergency seem at once hidden and perilously close.

From preparation to deployment

The book marks the day as the opening of Part Three, “Smashdown,” and labels its opening sequence “Insertion.” Before dawn, at 4:30 a.m., Jerry Jaax rose, dressed, and left for the Institute. The team would travel in civilian clothes rather than uniforms or camouflage, avoiding a conspicuous military spectacle that might provoke public alarm. By 5:00, people had gathered under floodlights at a loading dock. The air was cold enough for their breath to show.

Gene Johnson waited among camouflaged military trunks containing equipment he had kept from the Kitum Cave expedition. The stored supplies included field biological suits, battery packs, gloves, surgical clothing, syringes and needles, medicines, dissection tools, sample containers, biohazard bags, and hand-pumped sprayers for disinfecting equipment and suits. Their earlier use in Africa had become unexpectedly relevant: the gear was now being assembled for an emergency in a Virginia suburb. Johnson loaded the trunks into an unmarked white van and drove ahead as the first wave.

C. J. Peters joined the deployment, intending to accompany the group to the monkey house and then return to manage contact with news organizations and government agencies. At 6:30 a.m., he ordered the convoy to move. Ordinary cars carrying officers in civilian clothes followed two unmarked military vehicles: an ambulance equipped with a biocontainment stretcher and a refrigerated supply truck for dead monkeys and blood samples. The caravan crossed the Potomac at Point of Rocks and joined Leesburg Pike as rush hour began. Traffic slowed the journey; the convoy took two hours to reach its destination.

The insertion point

The team arrived at an office park that was filling with workers. To keep the vehicles out of sight, the ambulance and supply truck were parked behind the monkey house, beside the building’s glass-door entrance. A slope and a line of trees separated the rear lawn from a playground and day-care center. Children were playing within view of the operation. The proximity sharpened the stakes without changing the team’s immediate task: the outbreak had to be contained before it could spread beyond the facility.

Jerry Jaax and Gene Johnson had decided that personnel would put on their suits inside, rather than outdoors, both to prepare in the designated staging space and to avoid giving television crews a visible spectacle. The first entrants went through the rear door into an empty storage room. Beyond a cinder-block wall came the faint cries of monkeys; no staff were present in the building. Jaax took Captain Mark Haines with him as the first man in. Haines was a veterinarian familiar with monkeys as well as a soldier experienced in demanding field conditions.

They changed in the back of a van behind a sheet drawn across its doors, then entered the staging room in surgical clothing. An Army support team helped them into orange Racal suits. The suits supplied filtered air under positive pressure; gloves and yellow boots were taped to the sleeves and legs to seal the openings. The protection was cumbersome, but its purpose was direct: to keep airborne infectious material from reaching the people working inside. The staging room, air-lock corridor, and doors organized the route into and out of the hot zone.

Work in Room H

After surveying the building, Jaax and Haines found monkeys showing signs of illness in more than one room. Nancy Jaax then changed into a scrub suit in the van, entered the staging area, and went inside with Captain Steven Denny, carrying boxes of syringes. In Room H, she saw mucus on some monkeys’ noses, a familiar sign of respiratory illness that alarmed her in this setting. Dan Dalgard selected four monkeys he judged to be the sickest and administered drugs to euthanize them.

The room was crowded with suited personnel, and movement was confused. As Nancy handled the animals, she noticed that Sergeant Curtis Klages had a tear across his suit at the hip. She pointed it out and used spare tape to patch the opening. She then removed the four dead monkeys, placed them in plastic biohazard bags, and disinfected the successive layers of packaging and containers with bleach. At the air lock, a team member sprayed her and the packages before she returned to the staging area. Her suit came off; drenched in sweat and exposed again to the December cold, she changed into civilian clothes in the van and set out with a driver for Fort Detrick, eager for the animals to be examined in Level 4 conditions.

Inside Room H, Jerry Jaax counted 65 animals after Nancy had removed the four selected for euthanasia. Using a pole-mounted injector and a padded mop handle to restrain each monkey, he and Haines administered anesthetic, followed by a sedative. The team took blood from the unconscious animals and then gave them a lethal drug. Captain Steve Denny collected liver and spleen samples from the dead monkeys. By late afternoon, the monkeys in Room H had all been euthanized, and their remains were packaged for removal. The sequence joined disease control to laboratory investigation: the animals were destroyed to stop the outbreak, while their blood and tissues were preserved as evidence.

The day’s close and its significance

The operation unfolded beside ordinary neighborhood life. As evening approached, children left the playground with their parents while team members emerged from the hot zone in pairs and gathered on the lawn in civilian clothes. The juxtaposition—nearby families going home as workers completed a hazardous intervention—made the location part of the day’s meaning. The response was not taking place in an isolated research compound but in a working office park, within reach of a day-care center and rush-hour roads.

At Fort Detrick, Nancy Jaax stayed at work until 1:00 a.m., examining monkey carcasses with Ron Trotter. Five carcasses were waiting in the air lock, and examination revealed lesions in the animals’ intestines consistent with severe Ebola infection. The findings gave the response team direct evidence of what the outbreak was doing to the monkeys. Meanwhile, Jarvis Purdy, a monkey-house worker who had suffered a heart attack, was resting in a nearby hospital and reported stable. These details place the day’s containment work alongside its human consequences, without implying that the operation’s danger had passed.

December 1 therefore stands as the transition from planning and covert mobilization to physical intervention. The convoy’s unmarked vehicles, the suits assembled from Gene Johnson’s stored African equipment, the patched tear, the disinfected packages, and the specimens sent back to Fort Detrick all belonged to one connected effort: enter the infected building, limit the immediate threat, and obtain evidence about the virus. The day began before dawn and ended with the Room H animals removed, but it was only the opening of the larger Reston operation.