Word: scraphogs
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Marshall is one of a few dozen locals who have stuck it out as a scraphog at a 743-acre site near the Hawthorne Army ammunition plant in northern Nevada. Succumbing to public pressure to clean up its old demolition ranges, the Army last year turned over to a civilian contractor the tricky business of clearing the Hawthorne site, which had become a sprawling dump for more than 30 years' worth of defective or leftover bombs. The winner of the $3.2 million contract was a small new firm based in Washington named UXB International. (UXB, which stands for "unexploded bomb...
...Burger King, but it does have a casino, a legal brothel nearby and 9% unemployment. Locals and drifters thronged to UXB's headquarters the first day it was open, eager for jobs that paid $8.50 an hour. But the company had trouble finding workers willing to be a scraphog for more than a few days at a time. So two months ago, UXB decided to look beyond Hawthorne for additional hands, stirring up what seemed to be an undercurrent of prejudice and resurrecting some old resentments from a painful...
Just a handful of Vietnamese have chosen to remain in Hawthorne, but tension lingers. "There is nothing racist or slurist about it," insists the sheriff, "but we don't like outsiders telling us who we do like and who we don't." Vo still works as a scraphog under Le's supervision. "I've been in the U.S. for six years, and the first time I came to Hawthorne they put me in jail," says a bewildered Vo. "They have a bad feeling about Vietnamese people here...
...pretty nice bunch of guys," says Mike Cook, 31, an out-of-work miner from Tombstone, Ariz., who lives with his wife and four kids in a car to save money. Hoisting a 40-lb. piece of metal, he adds, "You have to be pretty crazy to be a scraphog...
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