Excerpt from A Girl's Guide to Missiles by Karen Piper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As for me, my only disappointment was that I had not seen any wild animals.

"Mom, uh," I asked quietly, "where are the coyotes?"

No one replied.

* * *

By the time we arrived at China Lake, soldiers were coming home with something called "post- Vietnam syndrome." To me, President Kennedy represents a different path we could have taken, a path that would not have ended in defeat. People loved him in China Lake when I lived there. He was the only president ever to have visited the base.

In the armaments museum, you can still watch a video about his visit or skim through photographs and news stories about that day— June 7, 1963. This was eight years before we moved to the base, but his memory still lingered. There, you can watch him land on Air Force One at the Area E airstrip. As his plane pulls to a stop, white- jumpsuited men with white hoods, looking like a biohazard team, push a stairway up to him. They look as if they'd just run over from the chemical lab to help Kennedy out of his plane.

Then, in dazzling contrast to the white of the plane, the staircase, and the jumpsuited men, Kennedy steps out in a black suit and black tie with a white handkerchief in his pocket, looking as brilliant as his smile.

Bleachers await him, full of women in pearls and pith helmets next to men in suits, all facing an empty desert that will soon be full of exploding weapons. At a podium in front, a man says into a micro¬phone, "The events to follow illustrate weapons in various stages of development and tests. Like parents bracing themselves for the possible embarrassment of a child's first recital, we continue."

Then the weapons begin to fly in all their Technicolor glory. Those fifteen- year- old chopped- down sycamore trees had earlier been propped back up as a mock Vietnamese forest, and when a Helicopter Trap Weapon is dropped on them, they lie down like rays around a sun. A helicopter lands in the middle. People cheer. Then Mk 81 bombs create little mushroom clouds that race across the desert floor. Cluster bombs spew shrapnel, breaking red balloons tied to the earth that are meant to represent soldiers. Napalm, also designed at China Lake, lights up the desert in a fireball. It is a symphony of fire timed beautifully to music. How could he not be impressed? Even William Porter, our friend and church deacon, got to shake Kennedy's hand. He had designed the Shrike missile, named for a bird that impales its victims and hangs their bodies on barbed-wire fences.

Finally, a Walleye missile, which is TV camera guided, is aimed straight for the president. It is the grand finale. The camera in the nose scans the terrain, looking for a target match, in this case President Kennedy. On a TV screen mounted by his chair, the President is supposed to see himself on TV. See himself as a target. Then the missile is supposed to veer away from him, right on schedule.

It might sound shocking to aim a missile at the president's head, but China Lakers were like the Merry Pranksters of weapons. They liked those kinds of jokes and tricks. For instance, a favorite gag was to hand a visiting dignitary or defense contractor a cigarette before taking him into a room to see the Sidewinder. The Sidewinder nose would be propped on a stand with the rotating glass tracker at the tip pointed into the center of the room. Since the missile is drawn to heat like a snake, it would start tracking the visitor when he walked in. Sometimes engineers would paint the missile nose like an eyeball, which would follow the visitor around the room. The visitor may have nearly had a heart attack, but everyone else had a good laugh. So it made sense they would point a missile at President Kennedy too.

But Kennedy did not jump, or laugh, as he was supposed to. When he was directed to look at the TV screen by his chair to see the Walleye missile photographing him, locking in on him, he merely looked confused. Reportedly, he simply said, "I can't say I recognized myself. I don't quite understand the joke." Soon after the show ended, rumors began to fly that Kennedy looked worn out and had a headache. One person said he "looked like he was tired, wished he didn't have to do this, and wanted a good beer or a shot of whiskey." He asked if he could lie down for a while, so the navy rounded up all the neighborhood dogs to keep them from barking while he slept.

Adapted from A Girl's Guide to Missiles by Karen Piper, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Karen Piper