But back then, what worried both my parents, and of course remained unspoken, was the ever-growing threat of a full-blown war in Southeast Asia. My dad sort of accepted my decision with a mixture of pride and well-hidden fear. The difficult part for me was telling my sisters. When I enlisted I automatically assumed that Kathy was so little that she wouldn't remember much about it, which I later found out was totally untrue. My twin sister, Margaret, was in a hospital/school for out-of-control young women somewhere in central Florida. Mary and Beth were the ones that I worried the most about. Who would protect them if I were no longer there? Who could they lean on when Mom and Dad were three sheets to the wind? Leaving my sisters was the hardest part of all. But I knew if I stayed, it would only be a matter of time until I was ground under by the neighborhood, or found myself wedded to a job that could only promise the same kind of life my parents led. I needed to leave. I had to go out and find my own way in life, and I needed to do that somewhere other than Miami. (This first step, while intuitive, was also very scary, taken somewhat in ignorance.)
Of course I learned much later that the survival of my sisters was never in question. They were as adaptable as I was to the circumstances of our lives, and while I might have made a difference with some things, they, too, had to find their own way in life, as well as their own way out.
I started my first day away from home in a singularly spectacular way. Just how much trouble can a person get into while riding a train from Miami to Fort Jackson, South Carolina?
Throw in six other recruits looking for a little action their first time away from home, and the answer is: a lot.
The train made its first stop, just a bit longer than ten minutes, just north of Miami in what was back then a small, sleepy burg called Fort Lauderdale. This was just long enough for the oldest-looking recruit in our group to slip into a liquor store and purchase half a dozen quarts of vodka. We had pooled our money, but the best he could do was the cheapest brand he could find. With vodka, cheap is relative, but at least he found bottles with labels. Once back on board the train, we discovered we had nothing appropriate to drink it with. So, we bribed one of the conductors to bring us something we could mix. He brought us a couple of large jugs of orange Kool-Aid.
To make a long story short, it must have been very disturbing to the military police to be carrying unconscious bodies off the train in Columbia, South Carolina, all six with large, bright-orange smiley faces curling up at the corners of their mouths. Blessedly, like the others, I have absolutely no memory of our arrival. However, I can tell you that no matter how hard you scrub, it takes about two days for orange Kool-Aid stains to fade. Never have I been as sick as those first few days at Fort Jackson. Welcome to manhood.
It doesn't take much in the way of an intuitive nature to get through basic training. You simply do as you are told and keep your head down. Everyone has heard that whatever you do, you should never volunteer for anything. Well, it's true. They asked once if anyone knew anything about steam and engineering. I raised my hand because I had done some work on a boat in Miami outfitted with steam engines. I ended up running a steam hose inside a dumpster while scrubbing it down with a wire brush. It was the last time I volunteered for anything, at least in basic training.
I graduated easily, earning an expert badge with a rifle and a bayonet, and making sharpshooter with a Colt .45 automatic. I never actually finished the bayonet course. I broke the stock off two M-14 rifles before they gave me a third and asked me to quit and go sit in the shade. Surprisingly to me, I had made expert by scaring the hell out of the arms repairman.
The week I graduated, they passed out orders sending everyone else in my platoon to Advanced Individual Training (AIT). I received nothing. Instead, my company commander called me into the company orderly room and informed me that the Army had decided to delete my weapons system from inventory. (I was originally supposed to receive AIT in the 106-mm recoilless rifle, specifically a weapons system called the Sidewinder, which had six barrels mounted over open tracks.)
I didn't know at the time, but found out much later, that my records and test scores had been reviewed by Army intelligence and, as I had scored in the upper three percentile, a decision had been made to recruit me. They didn't tell me that directly of course, they simply told me to go out and search for another military occupational specialty (MOS). For some ungodly reason, military intelligence needs to be so very clandestine about everything, even recruitment. Had they known how well I could hold my liquor I'm sure they would have made a different decision.
Anyway, I spent a few days combing the grounds of Fort Jackson, looking for something I'd like to actually do in the Army. While searching out this new MOS, I spent one afternoon sitting in the Post Exchange beer hall, drinking 3.5-beer from a pitcher. I was eventually joined at the table by a stranger dressed in civilian clothes. After a couple of beers spent ignoring one another, we finally struck up a conversation. When he found out I was looking for a new MOS, he slipped me his card and asked me to drop by his office for a chat. After a week of sitting around waiting for a callback from a number of possibilities that never seemed to materialize, I took him up on his offer.
Of course it never occurred to me that he might be the reason no one was calling, and that our chance meeting was anything but. I was still quite naïve back then.
So I eventually stopped by his office for a chat, he pitched me, and I accepted. But the decision wasn't as easy as I now make it seem.
Originally I had volunteered for two years of service, with four years in the reserves to meet my six-year obligation. Military intelligence wanted a commitment for a minimum of four years' active-duty service time. This requirement was primarily because AIT in intelligence was about four times as long as any of the other AIT schools. Depending on what I was qualified for in intelligence, I could be spending another two years going to classes.
I agreed to the additional two years and was allowed to pick my new job by throwing a dart at a wheel that was broken up into individually sized, pie-shaped segments with job titles. It looked unsophisticated, but it was just the opposite. They knew the percentages of fill rate they required for each MOS, and broke the wheel up into exactly that percentage of coverage, some pie shapes being quite a bit larger than others.
He spun the wheel and I let the dart fly. My dart nailed the very thin line of purple that divided the different MOSs. I laughed and started to throw the dart again, but he stopped me, informing me that the purple lines segregating the other colors was also an MOS. But all he would tell me was that it was in signals intelligence. A week later I was on my way to MT in sunny Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where the leaves were already changing colors in the early fall.
Back then, on entering the grounds at Fort Devens, one saw a beautiful, albeit small, Army base in quaint New England. The older red-brick three-story school buildings surrounded an open and paved parade ground situated across the street from a larger now-turning brown turf-covered parade ground. This was fronted by rows of large red-bricked manor houses, which were field grade officer housing. It was the perfect picture of peace and tranquility.
Of course, one would soon discover the antiquated two-story wooden barracks in which we privates resided. Thrown together for World War II, the structures had been meant to serve as temporary billets only, no longer than four or five years at the most. Did I mention they put no insulation in the walls back in the 1940s? With Vietnam looming on the horizon, they were putting new coats of paint on the buildings, hoping they'd continue to serve their purpose without falling down.
When I arrived in the late fall, the weather was still wonderfully brisk, but you could sometimes taste the bite of winter in the air. You could also tell that the base was gearing up for the Vietnam War because they had just started running classes night and day, or in today's vernacular, 24/7, to push twice as many soldiers through as normal. I was assigned to a night platoon. As a night school student I attended classes from four in t
he afternoon until midnight.
Ask anyone who ever attended school at Fort Devens what it was like, and they will tell you it was about as difficult a learning environment as any could be. During my third week I personally witnessed the first of two suicides in our student group. Someone—I assume a private, because of his slick sleeves showing no rank—did a near-perfect swan dive off the upper-deck railing, hitting the pavement with a loud pop, very much like you'd expect to hear if you dropped a watermelon three floors to concrete. Another student hung himself in the barracks latrine with a couple of web belts a few weeks later. Both scored perfect tens on the suicide scale. (I always wanted to know how these were reported to parents. "Your son gave his life in service to his country by . . ." I probably shouldn't go there.)
It's difficult to understand why someone would want to commit suicide, especially in a training environment. But, having been through the same training I can now say that suicide is not only possible, it is a viable choice.
One of the primary things we were expected to learn early on was how to accurately copy and understand International Morse code. Initially they began by familiarizing us with individual letters of the alphabet, which we listened to with headphones at about three words per minute. That would be a string of fifteen characters, one character every four seconds, not difficult at all. Translating "dit-dah" into the letter A was a piece of cake, especially at that speed. Later they added special symbols like the "&" sign or characters specific to different languages. Cyrillic was a pain in the butt, but some of the special characters in other, more bizarre, languages were even more difficult. All the while they would be increasing the speed of transmission. As the speeds increased, the level of difficulty rose exponentially, especially when they added cut numbers and started differentiating between letter/number groups and international Q&Z signals, all intermixed one with the other.
Q&Z signals were abbreviated three-letter codes for things like "You're using too much transmission power," "Please repeat—your last transmission was garbled," or "Over and out," that sort of thing.
What makes them difficult to understand is that they are normally sent so fast the letters all run together and you can only understand them by their individualized cadence or rhythm, which is totally out of cadence with everything else being sent. A difficult system to initially learn.
Almost everyone developed some proficiency at speeds up to eight words per minute or forty letters every sixty seconds. Producing copy with virtually no error made it a bit more difficult, but that too was expected. Eventually everyone reached ten words—fifty characters per minute.
Beyond that, the degree of difficulty was nearly overwhelming. Above ten words per minute you no longer have the leisure to listen to the actual transmission and then translate it to the appropriate character through formulation. It has to become second nature, something you don't even think about before doing, kind of like driving a manual shift car after twenty years.
Like many around me, I was stuck at ten words per minute for nearly four weeks. After sitting eight hours a day in front of a typewriter doing nothing but trying to copy more than ten words a minute in Morse code, I can tell you that suicide begins to look like the lesser of two evils. However, eventually I intuitively discovered the solution to my problem.
The small town of Ayer, Massachusetts, lies just outside the main gate of Fort Devens. As in most military towns, the downtown part of the small city contains numerous bars that cater to the soldiers.
Most are dives, where drinking and brawling provided the Friday and Saturday night entertainment. Anyone who has ever been to Fort Devens has gotten a black eye at the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill on a Saturday night. And, if not there, there were plenty of other places to choose from.
I had heard that if you visited the Hotel Ayer bar while wearing your uniform, they wouldn't ask you for an ID. So, that is where I went on Wednesday noon, toward the end of my fourth week. I had every intention of getting completely potted and skipping classes that night. The result, of course, would have been an immediate reassignment to a combat arms unit and duty in a hot and wet place somewhere in Southeast Asia, but I was past the point of caring.
By 4:00 P.M. I was pretty drunk. I had been drinking and shooting pool all afternoon, and had lost any desire to cut classes because I had forgotten why I was even there. So, I caught a cab to the school building and slipped in with the rest of my platoon when they arrived for night school. Stumbling into class, I quickly took my seat along the wall and braced my body so it wouldn't fall over when I fell asleep.
A surprising thing happened. Because I was still feeling the major effects of the alcohol, I was unable to keep track of what I was hearing in the earphones and following along with my fingers on the typewriter keys was impossible. In fact, it was actually quite comical and made me laugh. Suddenly, it was as if someone had reached inside my head and flipped a switch. My fingers began responding to the sounds of the Morse code I was hearing, without my thinking about it, and suddenly I was running on full automatic.
That night, I passed speeds ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty words per minute—all in one evening. From that point, it was a piece of cake. By Friday of the following week I was working twenty-five wpm with ease. Another two weeks went by and our class finally graduated: 33 out of 48 who started had stayed the course. I graduated first in my class. As proud as I was, I didn't know at the time this was not a good thing.
Seven days later, everyone in my class was on the way to their overseas assignments, the majority, of course, headed for Saigon. I was reassigned for further training in a place across the post we called Area G. I had heard about Area G. In fact, most students had. The nickname for the place was "Little Korea," because almost all the training took place outside and not inside the buildings, which in a typical Massachusetts winter, made any form of training quite nasty. The Area G training compound was circled with a double fence topped with razor wire, and filled with all kinds of equipment mounted on the backs of trucks and Jeeps. There was also an area filled with dozens of different antenna systems. We students had always thought that Area G was where they sent you if you couldn't hack it in the main school building, but it was just the opposite. Area G and a number of other special schools were skimming the cream off the top.
The class size in Area G was surprisingly small. In my class there were eight others assigned; four were Special Forces buck sergeants, two civilians (at least, two without uniforms), and two Navy personnel. Another surprise was my promotion to specialist four. So, I was feeling pretty good that first day, until they started the class. That was when they told us that everything we had learned to do with a typewriter, we would now learn to do with a pencil, or as they called it, "a stick." Not only that, but we would be expected to learn how to transmit Morse code as quickly as we could receive it. If you want to understand the level of difficulty involved, sit down and try to write 100 characters a minute by hand, never mind translating them from or into International Morse. Or try to tap the tune to a song on the right side of your thigh while driving a military Jeep cross-country and off road, or better yet, while jogging.
Besides learning to send as well as receive, we were taught everything anyone could ever want to know about transmitters, the use of encryption systems, and how to identify and locate them. The course even included two weeks of applied slide rule and the use of logarithm books.
It was a grueling ten weeks, but I again graduated first in the class, and once again watched as my classmates packed and departed for overseas assignments, all in the Saigon area, while I was under orders to sit and wait.
Ten days later, my orders finally arrived. They didn't make any sense. I was asked to turn in all of my military-issued clothing and was then taken by car to a Worcester, Massachusetts, men's store, where I was ordered to spend $250 on civilian clothes. By dark, I found myself sitting in the rear shadows of a C-123 military transport plane headed to points south, and I stil
l did not know where I was actually assigned.
The plane made two stops en route, both in progressively hotter climates. At one stop we picked up a pallet of equipment destined to the same place I was traveling to. The equipment was covered with canvas and sealed, so it was impossible to see what it was. No one on board would volunteer where we were headed, so I didn't ask. Eventually, as the sun cracked the Eastern horizon, we set down on a very small runway bordered on both sides with what appeared to be ocean. They unloaded me and the pallet, and then quickly taxied back out onto the runway and lifted off. I found myself sitting alone with some sea birds, on a rock in the middle of nowhere, next to a tin shack. It was hot, humid, and devoid of human life.
I didn't have to wait very long. After sitting in the heat and humidity for about ten minutes, a Ford Econoline pickup pulled up and I was greeted with a warm hello from my new boss, Chief Warrant Officer Sal Corrado. He was appropriately dressed for the occasion in a white T-shirt, tan shorts, and beach sandals–back then they were called flip-flops. He had a baseball cap to cover his thinning and receding hairline. The good news was that he wasn't armed.
"Welcome to Eleuthera in the Bahamas," he said, reaching out and shaking my hand.
My sense of frustration was almost overwhelming. I had spent considerable time and effort attempting to get as far away from Miami as I could, and now here I found myself within a fifteen-minute whisper-jet flight from home! Well, at least it wasn't Southeast Asia.
Chapter Three
From My First Assignment to a Near-Death Experience
My tour of duty on Eleuthera was normal except for two incidents (three if you want to count my rolling the Econoline pickup and shattering my wrist again).
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 6