War Story 3: Getting Equipment From Underground Sources

A Russian friend of mine (who has sadly passed on before his time due to liver cancer), was a big strapping guy that you might think of at the mention of the words Russian soldier. He had described what it was like to be in the Russian army. There were shortages of everything, and it was everyone for themselves.

    One day an off-base construction outfit arrived to build a steel fence around the base. This work would take several days, so at the end of each day they would leave a very large gasoline-powered arc welding machine next to the fence line. They figured it was too big to move easily and too hard to hide if anyone tried. They were wrong.

    It seems that my friend's outfit could use such a welder for general repairs and the odds of ever getting one on the up and up were zero. What they did was wait until dark, long after the workmen left, and dig a large hole next to the welder. Then they lowered the welder into the hole, backfilled it and graded the area to disguise what they had done. The next morning the military police were all over the base like ants. They looked everywhere trying to find the welder, which they knew was there somewhere. They never found it and had to bring in another welder to finish the fence.

    My friend said that a military policeman had asked him how they had done it. He said the policeman's curiosity was killing him and nothing would happen to anyone if he would just tell him how they had done it. Not falling for this ploy, he kept mum. Later, after a sufficient cooling-off period had passed, they dug up the welder and put it to good use.

War Story 2: Floored By His Thinking

Upon my return from an air force overseas tour in Italy, I was assigned to NSA (yes, the NSA) at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland.  My outfit, the 6970th Support Group was located in one of four U-shaped, two-story cinder block buildings. The other three were home to the Marines, who guarded NSA, and the Navy and Army Security Groups. (Search Google Maps for Cochrane Road, Fort Meade and click Satellite to see them from overhead.) I had heard that these old buildings were the original home of NSA before "the building" was built a block to the west. I don't know that for a fact, but the point is that the cinder block buildings were long in the tooth by the time I arrived in 1967.

    The ground floor of our building held the administrative offices, while the second comprised the barracks bays, each divided into three-man cubicals by simple plywood dividers and our grey steel lockers. The floors were covered with the typical speckled, dark brown tiles that one would imagine to find in a '50s government building. Some of the tiles were so worn that several in high-traffic spots, such as the entrance to the orderly room, were literally worn down to the concrete and had to be replaced. We're talking old here. The tiles in the bays were also worn, but, being in a low-traffic area, and by virtue of endless applications of GI floor wax, they had enough shine to pass inspection every time.

    Enter Captain Manzo. He was the newly arrived commander of our "bedroom" squadron, subordinate to the group. As the CO, he was supposed to make sure that we didn't sell the furniture out the door, kept the latrine clean and showed up for work at NSA . But I suppose he had to figure out something to do. He had a PhD. in music, so there was no way to anticipate what was coming.

    A memo from the new CO appeared on the bulletin board; it filled an entire page. The first paragraph started by saying that he wanted, generally, to eliminate the irritations of barracks life. The middle paragraphs were not notable enough to be memorable. But the last paragraph was; it announced a white-glove inspection for the following Saturday. The CO desired that all the floors, with their years of accumulated wax, be stripped and new wax be layed down. Hmmm. Saturday was normally a day off unless there was a parade or nuclear war scheduled, so this meant our weekend off was not going to be so "off" after all. I circled the first and last paragraphs in red pencil and connected them with a line labeled "LOGIC!" Thus it was clear to me that there was going to be no satisfying someone with a thought process like that.

    Friday night, the GI party (cleaning formation) began. Besides our own cubes, each of us was assigned a portion of the common areas to clean—the halls, the latrine and so forth. I quickly did my bit, and then, without doing anything to my cube, quietly left the barracks. Everyone spent the entire evening using stripping solution and mops to remove the old wax. Then they put on a layer of new wax and buffed it with a large electric buffer. It was a messy, smelly job, but when they got through it was, uh, terrible. You see, the only reason that those old tiles (with a surface resembling fine-grit sandpaper) managed to look half-way polished was because of all those layers of wax; once they were gone, it looked like, well, fine-grit sandpaper. This fact had not occurred to managment or they never would have given the order.

    I came back to the barracks about 10 PM, just about when the last of the worker bees were putting away the brooms, mops and buffer. I swept out my cube, damp-mopped it once and buffed it. Now the mop might have retained a residue of wax and probably the buffer brush did too, so when I had finished putting my exhaustive five minutes of effort into the project, the floor gleamed. Lastly, I dusted off my shoes lined up under my bunk. My two cube-mates lived unofficially off base, so in return for the pleasure of having in essence a one-man room, I made sure their shoes were clean and lined up under their bunks. The stage was set and I went to bed.

    Saturday morning, I and my cube-mates were were all standing tall as the commander's inspection team entered the bay.Our cube was number one on the inspection. They looked around for about two minutes, saying nothing, and went off to inspect the others. About 15 minutes, we were told that we were dismissed. My cube-mates disappeared instantly, heading to their digs off base. I later learned that my cube had passed inspection, but that everyone else had failed and they was required to spend all day Saturday re-stripping and re-waxing their floors. You see, their floors were dull, but mine gleamed. The inspectors did not realize that that was because I had not stripped the wax, whereas everyone else had. To avoid any embarassing questioning, I quickly made myself scarce and did not return until evening. Nobody ever asked me why I wasn't there all day, and I certainly didn't bring the topic up.

    I don't know what happened in the other three bays of the barracks, but I can only assume that they had done as ordered and were rewarded as just as handsomly as the men in my bay were. "No good deed goes unpunished" was coined not for nothing.

War Story 1: The Perfect Squelch

I joined the U.S. Air Force in August of 1964. I was first sent to Lackland AFB, near San Antonio, Texas, to attend basic training. The course necessarily sucked—KP was the worst—but it was bearable, even in the miserable, muggy heat of the season. This branch of the military was my choice, because it did not require me on the face of it to get killed, no small consideration. My dad was retired from the air force, but in any case, I wouldn't have let sentimentality push aside rationality in such an important matter. As it turned out, the fact that we eventually lost in Vietnam and that there was never any chance that we would not lose, meant that my planning was good, if not hurried (my draft notice for the army arrived while I was in basic).

My flight (a group of airmen equivalent to the army's platoon) was one of the last whose basic military training was split into two parts: the course at Lackland (which is what you think of when you think of basic) and a second part, lasting a few weeks at whichever training school you were sent to. The latter was later done away with, because it was a stupid idea; there was really no point in dragging it over to the training base. Psychologically, when an airman left Lackland, he was done with basic, but orders were orders.

I was sent to Keesler AFB, near Biloxi, Mississippi, to be trained as a morse intercept operator. After each day's school on the morning shift, we spent afternoons on work detail—waxing floors, mowing grass and the like. But twice a week that was set aside and we attended basic instead; it was just a matter of running out the hours to satisfy the requirements. There was nothing really to teach us, and to this day I cannot recall a single thing that happened save one cherished moment.

With nothing of import to teach us, the air force substituted a theme—cleanliness. Naturally it would be expected when falling in for basic, one would have one's footwear shined to a mirror finish and would have just "broken starch" (put on a set of fatigues fresh from the laundry). You would have to be an idiot to get caught messing up there. However a ploy was introduced that had not surfaced even back at Lackland: the training instructor (TI) would come up behind some hapless individual standing at attention, reach down behind the neck, pull up the collar of the T-shirt and examine it for ring-around-the-collar. If he had forgotten to put on a new T-shirt after school, it would be obvious. (Now that I think of it, they couldn't use this tactic on those who had school on the afternoon shift; at morning basic, they would have had on new T-shirts anyway.) So, in addition to the usual sharp, emphasize clean.

One day our TI marched our flight over to the TI office to attend some errand. He left us standing at attention in the parking lot adjacent other similarly idled flights. There were four or five other TIs smoking and shooting the breeze just outside the door. Evidently one of them got an idea, because he soon headed directly for us. Out of the corner of our eyes, we tracked him as he ambled across the neatly-trimmed lawn to our flight. This could not be good.

The formations of this basic were reversed from those anywhere else in the air force—the tallest man was in the front rank. Thus by such a small detail as my height, my fate was determined. The TI-on-a-mission stopped in right front of me, cigarette in hand, and said in a voice designed to carry over to his smoking buddies, "Boy, do you want me to put this cigarette out in your ear?" I replied just as loudly, "Sir, no, sir!" (In the real air force, an enlisted man did not merit one sir, much less two, but you must remember that we were playing at basic.)

After only a short pause, he asked, "Why not?" Obviously, the point of the excercise was to put me on the spot and watch me squirm. It is hard to calculate the paths that might have been taken had I given a typical answer: "Sir, it would hurt like the dickens, sir," "Sir, my ear would go up in flame, sir" and so forth. Miraculously, within the space of a heartbeat, the supremely correct answer popped into my head and I barked, "Sir, my ear is clean, sir!" What could the poor sergeant do? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Those words embodied the theme of the program and so neutralized his attack instantly. The sergeant must have recognized defeat, because he mumbled "Mumphf," turned around and walked off.

I would have liked to have heard the conversation when he rejoined the other TIs; that would have been icing on the cake.