Force Recon Command by Alex Lee

Author:Alex Lee [Lee, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80134-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

13

SILVER EAGLE RETURNS A CALL

As the year 1969 stubbed its toe on the way into the history books, Third Force Recon prepared to greet the arrival of 1970 with good humor. We exchanged many cheery holiday messages among ourselves, most of which would never have been used as prepared samples in any of the communications officer’s training manuals. I was in the Ashau with Corporal B.’s team, and at 0001 on the next to last night of the blood-drenched 1960s, Zulu Relay sent the following message: “Ancient Scout Six, Ancient Scout Six, priority traffic for Grog from Igor. Acknowledge!”

Now, laughter and good humor do have their place, but it is essential to understand that we continued to take the war very seriously. In fact, the war was growing more pressing for us each day as the NVA arrayed more forces in the eastern mountains of the Republic of Vietnam. Many of those forces had only one mission—eradication of Third Force Reconnaissance Company. Therefore, for me to speak openly on the radio in response to Zulu’s message might have been suicidal at worst and damned inconvenient at best. I did what all the radio operators were trained to do. I keyed the handset to break the squelch in the ear of the sender, released the transmit switch, and waited, listening.

Key clicking was not foolproof by any means, but it was superior to any type of speech whispered into the handset. For some reason, whispers carry for inordinate distances, and that could give away the presence of Marines lurking there in the jungle darkness. We used various short key-depression codes: nothing fancy, just enough to respond to simple questions and/or to signal that team silence was needed at the moment.

Of course, the teams used voice traffic when it was appropriate and safe to speak. Often the voice communications traffic was scrambled by cipher-coding devices when we were able to live with the transmission range reduction that the ciphering machines inflicted upon our equipment. Everyone knew that every radio transmission that was not encrypted was being monitored by the NVA.

After I had been passed the handset, I keyed twice, waited three beats, and then keyed six times in rapid succession. This would tell the relay communicator that he was really talking to Ancient Scout Six—me. Convinced that he had reached the intended party, the communicator sitting huddled in the dark on Zulu Relay passed on, “Grog, Grog, see the red fish. Happy New Year a day early. You are still totally unsatisfactory! The Igor sends!”

That particular message harked back to an underwater communications test that Buck Coffman and I had conducted off Catalina Island in California. We had been evaluating an engineering prototype of an underwater communications pack for reconnaissance swimmers. The eggheads in the Bendix design shop had fitted us with bone-conducting microphones and speakers that purportedly allowed the user to both transmit and hear through the bones behind his ears. In use, you spoke during exhalation into a modified rubber face

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.