Once
upon a time...long ago, a young boy wanted to be a
soldier.
He didn't know exactly what a soldier was, really,
because he was just a young boy, but his mom had told him that soldiers
fight for freedom and truth and for what is right and fair. His mom had told him
that soldiers fight to keep the United States of America free.
The young
boy was exactly nine months old on December 7th
when Pearl Harbor was attacked. One of his earliest--and
fondest--memories of his father was the night his dad came home on leave
from U. S. Army Air Corps pilot training and brought his parachute
along with his duffle bag. The parachute was required for all flights and
pilots kept them most of the time. Parachutes were to play a very large
part in the boy's life.
As the boy
grew older he often played mock war games and built tunnels and
underground forts with his friends. He often designed and built
tall towers of trees and ropes. The idea of shooting at people with mock
guns wasn't really fun for him. That was fake. What was most enjoyable to
him was the engineering and logistical aspects of warfare. The
engineering, building and logistics were real...the fighting was fake.
The boy had four uncles who served in combat during
World War II and one uncle who served during the Korean Conflict as a
submariner. He often remembered his mother pointing out the four stars in
the window of the row home in West Philadelphia where his mother's family
lived. Each star represented a family member who was away at war. He
never saw another house with a banner displaying four stars and he never heard of
any other house that had as many stars hanging proudly in the window.
Three of his uncles were Army men. One
served in Italy; one served in the infantry as a radio operator during
the Battle of the Bulge; and one was in the Army Air Corps. The fourth
star in the family window was for the uncle who served as a second mate
on merchant marine tankers which carried high octane aviation fuel to
Europe while dodging German U-boats in the North Atlantic.
For his tenth birthday, the boy's father gave him a
short wave radio. The radio was a multi-band Hallicrafters S-38B. The boy
set up an old table next to his bed and put the shortwave radio nearby so
he could listen. He climbed a tree in the pasture behind his house and
strung a long wire from tree to the house for an antenna. His dad gave him an old pair of radio headphones which
he plugged into the radio. With the radio next to his bed and wearing the
headphones could tune around and listen to the world
without his folks knowing he was listening.
When the boy wasn't
listening to shortwave stations from around the world he was reading.
His favorite books were science fiction, military escape and evasion and
parachuting behind enemy lines spy novels which he read beneath the bedcovers with a flashlight.
As the boy spent more time
listening to the shortwave radio he began to listen to stations from all
over the world. He listened to the BBC mostly to hear
Big Ben. He
listened to Radio Moscow, Voice of America and various missionary
station. A missionary station, with the call HCJB, from
Quito, Ecuador, was the first one from which he got confirmation of his
reception. The card read: "HCJB: Sending the good news abroad."
He
began to log all the stations he heard so he could report the reception
to the radio station. After a year of listening and sending reports to
stations he received dozens of QSL cards from shortwave stations around
the world. QSL cards, which are confirmation of a contact or reception,
began to cover the wall near his radio table. Listening was fun but
having a license and being able to transmit was what he really wanted
to do.
His uncle
who was the radio operator showed him that it was possible to turn the
squealing dots and dashes of Morse code
into letters and words. The boy was fascinated as he watched letters
appear beneath his uncle's fast-moving pencil point. It seemed like magic
to see the dots and dashes of the code signal turned into readable
intelligence.
When he was
eleven he started taking Morse code lessons at a radio club in the town
where he lived. He bought a book called "The Fundamentals of
Radio and
How They are Applied" and taught himself radio theory. He spent many
hours listening to Morse code and many, many more studying radio theory
from "The
Radio Amateur's Handbook."
After
quite a bit of study and practice copying code he got a Novice Class
amateur radio license. After increasing his Morse code copying skill to
23 words per minute and learning advanced radio theory, he passed the
General Class amateur radio exam. Shortly after getting he General
license he also received an Federal Communications Commission
commercial operator's license.
All through junior and senior high school he
continued building equipment and erecting antennas for his radio hobby.
Building antennas was one of his favorite parts of the hobby. In
addition, he quickly became well-known in local radio circles for his
operating ability. Copying Morse code was a particular thrill for him.
He spent many hours every
night listening for code signals from
amateur radio stations in Antarctica, Greenland, Nepal, Pitcairn Island
and other places not quite so exotic...like Chicago and Denver.
One of the
most thrilling times on the radio was the night he copied the Morse
signals from the Russian space satellite known as Sputnik. Another
high-point of his radio operating was the night Soviet Tanks rolled into
Budapest, Hungary. During the invasion by the Soviets, the boy
copied a message from an operator in Budapest who tapped out in Morse the
words "...God
bless you and your freedom..."
Copying those words
tapped out in Morse code and reaching him through the night static had a
much more dramatic effect on the boy than any radio or TV coverage could have.
He knew the moment he copied those words that he wanted to be a radio
operator and to be trained to parachute jump behind enemy lines.
One warm
summer night, during his eighteenth year, the boy was walking arm in arm
with his girlfriend through a display area at a local county fair. They
stopped at an Army recruiting table. On the table lay a stack of
recruiting pamphlets. One pamphlet displayed a picture of a huge, green
parachute with a paratrooper hanging beneath. Across the top
of the pamphlet in glaring color were the words "Special
Forces".
He picked up one of the pamphlets. The parachute jumper was
dressed in camouflage. Equipment and ammunition hung around the jumpers
body. The boy stared at picture. He was there. He was hanging under that
parachute and he was dressed in camo and hand grenades and ammunition. He stared at the pamphlet
for a very long time.
His
girlfriend jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow and said, "Hey,
parachute
dreamer,
don't you thinks it's time we headed back home?"
The boy
laughed as he came back to the reality with the realization that he was
experiencing one of the defining moments of his life.
His mom had told him that he would
have those kinds of days.
Continued...
