"What did you do in the war daddy?" Well daughter, I listened to "ditties" all day/night! Much of the communications utilized by the VC and NVA was done via morse code. Our particular job was to record the messages that passed back and forth.

Basically, you sat at a console in a room (bay) with a number of other men. Each of us had two radios and a mill. The mill was sort of like a manual typewriter on steroids. Instead of making one copy we actually made about 6 copies at once. The paper was arranged in a fan fold box with carbon-paper between each successive set of sheets. Evil stuff as it was pulled through the mill by toothed sprockets. Remember how much fun the old dot matrix printers were with the same type of paper feed. Now add some heat, mucho humidity and a plethora of swear words. Yup, that was us!

To make things even more interesting, you did not copy real words. Almost all messages were encrypted and sent as 6 letter blocks of garbage. Actually, this helped me quite a bit. If your "man" was sending in clear-text Vietnamese you would yell for one of the Vietnamese linguists. He would stand over your shoulder and interpret. I always found it harder to focus when I knew what I was copying.

As in any army, the enemy radio operators were a mix of good, better and atrocious. We had a term for the really bad ones, it was said they used something other than their hands to peck away at the key. The good "ops" were just that, fast and damned good.

They knew we were lurking and would frequently try to lose us. At a prearranged time or signal they would jump from one frequency to another. In the process, they would often change callsigns. Although this sometimes worked, just as often it would not.

If you "lost" your man in a situation like this you would yell for help. Anyone in the room, copying a station of lower priority would immediately tune their radios across a pre-arranged band of frequencies. The enemy op had to tune his (frequently her) radio to the new frequency. For a short time they would transmit a changing tone as they matched the new frequency to antenna. When one of your friends rolled across a tuning radio they would yell out the frequency. You would jump to that frequency and listen. Radios frequently have a characteristic sound and operators develop habits in the way they tune or send certain letters. It was often quite easy to tell it was your "man". Even when your target got real sneaky and changed radios his habits would soon reveal his identity. They did lose us, but surprisingly, not all that often.

Basically though, it was a pretty boring job. Shifts often lasted 10 hours, 12 to 14 hours when we were short handed. Because your work was encrypted you never knew if you produced anything useful. The airways were frequently overrun with natural and man-made interference. It was not uncommon to see a man in the room jump from his seat and roll on the floor in pain. You knew that more than likely, something very loud had just come up on the frequency he was monitoring while he had the volume (gain) turned up trying to hear his target. On the other hand, unlike our friends in the field, nobody ever died from ruptured eardrums.

One last thing. I did not learn how to type in high school as I spent all my time screwing around in the back of the room. In the code (ditty) school you were taught to hit a certain key when you heard a specific sequence of dits and das. We were sort of like well trained but unruly monkeys. When I returned to college, I used to type my papers in those first years by saying the dit-dah combination for the letter or number I wanted. It must have looked and sounded fairly interesting to those around me...no wonder I had such a hard time getting a date!!

Revised: 4 April 2002
18:54 hrs