Issue 10: Tech from the Military

COLD WAR | 13
How did you get assigned to the DEW Line
project?
HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY/NPS
of sank thinking, “Oh no, I joined the service and
I didn’t have to.” I joined the Air Force because
my brother John was in Vietnam for three tours.
He was in the Army and he told me his only advice
to me was, “Don’t go into the Army, they
are a bunch of animals.” So that’s why I went to
the Air Force. And then I naively went in to the
Air Force thinking that I was still going to be an
engineer in the Air Force because I had all this
training. So I was sort of told that you take these
tests. They were called Bypass Tests, and that you
would be able to get what you wanted.
Not knowing fully what the service was like, that
you don’t get what you want and they get what
they want you to have, I went through basic training.
At the end of basic training, I had a choice.
They gave me a choice of three things because I
scored very high on the tests. The highest score
you needed was to be an accountant. The next
thing was a plane loader, a person who loads
planes. I forgot what they called it. And the third
thing was communications. And so I put them
in that order because I thought, “Okay, if that is
what you need the higher score for, I guess being
an accountant would be okay. Otherwise I
couldn’t see myself as an accountant.” So it came
back that I was accepted to communications. So
I thought, “Well, I’m in the service.”
Before I went in the service, when I was in college
and in a company called Scott’s Contractors.
They were all seminary students, most of them
from Canada. And they tried to convince me to
go to Canada, because that’s what a lot of people
are doing right now. And they thought I could be
a conscientious objector. So I probably spent a
couple days thinking about it and I decided that
if my family was threatened I could probably kill
somebody so I couldn’t be a conscientious objector.
And I wasn’t going to go to Canada since
it was my duty as an American citizen to go into
the service, so I did.
But, being in the service, I did want to avoid going
to Vietnam. Actually most Air Force people
went to Thailand and Cambodia, I think. So, they
gave me communications. What that involved
was being in a communications center, but I had
to have a Top Secret Crypto Clearance, which evidently
is very high up in security. When I filled
out all my forms, I got calls from the people I had
names down for. One guy way up in Maine, up in
the boondocks of Maine, said, “Hey, the FBI came
around asking all kinds of questions about you.”
So, I know they investigated me.
I got my clearance. They gave us the list of where
we wanted to go. They called it a wishlist but we
all know that’s really not what it was. So I put
down, of course, England, Europe, and everything
as far away from Vietnam as possible. So
somebody had a sense of humor and they gave
me Greenland. So I ended up going to Greenland.
Can you describe what Greenland was like?
I went to a place called Sondrestrom, which in
Danish means “Southern Fjord.” It was right on
the Arctic Circle. It turned out to be the major
airport of Greenland. The mission was that they
supported the DYE Sites across Greenland and
the North Atlantic and Northern Canada. It was
also called the DEW Line, which I forgot what it
stood for “defense early warning system.” I think
that’s what it meant. Our base was actually a
supply depot for these DYE Sites on the ice cap.
Origins Scientific Research Society