Issue 10: Tech from the Military

16 | ORIGINS
They don’t know how I got it. Also they didn’t tell
me this at the time, but I could have died.
I was at Chelsea Naval Hospital, and it turns out
that one of my kids from my youth group had
joined one of the services. I had just happened
to meet him and he gave me the ins-and-outs of
how I could stay at the Chelsea Naval Hospital
the rest of my tour in the service. He had it all
figured out because during the Vietnam War the
hospitals were so, so crowded. The doctors were
so busy that if they didn’t see you physically they
didn’t know you were there. They had roll call.
You had to be there every night. But in the morning,
you usually had one little job to do like run
the paper from here to there. He would actually
hide under his bed after roll call in the morning
and then around ten o’clock in the morning he
would just go home because he lived right next
door to the hospital. He would come back in the
evening, have roll call, and repeat. As long as the
doctor didn’t see you to process you out, you
could stay there. He was firefighter. And so, what
happened was, I was there. I thought, this is fine
with me, you know, because it was nice. The Air
Force was just like a job, it wasn’t like the Army.
When did you leave the hospital? And how
did you end up in Texas?
So, what happened was they had received orders
from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. I
had won this award in Greenland and I had to be
at the award ceremony for the chapel in the Air
Force at Wright-Patterson on a certain day.
I ended up going to get my award. I forgot the
name of it. Then while I was there I got my orders
for State-side and I was assigned to Dyess
Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas, which was a sack
base at that time. Back then you had a technical
command and a strategic command. The strategic
command was kind of the frontline: bombers,
fighters, and spy planes. It was very secure. I still
needed to have my Top Secret Crypto Clearance.
So that’s where I ended up, which I did not like.
I liked Greenland better than I like Abilene, Texas
because there was no trees, there was really
nothing there.
So Greenland was wide open during Vietnam.
The Soviets could have come in, they could
have wiped out the whole North Atlantic
communication, they could have taken out
the DEW Line, they could have done serious
damage to the United States. Why do you
think they didn’t?
They didn’t do it because they didn’t know what
kind of technology we had. They didn’t know
how well we could see them. They just didn’t
know. They didn’t know. It really was a pretty
good system. They knew when anything was flying
up or coming out Russia. That’s why it was all
across northern Canada and Greenland because
we could see over into northern Russia. Without
sight, it wouldn’t give us enough time. That’s
when they had all the strategic bombers constantly
flying. There was always a nuclear strategic
bomber in the air at that time. And I think
that Russians just didn’t know. They were kind of,
in a sense, afraid not knowing what the Americans
knew and how well we could see them, real-
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