When I was 5, my parents frequently took me with them to visit their friends. The father and 17-year-old son were both HAM radio operators: K5-KWB and K5-KVE. Listening to them talk over the radio taught me the phonetic alphabet (similar, if not identical, to the military version).
Fast forward to my 2nd year in the USAF - in a 20-man seismic detachment in the jungles on Mindanao, PI. 500 miles from the nearest military institution, we were entirely self-sufficient. And my group (who operated the seismic equipment, analyzed the data and reported the findings to Langley, VA) had to operate the MARS radio and crypto gear 24-7-365.
Operating the MARS radio was particularly interesting. During the night shifts (after 9 pm), we'd raise a California HAM radio operator (when the propagation permitted) who would, in turn, make a long-distance call to the home of our detachment troopers. This was the only way we could talk to "home," other than snail mail. But those calls were (a) being listened to by every MARS operator in the entire SEA MARS network (Viet Nam, Thailand, the Philippines, Okinawa, Japan, etc.), and (b) required the call participants to say "over" after making a comment - to allow the MARS and HAM operators to activate/deactivate their respective microphone's key. (These were in the days before VOX - voice operated - microphones were used in the military. Voice transmission only occurred while the microphone button was being pressed - "keyed" in radio slang. And similarly, the mic had to be un-keyed to receive the other party's transmission) This made for awkward/cumbersome conversations, which frequently were humorous. [And was the source of "WFT-over" military slang.]
There was nothing funnier listening to our chubby, 35-year-old "supply" staff sergeant's conversation with his Portland, Oregon-based mom: "I love you mom - over." "I love you, too son - over." "Roger on the love you mom - over."
Of course, our MARS capabilities came in handy on occasion. For instance, we once had to MARS our sister detachment (500 miles north, at Clark AFB) to send down toilet paper on the next bi-weekly C-47 supply run (all 20 of us were concurrently suffering a bout of dysentery). Sympathetic MARS operators in 15 different SEA locations shipped us cases of TP in response to our plea.
In February 1971, our seismic instruments detected a major earthquake in Southern California (the San Fernando Valley quake) - and detected it 20 minutes after the earthquake actually occurred. [The equipment at each of our 20-some-odd seismic locations scattered around the globe was sensitive enough to detect basically any earthquake that occurred anywhere in the world. When multiple locations reported the same event, computers operated by our "Head Shed" guys at Langley could triangulate the earthquake's location to a surface area the size of a football field, and within 100 yards in depth. But I digress.] We immediately jumped on the MARS radio and initiated HAM-operator long-distance calls to SoCal for our 3 comrades whose families lived there. Now understand...news of the quake had not yet been broadcast in SEA (senior military leadership had chosen to suppress this news for "morale" reasons), so the SEA MARS operators were REALLY" curious how we knew of it. Since our "cover story" was that we were a weather station (our real mission was top secret, and we all had TS-Crypto clearances), we weren't permitted to explain just how we knew there was a quake. Suffice it to say, once news of the quake was broadcast over the SEA MARS and AFRVN radio networks, the long-distance phone lines were jammed with worried troopers trying to find out if mom and dad, or the wife and kids, were OK.
Kinda sad, actually, to know that the roles were reversed: the troops actually IN harm's way were worried about the safety of their state-side kin.
Interesting times.
