No Place To Go But Up

I lived in a blue collar town and a blue collar neighborhood where very few kids in my school were headed to a collage campus after high school graduation in 1952. My father was a machinists at the Glenn L. Martin Airplane Company on Middle River in East Baltimore, Maryland. We all signed each other’s year books with answers to little ditties like” what does the future hold? coupled with insightful notation like, ”Undecided”. But there were a lot of beer parties that whole summer. At one such party my best friend’s mother was talking to me and she was trying to talk me out of going into the Marines. She said go into the Air Force because, they don’t shoot at you. In retrospect, she was right—I joined the US Air Force.


Because I was around airplanes a lot, and because of where my father worked, I began to think this was the path I was destined to follow. I joined to be a fighter pilot. I passed all of the qualifying tests and it came down to one more, single hurtle - the test for color blindness. I failed this test and was sent to the USAF’s electronics school at Biloxi, Mississippi. This was one of the Air Forces’ top schools and there was a huge number of young Airmen like me (some being college drop-outs) and many were from the NATO countries. Correspondingly, I later discovered that the then requirement was that a Radar Repairman, the discipline I was being trained for also had the no color blindness requirement due to the color coded components of the electronics equipment.

Armed with this nine (9) months of schooling, we were distributed to locations around the Globe to the latest versions of this magnificent, electronic looking glass that was coming into vogue after WWII. The Korean War was still hot. Our 200 mile range marker went through Vladivostok. We saw from a distance what was going on from our mountain top location on a small island in the Japan Sea. When I returned to the Japanese mainland I had to check in with my new First Sargent. I stood before him as

he was pulling 3 X 5 cards from a little green box. Curiously, I ventured to ask the Sargent what he was doing.

He responded with, he was retrieving my missing in action (MIA) file. This went over my head at the time, and it took me fifty years to discover the significance of this status. During my two year, overseas tour which included several different assignments to remote early warning radar sites that were part of the network that provided the electronic curtain around northern Japan, I had several noteworthy experiences.

One was a visit from a very gentlemanly, gray headed colonel who was an I & E officer visiting the island I was on. His mission was to inform me that I had been recommended for an appointment to the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, New York. I tried to be as respectful as possible to this kind sole. The USMA is one of the most prestigious schools on the planet and I was corresponding with several schools in the states to study Architecture and I had to turn down this wonderful offer.

Another very significant occasion comes to mind during my tour on this island. The electronic curtain that we were a part of was on the steep part of the evolutionary curve of electronic warfare. The enemy was constantly trying to jam our signals and if they could detect these signals they could render our efforts at detection meaningless. Consequently; we were playing a game with them by constantly changing the frequency of our signals. We would not electronically transmit this information for fear of detection meaningless so an Airman had to hand carry this information back to the control center on the mainland in a briefcase. Randomly, Airmen were selected to do this. They were armed with a US issued, holstered, .45 automatic pistol.

I had several times in this rotation but on this occasion in September, 1954 I was not involved. The group from our site went by military boat to the port city of Hakodate, on Hokkaido. From there they were to get the Japanese National Railroad (JNR) ferry, the Toya Maru, connecting with Aomori on Honshu. Our group was to get the ferry the next morning. Fortunately, they spent the night in a number a saki clubs and missed their truck that was to take them to the Ferry. The next morning the ferry left the harbor and sank in a storm in sight of the harbor taking more than 2,000 soles to a premature death, including 50 GI ’s.

I returned to the USA to get an Early Out to attend the University of Maryland on the GI Bill of Rights.