The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

Fifty-six years ago I was in Vietnam, up by the DMZ at a place called Quang Tri Combat Base. It was named Quang Tri for a small village close by. I turned 25 years old there. I had been drafted by the U.S. Army and assigned the MOS  (mode of service–or, what you did) of 35E20, which meant repair and calibration of electronic equipment, some of which to work on required a secret clearance, which I had gotten from civilian electronics life.

Except for the constant 122-mm ChiCom rocket attacks, the mortar attacks, the constant probing of our defensive bunker line by Charley  (Viet Cong-Victor Charley-VC-Charley), it was a great gig. Oh, and add in the hemorrhoids that the weekly malaria pill gave me, the drinking water that came from a muddy river north of us, and the heat, and the humidity, and, and, and.

Except for that.

With my civilian electronics background, I occupied a valuable niche in and amongst 19-year-olds who had been trained to repair radios by replacing modules. I got to work on a lot of neat stuff.

The First Sergeant called me one day and asked me: “Do you know anything about organs?” 

What kind of organs, I asked him.

“The kind field chaplains use on Sunday,” he replied.

Well, I replied, I used to work on Conn electronic organs, and then I was off up the road to Dong Ha Combat Base, the last American base before you hit the DMZ. And strangely enough, the chaplain’s organ was a Conn organ. I fixed it. Dirt and humidity stuff. He was so grateful he put me in for E4, a boost in rank and pay. It was around 17.00$ a month, which wasn’t much, but it was something.

A couple of weeks later, amidst a storm of flying dust and sand, a propaganda helicopter landed next to our electronics steel-roofed building. It had a dozen monster auditorium speakers mounted on it, pointed down. It flew over Vietnamese villages and told them how much better off they would be on our side, basically.

Could I fix it? Sure. The thing is, when you key a microphone with  many thousands of watts of volume through the monster speakers, which are about six inches off the ground, the results are spectacular. It was the dry season. A simple click on the mike and huge clouds of dust arose.

I of course once it was fixed had to pull a Corporal Radar from M.A.S.H. and announce the time and temperature and overall greatness of life.

That didn’t earn me any points, but it was fun. I filled sandbags for a day. Eh!

Vietnam had its own military TV broadcast, which I would never have seen, had not my Warrant Officer asked me if I could fix a television set. Could I? I had done so back when I was a repairman of televisions in civilian life. It turned out the set belonged to my commanding officer. For fixing the CO’s TV, I got put in for E5. Another seventeen bucks.

And then there was the Filipino girls’ band that came to put on a show for us, and didn’t know you cannot plug 208-volt European equipment into our military 120 volts. I got to do a hurry-up fix on the same kind of Fender amplifier equipment that I had used and worked on in bands in which I played back in the world. (One of which later got me into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)

They didn’t speak English, they mouthed the words to English rock and roll while they did a respectful job of playing drums and guitars, but.

But they were of course gorgeous, and I had a ring-side seat, having saved the day.

Interspersed with all this “fun,” I worked on a steady diet of hand-held mine detectors, combat search lights, various electronic radio modules which the youngster techs needed repaired when they couldn’t get replacement modules.

Fifty-six years ago. 

I’d like to tell you that the fun parts outweighed the not-so-fun stuff.

I’d sure like to.