7 of 12 Devens Revisited

Once I made it home I was able to enjoy my two month vacation everyone was excited about Billy and we visited all our family members. My life changed considerably and instead of living for today I had the responsibility of tomorrow. My son had forced me to grow up and deal with life in a new way. My wife decided to stay with her parents and I went back to Devins alone. You must know by now that I took advantage of having my records with me. I preformed my usual hocus pocus alakazam and presto the orders for my 60 days of leave disappeared.

I thought I new everything about Fort Devens and here was in a whole new separately guarded interior complex. I was granted a Secret Clearance and a badge so I could enter the complex. There were no motor vehicles and this area was strictly foot traffic. They took away all my advantages and everyone was enjoying most of the privileges I had worked so hard for during my last stay. There was morning formation but everything else was laid back and tolerable. I didn't get to fake anything.

School was interesting and I was enjoying hands on education. Learning was something I enjoyed and found it difficult to extract knowledge from a book. But working with the equipment and figuring out how it worked was a specialty of mine. It was like playing with a puzzle and my favorite pastime.

The first thing I got to play with was the fax machine. It was the size of two large refrigerators. The government had a monopoly on new electronic equipment and this was cutting edge technology at that time. The military and the FBI were the only ones that new of its existence. This machine was crude at best but could send your finger prints over a phone line by converting sound into corresponding high voltage. This thing literally burned through the paper with a high voltage spark. A higher voltage meant a bigger spark and produced darker paper.

My hardest task was to adjust the spark high enough to see the light area of information and not to high as to set the paper on fire. These images were literally hot off the press and some of them came out of the machine on fire. This fax machine was generating 50 kilovolts and could send you flying across the room with a potentially lethal dose of electrons. I guess it made sense to start off on the fax machine. No sense learning about the rest of the equipment and then getting electrocuted.

The next thing was the black box flight recorder. This was not complicated and was like an 8 track cassette player. The housing was more complicated than the innards. I had the electronics experience to know all about the recorder. It had several tracks hooked up to the avionics equipment and 1 track for the audio. It also had a low power transmitter and battery power that activated on impact. This was of course to vacillate in finding the device after a crash. The case consisted of 4 layers and each was separated by a silicon substance. The whole package was wrapped in titanium.

My clearance was elevated to Top Secret and I was now working one floor below. The higher the clearance level went the further underground I went. I am trying not to use sophisticated electronics terms but some explanations make it unavoidable. This was a time of transition from vacuum tubes to transistors. The transistor had not replaced all the tube functions yet and the equipment commonly contained both types of electronics. The technology was changing faster than the equipment could be assembled. Equipment was becoming obsolete before production began.

I am not talking modification here I mean totally new technology. Suffice it to say I was learning about computers that were still the size of a large room and the memory storage was tape drives and they were refrigerator sized. I learned about several different types of transmitters and equipment I was learning about the video real to real recorder. This thing was waist high and barley fit in an 8 by 8 room. Doppler radar was something new and I going to get the basics on that equipment I can not explain the rest of the equipment without word like electromagnetic wave propagation. Let's just say primitive spy equipment.

I was elevated to a Top Secret Cryptographic clearance and working further underground still. The primary goal of this class was coding methods. My class also covered radio direction finding. Finding out where the enemy was and breaking the code was essential to the war effort. Then there were some more sophisticated pieces of spy equipment introduced. Radio frequency recorder was my next challenge. This thing was bigger than 3 of the video real to real recorder and the input was an antenna. It could record the whole AM FM and several other bands. The output was sent to AM FM and other radios so it took a room full of people all day to search through all the information on one tape.

My education was finally completed after a brief explanation of some experimental electronic equipment. Upon completion I was awarded a 33D20 MOS and promoted to the rank of E4. The same day my orders came in for Vietnam. I could write ten pages about the second I looked at those orders. I will spare myself the need to relive that moment and skip to the 30 days leave I was granted. Those 30 days were spent in horror and anguish. The war was no longer popular during my schooling and had not been since 1978. Before 78 warning my army uniform guaranteed hitching ride anywhere. After 78 the last thing you wanted to do was wear your uniform off base. People would sooner run you over than give you a ride. I did not ask to be involved and was getting screwed every which way. Jim Raab

http://www.jimraab.blogspot.com/