I had a great time in the Azores. The people were friendly and seemed to have
a festival somewhere on the island every other week. The wine and food were
great while the work was repetitious and simple. And I liked it so much that I
decided to re-enlist for six more years.
As in Edzell, I was the only maintenance technician for all of the Wideband
equipments. This station was much smaller but I had more responsibilities. In
addition to the WBDF, there were two NCDFs and one channel watch position, one
CSP, Parker, and the OPU. I also got to work on KL-47 off-line cryptologic
equipments and the KW-37 and KW-7 cryptos. After a few months, they gave me a
teletype technician to help. Bob "Lumpy" Lyons was not the most stellar Sailor
in either appearance or electronic aptitude. But I worked him hard and he lost
enough weight to be advance to CTM2. However, during his advancement ceremony,
he passed out due to his weight loss.
My work place was located about seven miles from the main base of Lajes Field.
We would have to take the Navy van to work and many times we would have to find
an alternate route to get to work. The locals would have a festival and would
put the village tables in the middle of the road. They would cook for hours
and start serving meals in the street. Occasionally, we would be coming back
from work and decide to stop and join them. They never refused so we would
help them eat their meals and drink their wines. We always made sure that we
told them thanks and tried to pay them. They never accepted any payments from
us.
The carts on the roads could also delay us. Oxen would pull them and the carts
had square wheels. The reason for the wheels was to prevent the cart from
rolling when the oxen stopped on a slope. And since the entire island was
rolling hills, the square wheels seemed like a pretty good idea.
I could drive my car around the entire island in less than an hour. It was
only nine miles long and seven miles wide so it was hard to get away from
everyone. At the far end of the island, I could park my car and go to the
beach to see Pico Island in the distance. Pico was the only island in the
chain that still had an active volcano on it and I could see plumes of smoke
coming from it on clear days. Terceira had an extinct volcano in the center of
the island and the Americans put a golf course in it. It was a very pretty
golf course but everyone joked that you always got a hole in one because the
entire course was in a hole.
Not too long after arriving, I found out that another CTM was heavily involved
in weapons qualifications. He took me to the Air Force's indoor range and I
got my Expert Medal for pistols. Later, we got to go to the Portuguese Army's
outdoor range to qualify in the M-16 rifle. I qualified Expert in that also.
Shooting with the Portuguese, in another extinct volcano, was great fun
especially when they brought their machine guns and mortars.
While in the Azores, I had plenty of time to practice my hobby of electronics.
I designed a board that, when connected to the television, would play an
elementary pong game. It wasn't great but I was pretty happy that I could
build something like that.
John Morris and I were looking at Doctor Dobb's Journal of Computing and saw an
advertisement for an Apple Computer. We both decided to order the motherboard
with 4k of memory in it. When mine came in, it had a whopping 16k of RAM. We
both went to the wood shop and build a case for our computers. Then, I
designed and built a power supply and keyboard for it. I also built a
modulator so that it would display on my television. Tom Kine would visit my
room to see how I was coming in my BASIC programming skills. He would
encourage me and ask me if I could do this or that. It was very elementary
programming and not very well written. But I had so much RAM that I could
afford to be a little wasteful. The only problem that I had was there was no
hardcopy capability. So, I built an interface board that would print out on a
teletype.
The operations building was a wooden building with a basement and attic. The
basement was full of hydraulic jacks that held the building up. The antenna
was a GRD-6 that was designed back in the 1950's to be used as a direction
finding antenna. The goniometer (the device used to find the direction of the
incoming signal) was located in the center of the antenna field. One dark and
stormy night, the goniometer went bad and I had to repair it. It took me
almost four hours in the driving rain to remove the power supply, repair it,
and return the system to operation. I finished the repair just minutes before
the watch relief time and I stayed around to finish the log entries and to
re-order the spare parts that I had used. When the dayworking staff came in,
my boss asked me why I tracked mud into the building.
Operations here were of a much slower pace than in Edzell. We operated two
NCDFs and four WBDF systems. The only intercept position we had was an
entirely automated SHF receiver. It was solely operated by the matmen who only
had to make sure that the frequency was set whenever we got a message to change
it. This mission was located in the WBDF room which had a black curtain for a
door. There was a nice little sign saying only Cozy / Myna cleared personnel
could enter. Paranoia was rampant with the Collection operators there and
they made up put a cardboard covering over the frequency display in case some
Portuguese Communist accidentally saw it. Of course, no foreign nationals
were allowed in the building let alone the WBDF area.
During this time, the Navy decided to change the name of my rate. All of this
time, we were called Communication Technicians to not advertise what we were
doing. They must have assumed that anyone who really wanted to know what we
were doing already knew what we were doing so they renamed us to be Cryptologic
Technicians. Same abbreviation but it was much harder for us to spell.
I tried to continue my college education here. I signed up for one course in
history but the instructor left the island before the class. The next term I
took Psychology from a doctorial candidate who had been teaching throughout
Europe and was gathering information about military members and their
education. He was using this information as data for his dissertation. I
thought that was pretty cool to be getting a paycheck while getting data for
his paper. He was remarkable in that he knew all 33 students' names by the end
of the class on the first night.
While there, I decided to take some leave back in Texas. I asked for 30 days
but spent only two weeks before I returned. When I got back, Tom Kine told me
that Chief Muller was trying to call me in Texas. So, I thought I was in
trouble and checked back from leave. When I went to work, he told me that the
detailer wanted to talk to me. I told the detailer that I wanted to go to
Germany and, if that wasn't possible, I would go anywhere in the world. He
said no way on Germany but when my orders came in, they told me to go to
Augsburg. The only bad part was that Dave Flannery was also going.
Dave and I didn't get along too well while we were in the Azores. Fortunately,
we didn't let that affect our work, and, later, got to be pretty good friends.
