The mess hall at Tent City B was abuzz during supper. Stories were circulating that there was to be a USO show that evening with some Sinatra singer. No one knew if it would be Frank, Nancy or Frank Junior. I’ve always been cynical of rumors and thought it was just another ploy someone had started to keep our minds busy. It didn’t matter to me since I had staff duty that night. Someone had gone on R & R1 that week, and that moved my staff duty to cover his absence. My staff duty required me to stand by a bank of phones and either work out anyone's issues or refer them to appropriate designees. Referrals after hours were often difficult since most folks would be at the Officers or NCO clubs after hours. I would go hunt them down and try to talk coherently to those who were already past their drinking limit.
I was walking to the PX to get some munchies to sustain me during my duty when Marquez from Corpus Christi caught up to me. “Ojeda, you hear about Nancy Sinatra giving a concert tonight?” he asked.
“Damn! Why tonight?” I asked. “Don’t these morons know I have staff duty tonight?”
I walked to my hooch to pick up reading material for my staff duty. Security was tightened that evening. I began seeing an increase in MP jeeps with mounted machine guns patrolling Tent City B, our base. I walked past the stage being quickly erected. That’s when I started believing the rumors. Someone was holding a concert. I began making up excuses allowing me to take at least an hour off to watch the concert. The captain I had on duty with me, however, was a hardcore worrywart and a stickler for rules. He was not well-liked neither by his fellow officers nor by the enlisted men. “If rules were made to be broken, the army would never have come up with them,” he informed me when I asked for an hour to watch the concert. “We are required to remain vigilant and onsite until we are relieved from duty.”
The concert began with Nancy Sinatra singing “These boots were made for walking . . . .” The volume on the amplifiers must’ve been working overtime with her music permeating every available corner of our small Tent City B.
The duty officer was talking to some friend bragging about having Nancy Sinatra in our compound and inviting him to come watch the concert when another phone rang. I picked it up, and a duty officer from somewhere in the central highlands wanted to report a microwave outage.2 I grabbed the form we used when interviewing outage reports. I asked the reporting officer all questions on the form, thanked him and hung up. One of the questions on the interview form asked for phone number and organization from which the outage was being reported. Following the instructions specifically and as reported to me, I entered the phone number he was calling from and “An Khe Officers Club” as the phone number’s owning unit. The reporting officer had said he was calling from the officer’s club due to the microwave outage at his unit. Microwave links carried communications links including secure voice and secure teletype traffic. All outages were topics of major concern and reported daily to our Signal Officer, Brigadier General Terry. No officer ever wanted to cross the general.
The duty officer was still on the phone talking to his friend when I handed him the outage interview form. He grabbed it, began reading it, then yelled out “Holy shit !” He hung up without another word and asked “What’s this shit about the An Khe officers club?”
Revenge can be sweet. I was still pissed about missing Nancy’s concert and told him the reporting officer called from the An Khe officers club because his unit’s microwave link was out.
“Is this a joke?” he asked. I assured the captain that it was a valid report.
“Did it seem like he was drunk?”
“Can’t say if he was drunk, captain. He called in the outage. I followed the interview form explicitly.”
He was worried. He was incredibly worried. He did not want to submit a bogus report to the general. He began trying to reach the number of the Ak Khe’s officers club. He reached someone at that number a few times but lost the connection before he could state his question. Phone communications back then were not as developed as they were to become a year later. After about an hour of trying to talk to someone at the An Khe officers club, he finally gave up and was totally frustrated. He now faced a difficult decision of possibly submitting a bogus report or ignoring the report altogether and run the risk of facing the general’s wrath if he failed to submit an actual bona fide outage report.
Come morning, Nancy’s concert was now history. I took an hour off to eat breakfast, clean up and go back to work my regular workday. I took a few minutes before I started my workday and reviewed the previous night’s staff duty report submitted by the insecure captain. I noticed my outage report called in from the officers club at An Khe was not included. I called up the captain and informed him he had inadvertently omitted the outage report. “I’ve got a copy of it, so I’ll just attach it to last night’s report before I forward it to the Signal Officer,” I added. The captain was in my office just mere seconds after I hung up.
“Specialist, I am not going to submit that report. I have a feeling it’s bogus, and I’m not going to piss off the general with trivial matters,” he said.
“But our standing operating procedures require all outage reports be submitted. We need to follow the rules explicitly,” I responded.
He came back with “I was the duty officer. I take the blame if need be.” With that, he turned around and walked off. I signed the previous night’s duty report and added a note next to my signature “With Exception”. Neither the admin officer nor the general ever questioned me about my note.
Primarily because our Signal Officer general was a hard taskmaster who would make or break officer careers, the rules captain probably had a few sleepless nights worrying about the report. Nothing came of that outage report, but it felt good getting the rules captain to break his precious rules.
The Pirate Code got me bragging rights and I freely shared with everyone how I got the upper hand on the arrogant captain who lived by the rule and broke his own rules with a little assist from me. I once heard that strong people forgive while intelligent people ignore. I can thank my God for making me neither intelligent nor strong - though somewhat devious!
1 - Rest & Recuperation was a week's vacation to several destinations to include Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Manila, Kuala Lampur and Hawaii.
2 - Telephone traffic was linked together thru microwave radio repeaters between local and final destinations. When a microwave link malfunctioned, the telephone and teletype traffic fed to microwave terminals would cease to function.
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.— The Dalai Lama
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