Notes in November 12

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,

While the secret sits in the middle and knows”

Robert Frost

 From the Crypt to Cryptography, Part Two

I have always been secretive about my Army experience for the best reason of all: it was indeed a secret. The work I was trained to do required it: it is now so obsolete that it is almost risible, but at the time—and for the years that followed, I was sworn not to reveal anything about it. It became a habit, actually, and, as far as I remember, I never talked about it to anyone, not even to my wife and children.

I remember that before I began the cryptology course at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the Army, or the FBI, or the CIA (I have no idea which—probably some third-rate private detective contracted by the Army) did a background check on me so that I could receive my “secret” clearance.

I knew about it almost immediately. Fran, my sister’s good friend and neighbor, called to ask if I was in some kind of trouble. Some suspicious types with shiny black shoes were in the neighborhood asking questions about me. They found nothing that would disqualify me.

Seems strange, today. I had no criminal record, of course. But I had run away from home a couple of times and I was expelled from school once (locked a custodian on the roof—it’s a long story). Thanks to summer school, I had a high school diploma, but I had an erratic academic record. I was on hostile terms with my dad, and when I was “home,” stayed at my sister’s house. My friends were artists, actors and singers. The few who had political opinions tended to drive on the left. I was at best an agnostic, and my most distinguished achievement in Basic Training was singing in a gospel choir.

Since I was obviously a perfectly normal, standard issue, stable, upstanding, righteous and healthy young man, I was not a security risk and I was good to go. Although I was trained to follow orders without question, I doubted the logic of my assignment to Ft. Monmouth. Why would the Army invest 40 weeks—just about my entire service commitment—in preparing me for a career that would last a few weeks at the most?  And what strange combination of answers in the battery of tests that I took in Georgia suggested that I had one iota of mechanical ability: cryptographic machine repair?

The answer to the first is obvious. Should war break out somewhere on this peace-hating planet, I could be called up, sent to the field poised to put their Humpty Dumpty code ciphering machines back together again every time they fell off the wall.  The answer to the second will never be known.

I remember a popular slogan of the time: “Join the Army and see the world,” and I think it is ironic that I was sent all the way to New Jersey, 50 miles from home. But in fact, for most of a year I saw very little of New Jersey or anything else. The Army took this secret thing very seriously and I found myself reporting to school in a prison-like barracks, frisked before entering the barred classroom, its windows painted a semi-translucent green. For all knew, I might have been in Alcatraz.

I won’t bore you with the details of the operation (if you’d really like to know, just Google “Converter M-228 or SIGCUM.” Its about as much of a secret as an treadle sewing machine is now), but it was essentially a teletypewriter connected to a box that contained a series of electromechanical wheels that were spun according to a sequence that only top secret-cleared operators knew. On the receiving end was a similar set of equipment, which descrambled the message. In those pre-digital days it was the best thing the Army had to keep classified information out of the hands of the enemy.

Once I learned the rudiments of electromechanics and the several models of cryptographic machines, my job was to mess them up—to find ways to make them inoperative so that some other MOS could repair them in the field. It was both a nightmare and a dream job. The working conditions were both stressful and depressing, but being assigned to destroy government property in the national interest appealed to my emerging sense of the absurd. I did my job so well that often my machines were so unfixable that they had to be permanently retired from service.

Until I was eventually trusted to receive weekend passes, I was restricted to the base. I joined my fellow soldiers (including those in the photo above—I’m the one in the bed doing nothing) in “building pyramids” at the PX: drinking 3.2% beer and stacking the empty beer cans on the table until either they toppled or we did. I was headed down a dark and dreary road to ruin—and unendurable ennui – when the happy hand of fate hit me in the face once again.

“Can anyone in this company act?” was the question at roll call.  The Army was preparing training films at Fort Monmouth and needed actors; I quietly applied, auditioned, got a decent part and went to work on “The Carnival of Safety.” It was a huge effort that took months: videotape had not yet come into use, so the project was produced on 16 mm film and then transferred to kinescope, with the accompanying maze of lighting and sound equipment, generators, wires and crew.

It was much more like working on a stage play than a movie. Each scene was rehearsed several times and then filmed without a break from start to finish. The only editing was stripping the sequences of scenes together to tell the story.

The script was pretty basic and pretty silly: carnival characters were brought in almost as deus ex machina to keep the target audience awake. A fire-eater, for example, opened the lesson about not smoking in bed. One of the complex things I demonstrated was how to look two ways before crossing the street.

I was dismayed to think recruits must be imbeciles to actually needed this kind of training, but –since the assignment gave me a respite from my cryptographic cave—I kept my opinion to myself.

While wrapping up work on “Carnival” I learned about tryouts for the Fort Monmouth Christmas production of Handel’s Messiah. By the time these rehearsals were complete—I sang first tenor once again in the chorus—my confinement was coming to a close.

When I think back on it, it was a glorious way to go: a hundred male voices echoing in the huge chapel, officers and enlisted men, from recruits to generals, standing in uniform and in unison to the resounding repetitions of the Hallelujah Chorus. Hallelujah, indeed!

My release from the crypt and from cryptology was complete. By the time I signed out and swore not to reveal the great secrets that had been entrusted to me, my attention had shifted. I had been exploring nearby New York City near the end and, when I was finally free, it was there that I wanted to go.