March 29 was designated by the Department of Veterans Affairs for a particularly poignant kind of event marking the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War. It suggested extending a belated welcome home to the returning troops denied such ceremonies in the rancorous last months of combat. The amateur radio community has another reason for remembrance. Few in its younger generation possess any idea of their predecessors’ wartime public service, or of the wide popularity and respect it won for ham radio. The following account is adapted from the recently-published “Army MARS at 90—Helping Defend the Homeland” by Bill Sexton (N1IN). ‘Serving Those Who Serve’ After the North Korean advance into South Korea (1950) MARS repurposed from domestic disaster response to morale-building for service personnel at war. It was a totally new venture and the army was short of operators and equipment for combat, but the Signal Corps scraped up transceivers and antennas capable of the long hop to ham stations back in the U.S. The operators on both sides of the Pacific deserve a far richer accounting than is available in this mini-history. Army and amateurs were better prepared for the Vietnam War (1965-1973). MARSgrams began flowing soon after the first combat troops went into action. Living up to the new MARS motto, the Signal Corps had six stations on the air from Vietnam handling MARSgrams in early 1966. Phone-patching followed. By the end of direct U.S. involvement eight years later, “a network of more than 80 Army, Air Force and Navy/Marine MARS stations in Vietnam transmitted more than 2.5 million phone patches and handled more than one million messages to several hundred stateside MARS stations,” reported former member Paul A. Scipione in his book Calling Back to The World from Vietnam (1994). Scipione records that MARS eventually had seven nets going simultaneously across the Pacific. Traffic crested in 1969, when the solar cycle reached its peak and so did the number of troops in Southeast Asia. Holidays were particularly busy—in December 1967 MARS “handled more than 30,000 calls and relayed more than 50,000 messages from servicemen,” the 27th Infantry Division newspaper reported It seemed as if amateur radio was one aspect of the otherwise fraught war that the fates were smiling on. The deputy U.S. ambassador in Saigon, William J. Porter, had been a ham and he pushed the South Vietnam government to allocate frequencies for MARS use. Moreover, Collins Radio Co. contributed many S-line transceivers to equip the military stations. And stateside hams rallied to the cause by the hundreds. The Internet abounds with stories and photos of MARSmen in the combat areas, portraying amateur radio at its finest. Here is one winning yarn from the blog written by a Marine Corps MIA widow, Elaine Zimmer-Davis (adapted with her permission): A MARS operator (and ham) named Barry Weathersby, an Alabama boy, and his MARS buddies were sheltering in their hootch from the monsoon season of 1968 when all of a sudden they heard a plane crash. It was dark outside and visibility was nearly zero. “An H-34 helicopter had crashed outside our door in the middle of the night,” Barry told me. “A couple of guys needed help.” The two aviators were slightly shaken but refused medical care. They wanted an aircraft to get back to the MARS station at Danang right away because the captain’s wife was having a baby in Florida. Barry and the other Marines said the aviators didn’t need to get back to the MARS station at Danang and cranked up their own station. They reached someone in the States who was willing to canvass all the hospitals in the area of Florida where the captain’s wife was living. The plan was perfectly executed. The captain talked to his wife immediately after the delivery and everyone involved in the call including the stateside telephone operators cried right along with his newborn baby. It was a watershed moment—literally. Had it not been for the MARS operators, many of us would not have spoken to our husbands, fathers, sons, or brothers ever again. This blog is a tribute to every MARS operator who patched our guys through to the states, coped with the happy and sad calls and put up with bad radio protocol – namely, from family members like me, who never said “over” at the right moment! Not Always Happy Endings: It’s not supposed to work the other way, too, but Tim Boyd (Vietnam call AB8AQ) reported on an exception at Phu Bai (about 40 miles south of the DMZ) which had an AMARS station with the special unit that tracked enemy radio transmissions. His blog [shortened]: Normally it was against the rules to have a phone patch originate in the States. There would have been thousands of American households swamping the system, and having us try and track down the servicemen would have been impossible. One day, just as the frequency was beginning to clear, A7USA called us. Curt, the operator, explained that he had an AT&T operator on the line holding a family from the East coast. The family had just heard from the DoD that their son had been severely wounded, and was not expected to live. They simply wanted to speak to him one last time. After a considerable period of yelling down the lines, and kicking some priority traffic off the lines, we got to the fire base,” Boyd wrote. [There he learned the soldier had been helicoptered to an unspecified medical unit.] Finally getting the fellow on the phone (he was a bit fuzzy), I explained that the exact extent of his injuries was considered confidential information that he was not allowed to discuss them on open radio as we were on. He said he understood. The mother, in the States, spoke first, saying hello or something similar. Then she asked him how badly he’d been wounded. Despite the warning the soldier had just acknowledged, he blurted out that he’d lost both arms and both legs. The son was softly crying over the phone and I was too. Being totally unprepared for his disclosure, I was too slow on the switch to be able to cut him off and his reply went over the air!! As Boyd told it, the stateside end of the call suddenly went silent. Later they learned the mother had collapsed. Boyd assumed the doctor had been holding the phone for his patient On the Lighter Side: It wasn’t all pain and suffering. AB8AQ’s Tim Boyd recorded these memories: Once we traded a month of priority placement on the call list to the local SEABEES for a concrete patio and BBQ grill pit right next to the station. We also cultivated a symbiotic relationship with Advisory Team 5 down the road.” They handed out an official looking ID card with this inscription on the back: "This EM is authorized free steak on Saturdays with MACV Team 5." We DID have some steak down there, and a few beverages. These stories are not meant to celebrate those few excesses, but to celebrate the dedication of operators on both sides of the 'water' who provided the link between servicemen and families, and to give a flavor to the time and circumstances in which we found ourselves. The more’s the pity that better records aren’t available for the awesome accomplishment of the stateside operators. Many Army units have professional historians on the roster; MARS HQ didn’t even have files, or else misplaced them. Heroic may be too strong a word, but there had to be plenty of resolute, valorous hams worthy of honor for their work on this side of the Pacific. Star Performer: AMARS had its celebrity in actress Lenore Jensen, who completed tens of thousands of patches at her Los Angeles station. NBC’s “This is Your Life” featured her in 1961, complete with a QSO on the air (you might say) with a regular HF sked partner. “I can remember having my heart broken a thousand times and more as I listened . . .” she told author Paul Scipione. “War is a terrible thing but we did our best.” In a web page he devoted to Jensen, ham radio historian Cliff Cheng Ph.D. (AC6C) wrote: “She was one of amateur radio's most prominent operators; possibly the hobby's most famous YL [woman operator] in its history. In 1939 she co-founded the YL Radio League. During WWII she founded a radio course for women through the American Women's Voluntary Services and taught CW [Morse code] to the U.S. Navy. In the 1950s she ran phone patches for U.S. Air Force personnel stations at remote bases such as Antarctica and Greenland.” The Commander’s Praise: Lt. Gen. Thomas Rienzi, who oversaw all Signal Corps activity in Vietnam for a time, gave two pages to MARS in his Communications-Electronics 1962-1970 (Department of the Army, 2002). Its operation, he wrote, “is definitely small when compared with all the other Army communications services provided, but to hundreds of thousands of servicemen in Vietnam and their families it has been the most important. True, the reception was not always good due to ionospheric storms and weather disturbances. But who cared when an amateur radio operator in the United States was relaying to a soldier on a remote firebase in Vietnam the message ‘Yes, she loves you’ and ‘Yes, she will marry you. Over.‘ “ Copyright 2016 by William C. Sexton Sexton, William C.: Army MARS at 90—Helping Defend the Homeland. 96 pages, illus. Lulu Press Inc., Raleigh NC $13.95 plus tax and shipping (www.lulu.com).
I made a MARS call back home from Marine Corps Air Station located in Chu Lai in 1967. The call was not as touching as the ones mentioned, just me talking to Mom and my sisters. Obviously I never forgot that. I was interested in ham radio since high school so kind of knew what was involved. My greatest appreciation and thanks to all the folks involved in MARS work. 73 es 88's to all of them (choose your appropriate number). Dan Hogan NA9DH
I was there. I operated MARS station at Iwakuni, Japan in 1967, 1968 and early 1969. We ran a bunch of phone patches for Marines at Da Nang to families in Iwakuni. Also for Navy personnel in detached squadrons out of Hawaii with amateur radio KH6AHQ. We ran mainland stateside patches through MCRD San Diego. I also remember KH6FMD from Hawaii and he operated A/M from a C-141. He has since passed. He was in Florida for a while after his time in the Air Force. I also operated at NAS Cecil Field, FL for Cuban cruse and Alaska earthquake. I was one of first NAVY MARS operators in Florida. I put together the first operations manual for the Florida Navy MARS program. My call was N0RCY which was later changed to NNN0RCY so that amateur calls beginning with "N" followed by a numerical character was used in all 10 districts. W0OLL now in Leesburg, FL
When I was a teenager, I used to sit in the shack with my dad as he relayed messages via MARS during the Vietnam War. This is how I learned the code and net operating procedure. My dad's telephone calls to local recipients of loved ones in Nam usually began, "Mrs. Smith, this is Amateur Radio Operator, Art Spinner, WA2HQZ with the Military Auxiliary Radio Service...I have a message from......no Mrs. Smith....nothing is wrong, everything is ok.... And then he'd continue with the message. I remember all this had a great impact on me as a kid.
I used it twice while in Vietnam, Christmas of '67, and my 19th birthday in February right after the TET offensive. Super thanks to all those operators. Barry Goldwater K7UGA was one of them. He was running traffic the night of the election he lost. Jim Simpson k6wez
A little off topic, but I would like to say thank you to every soldier that served in Vietnam. And offer a huge apology for the way they were treated upon returning home. May that NEVER happen again!
Da Nang 1967. It was difficult-poor copy and a lot of "over,over" but it meant a lot to my family just to hear my voice. Letters took about a week so my family never knew if I was OK. I was never disrespected when I came home but almost as bad was that no one wanted to talk about it. After a year in combat suddenly I was home with unique and "exciting" experiences and couldn't talk about them. I'd start a story and everyones eyes would look down or glaze over and all I'd get was "oohm,ah,yeah" and change the subject. To all those who served "Welcome home" and Semper Fi!
I was an operator at the Navy/Marine Mars Station in Chu Lai at about that time period. The station's call N0EFC. There just could have been a possibility that I was on duty. Only Three of us at that time period were operators. Myself , Steve, and Tom. Thanks for posting, it brings back a lot of memories 73 to All Dave
Lucky for me: too young to serve in Korea, but able to fulfill my service obligation before 1965. Having opposed the war, I nevertheless supported all who had served. A Nam vet friend who escaped physical injury, had mental problems. Had to rush him to the ER due to a drug overdose. What an abominable waste: young men forced to fight old men's wars.
I was the operator at the MARS Station at Monkey Mountain, a remote comm site north of Da Nang. The phone patches were usually a very emotional conversation with loved ones back home. They were also very important to us all. It gave us all a little bit of "HOME" while we were engaged in a terrible conflict. I would run patches from the time the band opened, until it closed or I had to report to my primary dutys. I'll never forget that ID at Monkey Mt.. AI8AM Alpha India Eight Alpha Mike. I must have said that a million times in my tour of duty. It was a good time and it was a bad time. The station was a Collins KWM-2 and a rack mounted amplifier(about 3 KW) and a 4 element wide spaced beam antenna for 19,615 Mhz, our primary frequency. All on top of a mountain near the South China Sea. I can't help but wonder, what's there now? BOB N2MDA
Some of us are still here, Bob. As a high school student in the '60s, I ran patches in the summertime from AFA7UGA when we were all on summer vacation. I have many fond memories of those days. 73 de Rick, N6NR (ex WA7CNP)
I was a Navy Corpsman serving with the Marines, wounded 4/27/66. While on the USS Repose was patched home to reassure folks. Dad was 24 yrs Navy, Mom was 31/2 yrs. They knew what I was doing. MARS provided news for my parents. The local ham knew the folks and the word was passed to the retired community. Bob Strait was my elmer(SK). Semper Fi Mike KE7IJH
Wow, that says it all. We used to listen to Country Joe and the Fish singing, 'one, two, three, what are we fighting for...' If any of those deployed were phone patched by K2BPP, 'busy phone patch,' Dave had the record for the most patches to Nam...I think something like 30,000 of them. He had stacked 5L Telrex monobanders at 150' and 190' aimed right there 24 hours a day, and I operated that station sometimes 12 hours a day while Dave took breaks. Back then, 'toll calls' actually were toll calls if you called outside your area, and his phone bills were as much as a thousand dollars a month. He paid them. Ironically, I've been back and it's a pretty nice country...a lot has changed since 1972. We installed a server system which wouldn't be accepted here, but was a big deal for them. It 'monitors' all internet traffic from internet cafes, no matter where they are, and routes them all through a hub that records all the traffic. Petabytes of storage. Pretty good contract. Nicer place than it used to be, but not 'free.'
Yeah, Monkey mountain-I remember that. I spent most of my time around Marble Mt. In fact that's it in the background of my avatar pic. Welcome Home, Semper Fi!
