Chapter 4: The TOC
“Military arrangement, and movements in consequence, like the mechanism
of a clock, will be imperfect and disordered by the want of a part.”—George
Washington
After a few days of settling in and coming to the
realization that the war was a 24/7 undertaking with no weekends off, I was
assigned to the Tactical Operations Center (TOC), the command and control
center for the Brigade. Given the Army’s habit of sticking people where they
needed them rather than having them do what they were trained for, it was only
luck that I ended up actually being a radio operator. There was another newbie
who arrived on the same day I did. We would begin and end our tours together,
flying home on the same freedom bird. But that was a long way off for both of
us. Dev was also an RTO. Among other duties as assigned, he prepared the map
showing the day’s patrol routes, earning him the title of Grease Pencil 6.
(Each officer in the command structure had a number, the brigade commander
being 6, hence the ironic job title.)
You entered the TOC through
a narrow doorway and then went down several wooden steps into what was
essentially a large square hole in the ground. On one end were a couple of
Conex cargo containers—metal boxes about six feet wide by maybe eight feet long
and eight feet high—which was where I worked. The TOC’s roof consisted of flat
sheets of tin that were covered by several protective layers of sandbags.
Overall the area was maybe twenty by twenty feet square, but that’s a real
guess.
When you walked into the TOC you would see a table and
radios for the Artillery LNO (liaison officer), who coordinated artillery
throughout the AO; the Air Force LNO, an Air Force tech who coordinated jet air
strikes (and who had those way complicated looking radios I last saw in radio
operator school in AIT); and the S3-Air, who coordinated helicopter and gunship
deployments. The S2 (Intelligence) and the S4 (Supply) would show up in the TOC
from time to time, usually when the shit had hit the fan. Taken together, the
elements of the TOC comprised a team that had to mesh together smoothly to
provide maximum support to the troops in the field during firefights.
A TOC is acronym heaven. The first day I walked in to the
TOC, I could barely understand a single thing anyone said. BDA. Kilos and whiskeys. Clicks and Charlie Papas. LZ’s and PZ’s, both
hot and cold. 3, 5, 6, One-One, Seven-Seven. Dust Offs. Alpha Alphas and x-ray
tango. Spooky, Red Haze, Heavy Artillery Warnings. All these terms would
acquire meaning over the coming weeks, but for now they were a tidal wave of
gibberish that I would be expected to quickly master if I wanted to hold on to
the job. I knew right away, this was the place for me.
I was shown to my office, a small table in one of the
Conex’s. There were two radios on a shelf above the table. One was our brigade
net, a net being a group of stations that reported to a superior command. Our
battalion radio operators reported to my brigade radio, just as the battalion
net consisted of companies that reported to them. We used a second radio to
monitor the battalion nets, setting it to whatever frequency we needed,
depending on where the action was.
A third radio was the division’s open net. This was used to
send routine traffic to the brigades, but it also alerted us to traffic coming
in over the secure mode radio. Both radios were on a separate table behind us. The
secure mode radio was a contrary piece of machinery that excelled at producing
long stretches of static that we called rushing noise. What made it secure was
a small board made of wires that could be aligned into various combinations of
positions. The crypto guy would come in every day and reset the “bread box” to
the day’s coded combination, which only he knew. Any secure mode radio sending
to another secure mode radio had to have these wires set in exactly the same
combination of positions, otherwise you would only get rushing noise.
Unfortunately, these little wires would expand in the heat and move out of
their slot, thereby rendering them temporarily useless. Given that the inside
of the conex was very hot, this happened a lot.
The main traffic on the division net was alerts about
imminent B-52 strikes, code-named Arc Lights, also referred to in radio traffic
as Heavy Artillery Warnings. The call would go out as, “Danger, Danger, all
Danger stations. Heavy Artillery Warning. Coordinates XT715816, Bien Hoa TACAN
3456, from 1300 to 1400 hours.” We would relay that warning to our battalions,
which in turn would alert their respective nets. Every so often, we would have
to receive confidential traffic from the division TOC. The RTO there, a first
lieutenant, would come on the clear radio and deliver a terse order: “Danger
11Zulu, this is Danger 77Zulu. Meet me other mode.” This was our signal to
swing over to the secure mode radio and pray that we didn’t get rushing noise
only.
Each radio produced a tremendous amount of heat in addition
to the already stifling heat in the room. (Air conditioning? Surely you jest.)
Everyone smoked, so the air was a dense haze of tobacco smoke. (I eventually
got up to five packs a day of a French cigarette called Gauloises, which were
short and round and gave off a very strong smell, not unlike a joint.)
An immediate challenge was learning the call sign of each
unit operating under us. When I began working in the TOC in October 1968, the
First Infantry Division was using its old World War II call signs. Every unit’s
call sign began with the letter “D.” Division was Danger, as previously noted.
The First Brigade was Devil. As the brigade radio operator, I was Devil Zulu at
headquarters, Devil Yankee in the field. The brigade commander was Devil 6, the
S3 was Devil 3, and so on. Battalions went by such call signs as Dauntless,
Darkness, or Dracula. The dozens of call signs we had to know for the entire
division and its supporting units were listed in the Signal Operating Instructions
(SOI), which also listed the radio
frequencies for all the units in the division.
At some point the security gurus decreed that we needed to
change our call signs every month. On whatever day that happened, the radio
operators would find a new SOI waiting for them. Amazingly enough, after just a couple of
hours you had all the new call signs memorized. Radio frequencies changed as
well, leading to the occasional situation where you were trying to give a new
frequency to a radio operator who didn’t have the current SOI. You could either use the KAC
Code book—a technology straight out of the Middle Ages that involved converting
frequency numbers to letters and then back to numbers, which was especially
cumbersome if one of the parties was in the middle of a fire fight—or you could
make use of a simpler system. A typical frequency (also known as a “push”)
might be 45.05, so you would say, “From Jack Benny’s age, up 6.05.” Of course,
every adult American living at that time knew that Jack Benny was stuck at age
39 for all eternity, so it made a very effective quick and dirty code. (I’m
equally certain that every NVA (North Vietnamese Army) radio operator
understood the principle, even if they had no idea who Jack Benny was. One
wonders which cultural icon would be used today. From Justin Bieber’s age, up 34.05. Doesn’t have quite the same
ring, does it?)
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