USS Arlington AGMR 2 —my experience

When Congress passed the Gulf of

Tonkin Resolution on August 4, 1964, it gave President Lyndon B. Johnson unprecedented authority to take whatever means necessary to promote and maintain peace and security in Southeast Asia. Without any formal declaration or congressional debate, the United States found itself at war with the Republic of (North) Vietnam.

One of the problems facing the administration was a complete lack of communications facilities in that part

of the world. The United States had no way to orchestrate a military campaign in the South China Sea. Geosynchronous communications satellites were still the stuff of science fiction and our westernmost communications facilities were Naval Communications Stations on Guam (NAVCOMMSTA Guam) and in the Philippines (NAVCOMMSTA Philippines).

The previous year, Admiral David L. McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), had selected a

mothballed light aircraft carrier, the USS Saipan CVL 48, for conversion to a command ship. The Saipan was partway through the conversion process at the Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company in Mobile, Alabama when work was halted and the project was redesignated to a floating communications station. The ship was named Arlington in recognition of the Navy’s first wireless station in Arlington County, Virginia.

The conversion to a communications relay station was

no trivial feat. Land-based communication facilities used separate receiving and transmitting antennas that were separated by a mile or more to minimize interference. The Arlington’s nineteen transmitting antennas and twenty-two receiving antennas, including two rotatable log-periodic arrays on top of 109-foot-tall masts, had to be located on a deck roughly 100 by 600 feet.

Below the antenna deck, in what was the carrier’s

hanger bay, air-conditioned compartments were crammed with ten 10,000-watt high-frequency transmitters, fourteen 500-watt transmitters, one 10,000-watt low-frequency transmitter, 65 multi-channel receivers, cryptographic gear, and 1,200 pieces of radio teletype equipment. After installing 74

miles of cable and completing 237,000 electrical connections, the Arlington could send and receive several thousand words per minute simultaneously (via radio teletype) over distances in excess of 10,000 kilometers (6,214 miles).

Commissioned on August 27, 1966 with a crew of 45 officers and 882

enlisted men, the USS Arlington AGMR 2 was the largest, fastest, and most advanced communications ship in the world. After a shakedown cruise in the Atlantic, it passed through the Panama Canal and took its position at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, where it relayed all electronic communications to

and from the war zone. Together with a sister ship, the USS Annapolis, one ship would always be on station. I caught up with the Arlington on November 19, 1967 in Subic Bay, Philippines. The ship had just

completed a tour on Yankee Station and was coming from ten days of R & R in Hong Kong. The stop at Subic Bay was just to pickup personnel before returning to Yankee Station. Approaching the Arlington for the first time, I was struck by the otherworldly appearance of the five masts protruding from the main deck. The tallest two, each reaching 109 feet in height, supported massive transmitting antennas that appeared ready to shoot death rays into the heavens. The ship’s receiving antennas, 35-ft rods that encircled the perimeter of the antenna deck, had been raised to an

upright position. They looked like the quills of a giant animal poised to ward off predators. Painted Navy gray with a black stripe just above the waterline, the Arlington was the most alien-looking ship I had ever seen.

Twenty years old with a radioman third-class rating,

I had been married for just a few months. (I just celebrated my forty-ninth anniversary!) My E4 pay grade was $177.90/month plus an extra $65/month for serving in a combat zone. Reporting to the Personnel Office, my top-secret clearance was verified, I was issued a security badge, and assigned to CF Division, which manned the Secure Message Center (SMC). I would be in the very heart and soul of the ship.

On station two days later, I entered the SMC for the first time. An

armed guard on the other side of a watertight metal door verified my badge, and a duty officer assigned me to one of several message-receiving stations, a radio teletype printer that typed three different messages at the same time (at 100 words-per-minute) and simultaneously spit out a perforated paper tape copy. The noise hit me first—like several hundred mechanical typewriters being pounded at an inhuman speed. Each keystroke resounded off the metal walls and bulkheads. The air smelled of light machine oil and paper. The compartment was air-conditioned, but that was more for the machinery’s efficiency than the comfort of their human operators. My job was to stand in front of a three-printer teletype machine, scan the incoming messages for garbled text, and either accept them or request a

retransmission. These radio teletype messages had been picked up by the receiving antennas on the perimeter of the antenna deck and sent through electronic cryptography equipment, where they were converted to plain text.

The traffic coming over my machine could be coming from other ships on station, bases in Vietnam, or the

U.S. mainland. We had secure teletype links with Guam, the Philippines, Japan and occasionally Hawaii. As soon as I signed for a message, new traffic would start printing. I had only seconds to tear the original

communication from the printer and cut the perforated paper tape. I would wrap the paper tape around my thumb and forefinger to form a butterfly, paper clip it to the message, and place it in a wire basket. All the while, I had to keep an eye on the other incoming traffic. When my basket filled with messages, I would run them to a radioman second-class that was seated at a table toward the front of the room. He was the “router.” He

would look at the intended recipient of each message and place it in one of many baskets that surrounded his desk. An operator manning one of the many transmitting stations would then pick up the message with its attached tape. He would insert the paper tape into a tape reader and the message would be electronically re-encrypted and sent on its way. Transmission completed, the paper copy of the message, and the perforated tape, would be put in a burn bag. At the end of each watch, the bags would be taken below decks and incinerated. On station, the SMC would receive and forward 5,800 messages and go through one ton of teletype paper every day!

Inside the SMC, only a chief petty officer, stationed at a raised desk in the front of the room, and the router

were seated. The rest of us stood for our entire eight-hour watch. I made a mental note to continue studying for my second-class rating!

The duty cycle of the ship was four hours on and eight hours off—except for CF Division. Always short of

radiomen, we worked eight on and eight off for the length of the tour. Most tours lasted 58 days, followed by 7 to 10 days in port for R & R. During our eight hours off, we showered, ate, wrote home, stood the occasional inspection, studied and oh yes, slept. Living inside a gray metal box without ever seeing the sun or breathing fresh air takes a toll. By the fifth day on station, I was a walking zombie. The menu on the wall of the mess hall was my only measure of time. Eggs and bacon meant it was morning. Stewed Stuff, a collection of the previous week’s leftovers, indicated it was Friday, and the sizzling smell of steaks signified Sunday.

One of the messages that came in daily was a SITREP (situation report) from MACV Tan Son Nhut,

General Westmoreland’s command center. This report outlined the day’s engagements. It was quite lengthy, detailing every enemy encounter with forces killed-in-action, wounded, and missing along with weapons and territory lost and captured. The report listed separate figures for U.S. Forces, Friendly Forces (i.e. Australian, Philippine, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Canadian) South Vietnam Forces, and Viet Cong. Filled with military acronyms, numbers, and text, the report required a fair amount of concentration to check for garble. While I could not read every word, my mind was able to absorb the gist of a report that would shortly be in some Washington, D.C., intelligence office. The data would be summarized and presented shortly to the President of the United States. I was seeing it first—pretty heady stuff for a twenty year old!

One tour under my belt, the ship made way to

Yokosuka, Japan for ten days of Christmas R and R. We berthed next to our little sibling, the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence (spy) ship.

Preparing for shore leave, I was listening to a national

(U.S.) news broadcast about a particular encounter. I was dumbstruck. I remembered the SITREP of that engagement. The numbers were all wrong! The public was being fed a much rosier picture of the war. The broadcast inflated enemy causalities and minimized our losses—by a huge margin. Now I understood the government’s need to maintain secrets during a time of war but that day in Yokosuka, Japan, changed my life. I realized that, even in

a free society, the public was only being told what the government wanted us to hear. Nearly fifty years later, I still hold that belief, and treat information released by any government agency with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Along the same vein was the media’s daily war coverage of our aerial bombardments. The broadcasts

implied that our bombings were winning the war, which they were not, and that we enjoyed unimpeded air superiority, which was far from the truth. The Soviet Union was supplying the North Vietnamese with their latest supersonic jet fighter, the MiG-21, and North Vietnamese pilots were combat-skilled in a hit-and-run

guerilla tactic our pilots nicknamed “one pass then haul ass.” We were losing nine aircraft for every MiG-21 shot down. After losing almost 1,000 aircraft in Operation Rolling Thunder, the new CNO, Admiral Thomas Moorer, ordered a review of our aerial combat tactics. The result was the creation of the Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program, popularly known as TOPGUN, which opened in March of 1969 in Miramar, California. A further break came when Israel loaned the United States a captured MiG-21, and our pilots were able to access the plane’s weaknesses and develop effective air-

to-air combat strategies. In total, the United States lost nearly 10,000 aircraft during the Vietnam War vs. North Vietnam’s loss of 150 – 200 aircraft.

The gloom of war subsided over the Christmas

holiday as I was granted a three-day pass and took the Shinkansen (Japan’s bullet train) to Tokyo where I experienced the Japanese version of Times Square, the brightly-lit and always crowed Ginza. I fell in love with the country and its people, returning several times in my later years.

January brought the Arlington back for another

tour on Yankee Station. I was manning my receiving station in the SMC on January 23, 1968 when all hell erupted. My machine and several others started ringing, indicating FLASH-priority transmissions were coming in. FLASH messages are the military’s highest-priority traffic. They are hand-carried from the receiving station to the router, who hand-carries the message to the correct sending terminal. FLASH messages are typically operational combat messages of extreme urgency, and are put ahead of all other traffic. As I read the text being printed on my terminal, my jaw dropped. The USS Pueblo, with its 83 crewmembers, had been boarded by the North Korean Navy, captured, and was being taken to the port of Wonsan. One crewmember had been killed in the attack. I had no way of knowing, but in just minutes, President Lyndon Johnson would be roused from a sound sleep. It was 3:00 A.M. in Washington, D.C.

Just hours later, the commander of USPACOM (United States Pacific Command) ordered the Big E, the

USS Enterprise, to proceed to Wonsan, North Korea, at flank speed. The Enterprise was a new class of aircraft carrier powered by eight nuclear reactors. While the vessel’s top speed is classified, it is estimated to be near 50 mph (43 knots). That’s moving a structure the size the Empire State Building through the water fast enough to ski off the fantail! In the days and weeks to follow, three cruisers, five carriers—in addition to the Enterprise—and eighteen destroyers would be added to the task force. All of this information is in the public domain now, so I am not divulging any classified information, but at the time, these MOVREP’s (movement reports) were top secret.

I participated in a total of four campaigns during my year aboard the Arlington including the Tet

Counteroffensive and Vietnamese Campaigns Phase III, IV and V. Rest stops between tours included Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Yokosuka and Sasebo, Japan; Hong Kong, and Sydney, Australia. Coming back to Yokosuka in September of 1968, I was summoned to the Personnel Office. My one-year tour was coming to an end, and I had received new orders to report to a destroyer escort. I had also passed the exam I took in August for my radioman second-class rating. As the personnel officer handed me my new orders, he hesitated. “Congress has just announced an early-out program for persons who have served at least one year in a combat zone. You qualify under the conditions of the program, but if you take an early retirement, you will forfeit your second-class rating.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. We were always short of radiomen, the war was not going well, and Congress was letting me out a year early? It did not make any sense, but I had not seen my new wife for over a year. After carefully considering my options for at least two seconds, I opted for the early out! I had enlisted in the Navy Reserve, and still had five years of commitment ahead of me that consisted of one meeting every month and two weeks a year of active duty training. No big deal. I figured that I could retake my radioman second-class exam when I returned to my reserve center.

Walking down the gangway for the last time was a bittersweet experience. The tours were exhausting, but

the experience, the foreign ports, and my fellow shipmates had shaped a naive young recruit into a tough, mature, and well-rounded man. As I walked through the base at Yokosuka for the last time, I could not help but notice the stacks of large pipes lining both sides of the streets. They were everywhere. I asked the guard at the front gate if the base was updating its water or sewer system.

“Haven’t you heard?” the guard replied. “The battleship

New Jersey is joining the war effort. Those pipes are replacement 16-inch barrels. The New Jersey’s guns can only be fired a limited number of times before the barrels need to be replaced.”

I just shook my head, walking out the front gate for the last

time. EPILOGUE The USS New Jersey (BB-62) arrived on Yankee Station

September 25, 1968 and saw duty until April 1, 1969. During that period, it fired 5,688 16-inch rounds and 14,891 5-inch rounds at distances exceeding 22 miles. With a reported cost of $7,000 per shell, each 16-inch round was the equivalent of firing a new Cadillac Eldorado down the barrel.

On December 10, 1968, I reported to the Naval Reserve

Training Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to resume my inactive duty requirements. An officer took my service jacket, and informed me that the center had suspended its monthly meetings and two-week active duty requirement due to severe budget cuts. I would be receiving a full honorable discharge in the mail and should consider my military obligation as being fully satisfied! Again dumbfounded by the actions of our Congress, I saluted the officer and left the training center a civilian.

On December 23, 1968, following a written apology by the United States, the remaining 82 crewmembers

of the Pueblo were released to U.S. authorities. The USS Pueblo is still in North Korea, the second-oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy behind the USS Constitution.

The USS Arlington departed Yankee Station for the last time

on July 8, 1969 having earned seven campaign stars for her service in Vietnam. Made redundant by new communications satellites now circling the globe, she participated in the recovery of Apollo 8, Apollo 10, and Apollo 11 capsules before being decommissioned on January 14, 1970.  

In January of 1971, President Richard Nixon repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution after an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee revealed that the attack on the USS Maddox (the incident that sparked the Tonkin Gulf Resolution) never occurred!

In 1973, over President Nixon’s veto, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which requires a

president to consult with Congress before engaging U.S. forces in foreign hostilities. On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese captured Saigon, marking the end of the Vietnam War. The war

took the lives of 58,220 U.S. military personnel. In 1995, Population and Development Review calculated that 882,000 civilians (North and South

Vietnamese) were killed during the war including 655,000 adult males, 143,000 adult females, and 84,000 children. That estimate was later updated by Uppsala University in Sweden, which maintains the Armed Conflict Database, to 1,622,973.