Air Defense Command and NORAD

 

In mid November 1965 I packed up, shipped my stuff, and got a chopper ride from Can Tho to Saigon. From there I got a gooney bird to Clark. MATS was flying an airplane between Clark and Travis — I don't remember what model it was — that we called the flying submarine since its fuselage had no windows. I was in the terminal at Clark, scheduled out on the flying submarine, but there also was a contract Pan Am 707 getting ready to leave. An airman came out from behind the counter and asked if anybody wanted to go right now in the last seat on the 707. I'm not sure how many people I knocked down to get to him but I made it, got to Travis on the 707, and caught another flight to Denver.

Autumn had rented a condo in Denver that you could take on a weekly basis. We had a glorious reunion and visited some of her old haunts around town. I remember the first time we drove north of town after dark. When we got beyond the outskirts of town I had a minor panic attack. Driving outside town after dark in Vietnam was a very, very scary idea. It took me most of the following week to get over that feeling.

I'd been a pretty active photographer in Thailand and Vietnam. With some of my Delta Villa poker winnings I'd bought a Canon 7, which was a Leica M2 knockoff (Google it) with a very fast lens. I shot this picture of a Mariachi dancer at a bistro that night. I think it was the first picture I shot back here in what in Vietnam we called "the world."

We drove down to Colorado Springs, found a realtor to help us do some house hunting, and rented 1115 North Cascade from Colorado College. A couple days later we drove back to Omena.

After an all too short leave we shipped our stuff, loaded up the kids, and drove back to Colorado Springs. We had to wait several days for our household stuff to arrive and we stayed in a motel on the south side of East Platte, just to the east of Union Blvd. The place is a dump nowadays but it wasn't bad when we were there. There was a diner across Platte where we'd eat breakfast. The kids got to know the people who ran the diner. They'd go over in the morning before us and order all sorts of stuff. Nowadays the diner is the office for a used car lot.

After a few days our household goods arrived and we moved in. That was the beginning of more than six years at 1115 N. Cascade during which Autumn went back to school and got her degree, the two youngest boys went to Lutheran school, and all the boys zoomed around the Colorado College campus in a go-cart, occasionally getting into trouble with the campus cops.

I was assigned to operations plans at Air Defense Command (ADC) headquarters in the Chidlaw building on East Bijou street. In those days the building was windowless and the operations plans shop was on the lower level.

At first there were four of us in our office: majors Ray Blake, Del Pichon, and me, and Chief Master Sergeant Ralph McCutcheon. We did disaster control planning and wrote regulations on operational status reporting. We also ran the disaster control part of both scheduled and surprise evaluations on ADC operational units. The evaluations were simulated attacks with SAC providing incoming bombers.

Surprise evaluations were the most fun. The disaster control field was a small one and we all knew our counterparts in the field. First we'd call in disaster control people from some of the units that weren't about to be evaluated and spend a few days planning our attack. The attack would include things like simulated fallout from a nuclear burst so we could evaluate the unit's ability to calculate, and keep to a minimum, radiation dosages on its people. We'd also plan to grab a group of people at the unit and turn them into simulated casualties to evaluate emergency casualty handling. During the exercise we'd do dosage calculations on pilots and ground those who in a real situation would be incapacitated.

We didn't have to worry that a fink might sneak the word to a buddy at the target outfit because everyone knew that if he finked and got caught he'd become an outcast and never get another chance to be an evaluator. One sergeant from our group was having some dental work done when the dentist asked him what he did in the Air Force. the sarge said, "My job is to screw thing up." The dentist said "I was sure there were people like that in the Air Force but you're the first one I've actually met."

An evaluation at one California base sticks in my mind. This one was scheduled, so we didn't have the thrill of showing up at 3 o'clock in the morning and catching everybody by surprise. We had a scheduled briefing on the disaster control part of the exercise for the wing commander and his staff, and Ray and Del decided I should do the briefing. We gathered in a big conference room and when we all were seated the wing commander said, "We're not going to do this." I was a pipe smoker in those days and to give me a second to think I stalled by lighting my pipe. I asked the colonel if we could go ahead with the briefing since I was required to explain what was involved in the disaster control part of the exercise. I suggested he could take up his objections with the evaluation team chief when he arrived. I got a grudging go-ahead and we did the briefing. When the colonel who was team chief flew in later that day the wing commander told him he wasn't going to do the disaster control part of the exercise. The team chief said, "That's okay. We just won't give you a rating."

The wing commander caved of course, but during the night while the exercise was going on he kept coming by where we were doing dosage calculations and giving us a hard time. The next morning, after the exercise was over, he called Ray and asked how his wing did on disaster control. Ray tried to avoid the question but the colonel kept insisting. Finally Ray said, "Well colonel, frankly it left something to be desired." The colonel shouted, "What?!! I'll court martial your ass." In the end the wing busted their eval on a lot more than just disaster control, and Ray's ass stayed out of court.

Shortly after that evaluation Ray Blake put on his silver lieutenant colonel leaves and got reassigned to the Pentagon. The shop boiled down to Del, McCutcheon, and me. Del and I both could write. It turned out that was a rare capability among people who mostly wrote in third-person bureaucratese, so every time the ADC commanding general needed to make a presentation we got the job of writing it. We finally came up with a couple speeches for all occasions into which we could plug a few details to fit the specific situation.

Not long after Ray left, ADC ops plans got a new boss, a colonel who'd spent a lot of time in the Pentagon before he came to ADC. He was a nitpicker, but fortunately he didn't understand what the three of us did, so he couldn't interfere too much. He was being groomed for a star, and about a year later he was assigned as commander of 27th NORAD Region, with headquarters outside Phoenix. About a year later it came time for us to evaluate the 27th. We watched as the region went down the drain because the colonel was the only guy in the place allowed to make a decision and there were far too many decisions to be made. He ended his career still a colonel. I've never seen a more convincing demonstration of the fact that real leadership means finding subordinates you can trust, and trusting them.

In late 1966 Del got orders for Vietnam, and now our shop was down to McCutcheon and me. But in July 1967 I got orders to transfer to NORAD headquarters operations plans. Ray Blake tried to get me to the Pentagon but his request came in at the same time NORAD asked for my transfer. NORAD was an international command and it took precedence, so I stayed in Colorado Springs and moved to the NORAD operations plans office in shack city, which was on part of the ground Memorial Hospital now occupies. I had and still have mixed emotions about the outcome of that clash. Ray was a good friend and I owed him since he was the main reason I was in Colorado Springs, but at the same time stories about working in the Pentagon and living and commuting in the DC area were, to say the least, disturbing. Years later Ray did me one more favor when he got me out of my second, disappointing, tour in Great Falls and sent me to Austin, Texas. But that's a story yet to come.

Bill Weston was a Canadian major assigned to NORAD ops plans. Bill had been along on several of our evaluations, so I knew him even before I went to NORAD and settled into a desk across from his. We soon became close friends. As far as the evaluations were concerned things hadn't changed much. I still participated in the disaster control parts of NORAD/ADC exercises. Around this time somebody at the Pentagon realized you couldn't "control" disasters and changed the name of the field to "disaster preparedness." I'm not sure that was an improvement, but the name stuck.

Operations plans' main focus was the computer system upgrades for the NORAD command center in Cheyenne Mountain that were to take place in the future. The "cave" was operating with the 425L Command and Control System, which had been installed along with the finishing touches to the construction in 1957. A new computer and display system, the 427M, was in the planning stages. Operational status information wasn't integrated in the 425L system. We depended on status reports coming in over telephones and 100 baud teletypes to determine which fighter squadrons and other units had survived an attack and were still able to carry out their missions. One of my main concerns in this new job was to integrate that information into the new system.

The Pentagon hadn't made a decision yet on computer hardware for 427M. Bill and I went to a one-week course at San Jose on the new IBM 360 computer system. The 360 was the first computer that could multi-task, meaning it could do more than one job at a time. One of the instructors explained multi-tasking by saying that if somebody were typing something into a computer as fast as the 360, and each keystroke took a second, the machine would have the equivalent of a couple thousand years between keystrokes to do something else. The 360 could take advantage of that fact and do something else while it was waiting. At the time, it was the only computer in the world that could do that. Nowadays even your laptop, even your cell phone, can do the same thing.

At IBM I was exposed to the PL/I programming language, which was a combination of what then were the standard languages: FORTRAN and COBOL. I found it fascinating. We were broken into groups and required to write a program that would compute, and on a high-speed printer, print ten bounces of a ball dropped from a specified height with a specified bounce. One group forgot to terminate the cycle after the tenth bounce so the ball stopped bouncing and began rolling. They started their program and the printer started pouring out paper so fast they didn't know whether to try to shut off the printer or run for the door.

After the IBM 360 course Bill and I went to a course at the Pentagon called "Specifications for Selection." The course existed because since computers were new and jazzy every general wanted a computer of his own, even though he had no idea what he was going to do with it. Unfortunately the whole course was built around single-tasking machines. Evidently the Pentagon hadn't yet heard about the IBM 360.

But the two main problems Bill and I had to tackle were: First, communications over phones and 100 baud teletype were terribly slow. In both cases you had to take the incoming message and punch its information into a computer keyboard before it could be displayed. Second, a large percentage of communications lines would be taken out by a nuclear attack. Getting through would become very difficult.

We started looking for ways to speed things up. In the course of our research Bill and I met and worked with the local IBM salesman. He helped us learn the capabilities of various pieces of equipment, and with a go-ahead from our boss, we (NORAD) leased a keypunch, a card to tape converter, and a tape to card converter. In those days the standard way to store data off-line was with 80 column punch cards. But you could interface a punched paper tape machine with a teletype to speed up teletype transmissions.

Once the equipment was in place in a small room next to our office the first thing I did was develop a coding system for unit designations and status reports that used three or four character codes. In other words there was a four letter code to report that a unit's fuel storage had been destroyed; another four letter code to report that a unit was under heavy fallout. The idea was to reduce the traffic volume through our limited teletype systems, and at the same time in the new 427 system, automatically interface the teletype output with the computers.

I needed to keep the results sorted so I punched all the codes and their meanings into 80 column punch cards so I could take the deck over to data processing periodically and get it sorted and printed. I got damn good on the key punch. As I told Ben in "Correspondence with Ben," at one point there was something I wanted to do with the card to tape converter. IBM said it couldn't be done. I figured out a way to do it and next thing I knew our friendly IBM salesman brought me a job offer from IBM. I politely turned it down.

We finally got to the point where we were able to write up the new reporting system in a manual and publish a list of codes. The 425L system didn't have the capability to interface automatically with the teletype output, but the data volume coming through the phones and the teletype was reduced by an order of magnitude. I came up with a name for the system: "Operational Status Reporting" OPSTAR. One of the first things that happened after OPSTAR went operational was that I got called over to the ADC vice commander's office where the general explained that OPSTAR wasn't secure. The enemy would be able to break the code. I explained that security wasn't its purpose and briefed him on what we were doing. I'm not sure he understood, but he let me go.

Hawaii was part of NORAD, and at one point Bill and I had to go to Oahu and brief CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific) on OPSTAR. We had to wait a few days to get in for the briefing, and the region's disaster preparedness officer spent a couple days giving us a tour of the island.

Not long after our Hawaii trip, Bill was reassigned to Canada's Air Transport Command at Trenton, Ontario, and in July, 1969 I was able to put on my silver leaves and become a lieutenant colonel.

For a long time my immediate boss had been an army lieutenant colonel named Jim Turner. Now that Bill was gone, Jim and I started working on the next step in the information survivability problem. I wanted a way for reports coming through the system to be rerouted automatically when communications were down. Small computers were coming into existence, and I started looking for one that could accept reports to be sent through the teletype, store a list of communication paths, and if the primary path were out, start down the list of alternatives until it could make contact. I also wanted the machine to be able to receive reports from other sources and forward them.

A colonel we'd worked with on something — don't remember what — had retired and gone to work for Lytton Industries. He dropped in one day for a chat and we told him what we were doing. He told us that Lytton had developed a small computer for the Marines that was much like what we were looking for but it hadn't quite satisfied the Marines' requirement. He suggested we go out to the Lytton lab in the San Francisco bay area and check out the machine.

On our first night in San Francisco Jim and I were wined and dined by the Lytton sales people, including the retired colonel. I shot this picture on the street as we were walking to a bistro where amateur musicians performed. The next morning we were hung over and I was having a hard time determining whether or not the system was going to be able to do what I had in mind. Fortunately there was an engineer on the Lytton staff named Ellie Boubli, who was able to get down to basics and help us understand the system. Ellie was an Egyptian Jew who'd been educated at University of Alexandria. He was the smartest guy in the room by far. Ellie visited us once in Colorado Springs later on when he and his family were passing through.

Finally I wrote up the automated OPSTAR proposal and sent it up through channels. The Pentagon bought off on the plan, but it never got funded.

But the ops plans directorate's current problem was to find the best possible hardware for the 427M system. I was pushing for the IBM 360, which had reached a maturity that made it pretty bulletproof, but there were some other multi-tasking systems beginning to come into existence. I spent an awful lot of my time briefing people in NORAD and ADC headquarters and people from the Pentagon. Finally the Pentagon made their choice. I don't remember the manufacturer of the machine, but it was what most of us called a sock-counting machine. We didn't think it would to do the job very well. We were going to need two complete computer systems to do the job. One major general almost got himself in serious trouble by coming up with specifications that sneaked parts for a complete third computer into the mix.

In the spring of 1972 Autumn and I decided we wanted to stay in Colorado. We bought 20 Grand Avenue in Manitou Springs and moved. Clint started college but very soon dropped out, joined the Navy and went to SEAL training. The other three boys were enrolled in Manitou's District 14 schools. We were going to church at St. Andrew's in Manitou and Fr. Boyer, the rector and I became good friends. Fr. Boyer bought a house at 50 Grand Avenue, just up the street from us, and many evenings on his way home from church I'd get him to pop in and have a Perfect Manhattan with me.

In December, 1972 I was promoted to full colonel. Operations plans' ultimate boss was Brigadier General Tyler, whose office was in Cheyenne Mountain. Tyler came down to shack city that day and pinned on my eagles. Shortly after that the colonel who'd been our immediate boss retired and I became director of operations Plans.

In January, 1973 I'd been at Colorado Springs for more than seven years and I was overdue for an overseas tour. One day General Tyler came in, shut the door to my private office, and asked if I'd be willing to take a short tour to Vietnam so I could come back and take over again as director. The problem he was trying to get around was that it took something like three years in 427M planning to develop a reasonably good grasp of what was going on. He told me that command of the 505th Tactical Control Group in Saigon was coming open, and if I took the assignment he'd get me back to NORAD in a year. I agreed, and volunteered.