Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [123]
The 18 Echo candidates are trained at two locations. The classroom work that relates to computers is done at Aaron Bank Hall at Fort Bragg. The fieldwork and the classroom work on radios take place at the communication training facility on the eastern side of Fort Bragg, a portion of the base known as Eureka Springs.
“The first thing we learned were computers,” Specialist Justin Keller tells me. The big man from Denver, the former college wrestler and bouncer, had been tapped for communications training. I note that a great many other X-Rays with college degrees, like Specialist David Altman, are in Echo training. “When most people think of Army communications, they think of a radioman in the field with a handset to his ear. There’s that, but the portal to most of our radios is through the computer. Everyone has some knowledge of computers. Some like me could just do e-mail and word processing. A few in the class were computer techs before they came into the Army. And you’d be surprised how many guys worked at RadioShack or Circuit City. We spent almost three weeks on computers, and working with the one we use in the field. It’s a ruggedized PC designated as the CF-18. We call it a toughbook. We learned field maintenance and how to take them apart and reassemble them, so they can replace components on deployment and make upgrades to components. We also learned how to set up work groups and local area networks, or LANs. The basic program is a version of Windows 2000 Professional. We all became very proficient at using a computer.”
The 18 Echo curriculum includes antenna theory and radio wave propagation. The candidates are introduced to a host of military radios, but focus on the care, maintenance, and operation of the radios that are currently in use in the Special Forces groups. Then there are the peculiarities of military communications that include message format, authentication procedures, operational procedures, common abbreviations, acronyms, and prowords. The 18 Echos must also master secure communications, which involves cryptographic coding and decoding—or, more simply, using crypto.
“We really learn and use four basic radios,” Specialist Altman explains. “The first, heaviest, and probably the most important is the AN/PSC-5D. We call it the PSC-5. It’s our primary satellite communications, or SATCOM, radio, and weighs about twelve pounds—eighteen with batteries in it.”
The PSC-5 can do a lot of things. It is a multiband, multimission backpack radio that can operate in the UHF and VHF frequency ranges and can be used for line-of-sight or satellite communications. One cadre referred to the PSC-5 as the king of radios. The 18 Echo candidates train on this radio and use it primarily to transmit text and imagery by satellite from remote locations back to the forward operating base.
“There are three other radios that we have to know,” Altman said. “Our primary HF or high-frequency radio is the AN/PRC-137F. The 137 is used for HF voice traffic and for ALE transmissions—automatic link establishment messages. The automatic link is kind of amazing. When you type up a long message and send it on ALE, the radio chooses the frequency, at the lowest power setting, and sends the message when it finds those parameters. It makes for a very secure transmission. Then we have the AN/PRC-148. We call it the ‘embitter,’ for MBITR, or multiband inter-/intra-team radio. It’s a handheld FM Motorola-type radio that’s very light, less than two pounds, and durable. This a great radio and can do a lot of things, including satellite communications, but we use it as a secure, line-of-sight radio for squad communications. And finally, we have the AN/PRC-119F. The 119 is a heavy radio like the PSC-5, and we use it for