Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [125]
“We do a quick tactical setup and get ready to make commo. From here we will do SATCOM with the PSC-5 and high-frequency voice with the 137. With the SATCOM, the timing has to be precise. We each have designated fifteen-minute windows in which to get our message off and to receive a receipt for it. Then we rotate positions. Then the next guy has fifteen minutes to sanitize the radio and set it up for his transmission window. We call them block times—fifteen minutes to set up and fifteen minutes to make commo. Each of us will send two messages, which will keep us here at the team site for five hours or so. Then we pack up and head back to the patrol base. Back at the base, we will send an ALE message on the 137. We also have hourly FM commo checks with our forward operating base on the PRC-119 and intra-squad comm checks with the MBITRs. Tonight, we’ll be back out again for more SATCOM on the PSC-5.”
In the tactical configuration of the team commo sites, I note that they are always ready to move and fight. When they are talking, the radios are still in the rucks so they can shut down and leave quickly if required. I also watch as they set up two of everything, including two toughbook computers, so if a computer or a radio fails, the operator on the block time can quickly change out a faulty component.
Each candidate’s SATCOM message, text or imagery, is beamed to a satellite twenty-three thousand miles in space and back to the commo facility just a few miles away. There, a team of staff communicators receives and acknowledges each transmission. The facility is manned 24/7, and these are graded transmissions. Inside the commo facility is a large board that identifies each individual message, the Echo candidate who sent it, and any irregularities of format and procedure. During the course of the Max Gain exercise, each candidate will make a total of fifteen graded SATCOM transmissions.
“Block time is evaluation time,” Keller says. “For the most part, I didn’t have any trouble, but on a few of them I was sweating it. Fifteen minutes isn’t much time if something’s not working. But we’ve been trained for that; it’s called the ABCD protocol—antenna, batteries, connections, data. Ninety-nine percent of all problems come to this. When the gear doesn’t work, you begin a formatted series of troubleshooting procedures. A loose connection almost caused me to miss my comm window, but I got it fixed in time to make commo.”
“High-frequency communication is all about the antenna,” David Altman explains to me. “We use either an elevated dipole or an inverted ‘V’ configuration. For Max Gain, we were communicating with a commo station in Florida, some four hundred miles away. The signal has to skip between the earth and the ionosphere to travel that far, so we have to adjust the antenna to get a good signal—to achieve the right bounce. But the PRC-137 is a good radio. We had ten graded HF voice and HF ALE transmissions on the 137.”
In 18 Echo Class 1-05, there are seventy-some students out working in two patrol bases for Max Gain. The cadre pretty much leave them alone, but stop by periodically to see if there are any problems and to ensure they are maintaining a tactical posture. The patrol base locations are each scheduled for one move to drill the candidates in breaking camp, along with the radios and the aerials, and setting up in a new location. One of the patrol bases gets a little sloppy in their fieldcraft discipline and are forced to move a second time to refocus their attention to tactical detail. The cadre, based on feedback from the commo facility at Eureka Springs and in Florida, know if an individual candidate is having trouble. Usually,