I was in Korea for about a year, serving in C Battery of the 38th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, first as a Fire Control Operator and then, when I became a Sergeant, as a Target Selector in a HAWK – Homing All the Way Killer – SAM ( Surface to Air Missile) system. We were in the business of providing an air defense umbrella for the Republic of Korea and the United States troops stationed there. Everything in C Battery revolved around the Tac Site which was the home of all the radars and missiles in our system and sat on the highest hill around. The Tac Site overlooked the Yellow Sea and had the best view of any place I have ever worked. By far.

To the northwest and west were  islands and inlets off of the port of Inchon, which opened into the aforementioned Yellow Sea. To the north and east were rice paddies and the village of Nam Yang.

To the immediate north, in a small valley just below the Tac Site was a compound with a Buddhist temple (I went there several times but it always seemed deserted except for the laundry and I now have the feeling they were ghosting us).

To the southeast and south was an almost endless view of hills and valleys. For awhile, when the Air Force took the troublesome F-105 offline, we ran practice missions against the Marines who were flying A-4 Skyhawks and they used to sneak up these southern valleys at about 350 miles per hour. They were much harder to “kill” than the Air force planes.

In the winter, on top of that hill, it was sometimes bitter cold with the wind coming off the Yellow Sea. Most of the snow was blown off the hill by the wind, but the cold remained, and we were often stuck out in it.

The Quonset hut, in the middle right in the picture above, was called the Ready Room or something equally pretentious. Our basic work schedule, if that is the right term, was that our Battery would be On Status or Hot for about half the time (I don’t remember the time frame, maybe 24 hours out of 48, 48 out of 96, something like that).  On the Tac Site, when we were not On  Status, it was a regular work day and we would be working on the equipment or running drills. When we were On Status, in theory, we were ready to launch missiles at airplanes if we were attacked. Well, semi-ready, we had to be ready to launch  in fifteen minutes and meant hanging out, waiting for an alarm from Battalion with somebody, in the Battery Control Central – BCC – wearing an headset listening to the Battalion comm-line all the time. Passing time when we were awake and sleeping in our clothes when it got late or we got bored (when pulling duty in the BCC, I discovered that the headset connection cable was long enough to allow me to sleep on the floor, a tactic based on my theory that Battalion talking to me over the comm-line would be loud enough to wake me). On one day, off one day, for a year, in theory. In practice we were on much more than we were off, the longest run being almost full time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve. It got tiresome.

This was the early 60’s, and the HAWK system was based on vacuum tubes. The BCC had a wall of racks and racks of tubes that required a huge air-conditioning system to keep the inside temperature reasonable.  It was so noisy inside that even though we were within touching distance, we couldn’t hear each other, relying on headsets and microphones. This was 60’s state of the art meaning that everything was unreliable and required daily, hourly, minute by minute maintenance. The missiles, especially demanded constant tinkering and replacement which required taking them to the assembly building on little crawlers and constantly running operation checks while they were on their launchers.

Our most distinctive radars were continuous wave radars, called illuminators, which lit the target with a radio frequency beam that the missile then homed in on. The radar frequency was controlled by a gizmo called a klystron that was encased in its own glycerol cooling system which was very unreliable and had to be replaced way more than seemed reasonable.  We had different crawlers to help move them around.

Keeping the HAWK system running required almost constant activity but it was activity to no end. It was practice and maintenance – and changing klystrons – over and over again ad nauseam . It was sitting in the dark, watching small dots – bogies or blips – move across a radar display. It was running system checks and then re-running them. It was lugging heavy machine guns into bunkers in a snow storm but not being issued any ammunition.

Except for August 2, 1964, when the destroyer  USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin thought it was being attacked by the North Vietnamese and everybody went amok. We were off status but came up, as fast as we could, accompanied by klaxons blaring, and orders to change code books.  Ammo was issued to us without anyone keeping track, the missiles were armed, and our battery commander went sort of bonkers issuing orders nobody could follow. It was an interesting couple of days, followed by another half year of pointless drill.

And another half year of great sunsets.