In 1980 I was ready to give another try at the army, the first time I had done a tour in Korea (definitely stories there).  When I saw the recruiter, he said that as “prior service” my choices were Germany or Panama.  I knew AFN could be good duty but that Headquarters had a nasty habit of putting 71r-types in the PAO shop.  Didn’t know anything about Panama other than it was an accompanied tour and that the weather would be warm. While I was trying to get the paperwork straightened out I wrote ahead.  Major Satterlee wrote a nice letter welcoming me.  After arriving at Clayton, My first SCN experience was to hear an unbalanced, distorted horrible sounding piece of the FM station, after about a day of that Mort DeLeon picked me up at the Replacement Detachment and I had a chance to see the place.  We were billeted with the 193^rd Infantry Brigade.  When I was with AFKN  I was at a field station with the 2^nd Division.  We trained with the division but we weren’t “The Infantry”, here we were.  When I finally got to SCN and saw the FM I asked (I think it was Dave Engdahl) if I could reset the Optimod.  Got rid of the distortion and had a pretty good feeling about this thing. 

I’ve always been radio oriented.  At SCN that was a good thing.  There were a lot of restrictions on the programs that they showed. 

“Where do you work?

“SCN”

“Why don’t they ever show anything good?”

I was very happy to get assigned to the radio station.  Ray George was running it and doing afternoons.  Joe Fondy in the morning and Dave Engdahl at night.  The scheduling of the AFRTS-LA programs was the confusing part.  Wolfman Jack at 3:00 am???  Apparently, somebody didn’t have a sense of humor.  One of the things they told me was that everyone had to cross-train in radio and television.  I did cut voice tracks, but I never worked for the television side.  The nice part of being in the 193^rd was the housing.  We had an old style cement duplex about 3 blocks from the station.

Banana trees in the car port and a parade field in the back yard.