Another story from the wacky world of military broadcasting – I thought I had written this one out before – maybe I have, but that must have been so long ago, that it’s lost in the archives.

This really happened; the whole story was verified by the then-news director, who I worked for as a station manager some years later, around the time that I decided that I didn’t want to go into broadcast management with AFRTS. It came to me around 1989 or so that every AFRTS station manager I had ever worked for had cracked up in some interesting manner, either mentally, physically or personally. (It was a stressful job, with a great deal of responsibility and very little actual control over anything much – a certain guarantee of killing levels of stress.) I wanted to retire in good health at 20 years with all my original issue of marbles, and eventually did a sideways slide into a related video production field.

Anyway – there was an incident in the late 1970s involving a Russian fighter jet flying a little too low and slow over an American carrier, in a manner presumably meant to be intimidating by buzzing the carrier, and which resulted in some panicky news stories, along the lines of “OMG the Russkies are trying to provoke something!” At this time the Far East Network was headquartered in Tokyo, and at Misawa we rebroadcast their radio feed, with a five-minute long newscast at the top of the hour for most of the day save for when we broke away for our local morning and afternoon shows.  FEN-Tokyo’s radio section boasted a full set of golden-throated trained DINFOS announcers, one of whom was a guy with a deep, resonant speaking voice, and possibly the emptiest skull ever recorded as being possessed by one of that ilk. He would become known far and wide as the Ted Baxter of the Far East Network; an absolute legend in military broadcasting at that time, and not for good reasons.

It came to be that Our Hero was the duty announcer the day that the story of the Russian fighter buzzing the American carrier came over the wires. At that time, we had teletype machines printing out the various stories sourced from AP and UPI. It was a matter of pulling copy off the teletype, arranging the various stories in order – most important first, counting up the lines of text (14 per minute was normal reading speed for us) writing out something to bridge between stories, editing or adding as necessary. Our Hero popped his head around the news directors’ office door, and asked casually, for the correct spelling of “strafed”. The news director, with his mind on other matters, spelled it for him and went back to work. Our Hero went into the on-air studio and waited as the hour-long music program came to an end. The minutes ticked by – top of the hour; time hack, station ID, opened the mike and launched into the first story. The On-Air warning light outside the studio door was red; alerting anyone that the mike was hot, and not to open that door until it went out.

Some minutes into the newscast, the news director was struck by an awful premonition – a feeling of absolute certainty so powerful and urgent that he dashed into the studio – disregarding the On Air light and ripped the news copy out of Our Heros’ very hands. When the news director verified the story to me, some years later, he claimed that he broke into a cold sweat and nearly had a heart attack on the spot. Our Hero had come about two lines from announcing to everyone within radio-hearing that a Russian jet had strafed an American aircraft carrier. Our audience didn’t just include American military personnel and dependents, but a substantial shadow audience … to include diplomatic personnel of all nations who listened to FEN. This would have had serious international repercussions for everyone, up and down the chain of command – and all of this escaped by a whisker by the news directors’ sudden premonition.

Our Hero, though – was completely oblivious. In the aftermath, as he was being yelled at by the news director, the program director, and for all I know, the det commander, he looked at them all in bafflement and asked. “Strafed? Buzzed? What’s the difference?”

Believe it or not, he was around for years in AFRTS, and became a legend, rather like Bigfoot, bouncing back from near-disaster after near disaster, as if he was glazed with Teflon. Nothing every stuck to him, and no one could figure out how he managed to make the rank that he eventually did. The best anyone could come up with was he was the nephew of someone high up in the Pentagon. Very high up. That, or incriminating pictures.