Dateline: 6903ESS (Skivvy Nine).  Osan Air Base, Korea.  1979.

There were six of us: Dan “Schlong” Schlinger, Tom Dziak, Tim White, Rick “Gally” Gallaher, “Big” Ben Wright, and me.  We called our collective selves “Wolfschanze”.  It’s an obscure reference to some, perhaps, but that made it all the more attractive as a name for our little “subversive organization”.  And we adopted it with glee.  Wolfschanze was super-secret, Wolfschanze stood for rebellion and, worst of all, Wolfschanze sent nasty letters to the editor of the unit news rag.  Wolfschanze was, in the final analysis, disgruntled.

The tipping point came when the unit commander announced with a certain amount of breathless anticipation that the Right Honorable John C. Stetson, then Secretary of the Air Force, was to visit Skivvy Nine.  The members of Wolfschanze shuddered and unanimously agreed that the news of the impending visit was a harbinger of terrible things to come.  And that’s exactly what happened.  Not long after the fateful announcement, the members of Wolfschanze were told that the operations floor (“ops floor”…a fairly large expanse of mottled gray and white tile) would have to be swept, stripped, washed, waxed and buffed.  And naturally, being on the lowest tier of the local food chain at the time, Wolfschanze would have to do it.  So Wolfschanze uttered a collective “damn” and proceeded to meticulously sweep, strip, wash, wax and buff the ops floor.  But our efforts were rebuffed.  The mission supervisor (a certain buck-toothed wonder named Frank Allison if my memory doesn’t fail me) informed us that there was “dead wax” around the metallic bases of the Teletype machines in one area of the ops floor.

“Dead What?” was our collective response.

“Dead wax”, he said, pointing at an uneven, crusty layer of stuff that had accumulated around the base of each Teletype.  “It’s got to go,” he said.

“But how?” we countered.  “We cleaned as close to the damned things as we possibly could with the brooms, mops, and buffer you gave us.”

Allison reached into his desk drawer and gleefully produced a handful of single-edged razor blades.  “With these,” he said.

So we stripped that area of the ops floor again.  And then we got down on our hands and knees and laboriously, and somewhat painfully, scraped off the offending ring of dead wax.  It was a task that lasted for hours.  Finally, we washed, waxed, and buffed the floor again.  And lo, the mission supervisor was pleased.

Wolfschanze, on the other hand, was steaming frickin’ mad.  The way we saw it, no fat political appointee (read: hack) should be allowed to waltz into our unit and cause valuable military resources (such as ourselves) to be diverted from our God-given task of saving the Korean Peninsula—nay, the world!—from communism.  So Wolfschanze did what it always did when it was miffed.

We drank!  Bottles of booze and cases of beer.  And in the drinking it came to pass that a nefarious plan was born.  I can’t remember who among the six of us planted the seed of the scheme, but whoever it was deserves to receive the Congressional Medal of Deviousness.

You see, in those days Skivvy Nine sat atop Hill 170 on the eastern end of Osan Air Base.  To get to the unit, you had to climb a steeply ascending road straight up the side of the hill.  Roughly halfway up that road (affectionately referred to as “Thunder Road” by crusty old Skivvy Nine lifers) one would encounter a sign that read:

Welcome to Thunder Road
Home of the 6903 Electronic Security Squadron
“Skivvy Nine”

(Or some such crap.)  Anyway, Wolfschanze knew that the very first thing the Right Honorable John C. Stetson would see of Skivvy Nine would be that very sign.  And it was determined at our drunken war council that the “Thunder Road” sign would simply have to be defaced.  We formulated a battle plan and then drew straws to determine which one of us would have the honor of perpetrating the deed.  Dan Schlinger drew the short straw.  The plan was on.  The night before Secretary Stetson’s visit–dressed in fatigues and field jackets as if we were going to work—we set out on the walk from the barracks, past the NCO club and the fuel dump, to Thunder Road.  We knew that it wasn’t uncommon to see Skivvy Niners walking to work at odd hours of the morning and, indeed, a security policeman drove right past without giving us a second look.  As we reached the base of Thunder Road, we deployed: two scouts up, three lookouts to the rear, and Dan Schlinger and his AWOL bag of tricks ensconced in the middle.  And before we knew it, the job was done.  We retreated to the barracks, took off our uniforms and resumed our drinking.  No one had noted our presence.  It was as if we had been invisible…ghosts in the night.

And when our commander drove up Thunder Road at daybreak the next morning (he went in early to prepare for Stetson’s visit) he was greeted, not by a cheerful “Welcome to Thunder Road” sign, but one that read “DEAD END” instead.

The sign, of course, was removed before the Secretary of the Air Force arrived for his “inspection”.  Many members of Skivvy Nine (including the commander, I was told) assumed that Neolithic knuckle-draggers from Red Horse had committed the crime.  (Red Horse was, and perhaps still is, the civil engineering squadron on Osan Air Base; it was Skivvy Nine’s nemesis, and many an entertaining bar fight erupted over the years because of the rivalry between the two units).

My story of the “Night of the Tar Paint” is pretty well told.  We members of Wolfschanze, fully aware of the uproar caused by our escapade, kept our heads down for the ensuing weeks.  And as far as I know, this is the first public confession of our culpability.

Hey, it was only thirty years in the coming.

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Technorati Tags: 6903ESS, Skivvy Nine, Osan Air Base, Korea, Wolfschanze, John C. Stetson, Secretary of the Air Force, operations floor, ops floor, mission supervisor, Korean Peninsula, communism, booze, beer, Hill 170, lifers, Thunder Road, Neolithic knuckle-draggers, Red Horse

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