00:11:27.720We were in a little country called Ethiopia at the time.
00:11:33.780And it was ruled by an emperor whose name was Haile Selassie.
00:11:38.040you can look that up and he had a what he had one son I won't tell you his name
00:11:46.980because I don't remember it anymore I only met him a few times and in fact the
00:11:55.660funniest story is we I would them with downtown and did what most people in the
00:12:00.760army do we went to a bar and drank might as well on your day off yeah and some
00:12:07.560guy came up to us who looked well-dressed and said, ask us if we wanted to go to a party.
00:12:15.020And being young and stupid in the army, we said, sure, we'll take an invitation from some stranger
00:12:22.520to go to a party. Go to a secondary location with somebody we don't know. And so we did. We followed
00:12:30.180them in our cars and we drove up to this fairly large, well, massive house and went
00:12:41.360through a gated wall with with guards around it. And I thought, I really did
00:12:50.040think there was some, there could be something wrong here, but we went on in
00:12:53.460and sure enough there was a party in the house and we were there for two, three,
00:12:59.400maybe four hours, and then this guy walked up to us and said, hi, I just want to thank you for
00:13:06.680coming to my party, and said his name, which I immediately forgot. You've been probably drinking
00:13:15.260a lot, to be fair. True. So, you know. But I asked someone later, who was that? He said, oh, that's the
00:13:22.180son of the emperor okay he just likes to throw parties and he likes the u.s military for some
00:13:30.640reason likes to bring him around yeah and so that's he has people to go out and just pick up
00:13:36.720people you know or ask people who are in the military if they want to go because i and it's
00:13:42.040obvious that we were in the military because we're all speaking english not italian or uh ethiopian
00:13:48.520Right. And I mean, it's not like the military didn't, it wasn't kind of, you guys all have the same haircuts, so the same out, you know, look a certain way. It's pretty easy to pick out an American GI in a bar.
00:14:00.500Yeah, even though we were dressed in civilian clothes, not our military uniforms, it was easy to pick out.
00:14:05.420Yeah, but you got, it's the haircut. It's, you know, and the, what do they call them, the birth control glasses. It's pretty easy to locate American GIs, especially back in the 60s.
00:14:15.500Now, and the funniest thing about that situation is that, as I said, Haile Selassie, the emperor, had one son.
00:14:22.120I found out later that he had had, I'm not sure how many, eight, nine, ten sons.
00:15:05.460Right. We won't speculate on how, but, you know, it was suspicious.
00:15:12.040Yes. And the situation was that the son of the emperor lived in the town where we lived, where the base was, because it was 250 miles from the capital.
00:15:26.960and he was required to stay there at all times.
00:15:44.020So not a great relationship with that family.
00:15:47.780Awkward Christmas dinners, I would assume,
00:15:50.400if in fact they had Christmas dinners.
00:15:52.820They probably did since they were Coptic Christian.
00:15:55.960Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I, I'm an American historian. Don't, don't look at me when I know absolutely nothing about Ethiopia. But yeah, so that makes sense.
00:16:05.960But the main church there was Coptic Christianity, and often we went to a place down by the ocean in a town called Masala, and that was part of the area.
00:16:23.820The area we were in of Ethiopia was called Eritrea.
00:25:16.900the time in Washington when they got it was about 1 a.m. in the morning. So by
00:25:24.820the time they got it processed and took took it to the president, so they went in
00:25:30.820and woke up the president at about 2 30 a.m. in the morning so that he could
00:25:36.720handle this situation in case it was a real assassination of the president of
00:25:43.480Egypt and so there he was awake middle of the night and one thing you have to
00:25:51.880remember is Abdul is a name in especially in Egypt that's about as
00:25:58.720common as John in the United States and Nasser is almost as common as Smith so
00:26:06.100there were probably a lot of Abdul Nasser's right but it did
00:26:13.300come from a source that we felt could be real it was a high level like it was if
00:26:20.980they wouldn't be just sending that message on that code in that in that way
00:26:24.700if it was just some random person who had died right yeah okay so there we are
00:26:29.560we have the president up they dealt with it found out that Abdul Masir was
00:26:33.740actually still alive the president of Egypt and it went on and about four
00:26:41.200months later we got another message and it was a highly critical level message
00:26:49.640and it said the same thing basically so we sent it on and they woke up the
00:26:59.720president probably about 3 o'clock in the morning the president being Richard
00:27:04.540Nixon so you don't have to feel too bad about the president being woken up in
00:27:07.420the middle of the night. He had it coming. It's fine. You don't have to feel bad about it. So we sent that on and it turned out to be false as well. About a month later we got a message from the National Security Agency with a something from the White House saying don't ever use that code again. You were not trusted anymore. It wasn't your fault. You were doing your job. You were passing along information that was obviously you thought it looked legit.
00:27:37.420They suspended our ability to use that code to wake up the president.
00:28:34.160exactly so you uh you know you were you were doing spy stuff right you know
00:28:44.800most radio intelligence that's what they call it uh our communications intelligent
00:28:54.140intelligent what they call it is comment and most of it is iffy right I mean you
00:29:03.740can't really know what and what you have to do what you have to know when you get
00:29:10.760comment radio intelligence saying a certain thing you have to verify it with
00:29:16.760what they call comment or human intelligence they go ask somebody in
00:29:21.860other words. Yeah, go ask somebody for real if it's a real thing, yeah. And
00:29:27.180obviously the United States had people they could ask in Egypt, or most other
00:29:35.920countries in fact. Right. So that's how they verified that it was, that the
00:29:43.180situation, maybe Abdel Nasser was dead, but it wasn't the President Abdel Nasser.
00:29:48.860It was somebody else. And it might have even been a high-level person. Like you said, it was a common name, so, you know. But, you know, if you heard a message over the radio saying that Richard Nixon is dead, like, okay, that's legit. You're going to have to pass that on to somebody, even if it turns out that the Richard Nixon who's dead is not the President of the United States.
00:33:51.560And I will always be cracking up over the New York Times article I found in the New York Times
00:33:56.660archive where the military was denying that it was a listening post. They're like, no, because it was
00:34:02.920the student Eritrean student front or whatever who was protesting the American presence there
00:34:09.500in Ethiopia and was saying that this was a spy. This was a spy base. You guys were spying on
00:34:16.340things. And the American military is like, no, we're not. And I'm like, they totally were. That
00:34:20.720was exactly what they were doing. They were spying, but of course they were going to deny it. That's
00:34:23.800what they do. But it's just the funniest. It's like a, just a, an article that ages so poorly
00:34:29.120because I'm like, yeah, they were definitely spying no matter what the military was saying.
00:34:33.120Yeah. Well, and, and as an after note on that, uh, the province of Eritrea did finally get its
00:34:39.780independence from Ethiopia, uh, in the late seventies. Yeah, they did get it. So good for them.
00:34:45.740So, Ethiopia kept a little section down at the southern end of the province of Eritrea, which was about 10 or 20 miles wide, but it gave them a port on the Red Sea.
00:35:13.420but you got you know you got to come home after that which is great yeah the yeah well and at the
00:35:20.580end of my my end of tour of service was one date but at that point the Vietnam action was starting
00:35:31.980to wind down and they started to let everyone else everyone out that they could so they let me out
00:35:38.000two weeks early, which makes it hard for me to think of Friday the 13th as a bad day because
00:35:45.180that was the day I got out of the military. So that's a good luck day for you. The number 13,
00:35:50.860much like with Taylor Swift, is your lucky number. Yeah, it should have been Friday the 27th if they
00:35:55.820let me out two weeks early. Nice, yeah. So you came back to the States, back to Arkansas, right?
00:36:05.200Was that where you went immediately after getting back, or did you...
00:36:07.960I went right, came right back to Fort Smith, Arkansas,
00:36:11.700the city which some people call Hell on the Border.
00:36:14.860I mean, that's a reasonable name for it.
00:36:18.120Yes, but that was called that because it was the border town between Arkansas
00:36:25.520and what was then in the 1880s and 1890s and early 1900s Indian Territory.
00:36:34.300and if you know any history about the judge isaac c parker the hanging judge was the
00:36:42.220judge of the federal court in fort smith at that time and had these marshals who went into indian
00:36:49.100territory uh to bring back criminals who had committed crimes and then escaped into indian
00:36:56.460territory uh he's called the hanging judge but you have to understand actually hit the number
00:37:03.500of people he hanged by percentage was much lower than many other judges he just got a reputation
00:37:11.500he just got a reputation but he because he had a gallows that he could hang five people at the
00:37:16.620same time yep and then i did often and when i was in elementary school they took us to visit the
00:37:21.180hanging judge courthouse and let us take pictures on the gallows which is a really dark thing to
00:37:25.580let elementary school students do it's just very strange uh but yeah they did that they did that
00:37:30.860that in elementary school it was weird and I could say truthfully the reason
00:37:35.000he hangs so few was because many of them who would have been hanged were never
00:37:39.620brought back alive yeah marshals got a little bit trigger-happy occasionally I
00:37:43.760mean no they didn't want to they didn't want to go back you know the point is
00:37:49.520that they were sent out to bring these people back because they already knew
00:37:54.200they'd committed the crime they'd already been tried in fact and they had
00:37:58.880escaped, and they were told, bring him back one way or the other. And if the guy
00:38:05.300shot at them, then they shot at them back. And to be fair, I mean, it's not like
00:38:09.740Fort Smith was still like that during the 20th century. Probably not,
00:38:14.600anyway. No. It wasn't quite that crime-ridden by the time you were
00:38:19.000living there. But yeah, it is a weird period of history, which is
00:38:26.000immortalized in a lot of movies what is the movie that that's got The Hanging
00:38:30.400Judge in it oh my gosh they made it remade it a few years ago True Grit
00:38:35.380True Grit yeah that's the one that's the one that's set with The Hanging Judge
00:38:39.800that's the one it was made once with John Wayne in it and it was remade later
00:38:44.120with I cannot remember we went to see it in theaters I think when it came out but
00:38:49.140I don't remember anything about it it wasn't bad I just don't it wasn't
00:38:54.000memorable i guess um but yeah from arkansas what the country singer from arkansas i don't know
00:39:02.000he was in true grid with john wayne okay well there you go i don't think i've seen the original
00:39:07.620one but yeah arkansas appears occasionally in film very occasionally but the truth is
00:39:13.860if you look at the original show you'll notice huge mountains in the background
00:39:20.060You don't have those. When you're traveling from Fort Smith into Oklahoma, there are no huge mountains in the background. It's all plains. So they were filming that probably in California or Colorado.
00:39:33.980Of course, you know, that's much easier to do it there, right? So you moved home. You went to college, right? Because you decided to, and that's where you met mom. Yes. Right. So you met mom there.
00:47:46.280After a while, I joined another group, which did, well, sometimes when they put a pipe down in the ocean, or on land even, or in the swamps,
00:48:02.940they get it down for a ways and it gets stuck either the drill hole caves in or
00:48:11.620something else happens and they get the pipe stuck and so I went to work for a
00:48:16.740company that specialized in freeing stuck pipe or as much as possible
00:48:23.280sometimes they just had to take what they could get and leave the rest and
00:48:30.200remembering that the drill pipe costs as much as $5,000 per joint.
00:50:06.840But actually, at one point, I had to, I was, most, I'm not really big, you know, I'm a little less than six feet. And most of the people on these ships, on these drilling rigs, were 6'2", 6'4", they were big guys.
00:50:28.520After all, they're handling great big 90-pound lengths of pipe, and we got
00:50:39.080prepared for a job at one point and taped everything up. Now, I was carrying a
00:50:44.720six-foot rod that hooked onto the bottom of the pipe for it to go down into a
00:50:49.640section. It actually hooked on on the end of a cable that was going to be
00:50:55.780sat down in there and it had six or eight six-foot pieces of primer cord
00:51:05.100attached to it with a with the explosive device hooked on oh that's fun yeah so
00:51:16.300it's all ready to explode any huge any electrical shock would have detonated it
00:51:22.300and possibly even dropping it would detonate it not not necessarily likely
00:51:30.940but so I was carrying this over and I started at the stair and I was you know
00:51:38.140the stairs are about 20 feet high and I was about five or six feet up it miss a
00:51:43.880great big Hawking guy came on started down he got down about four steps
00:51:52.260and he waited for me to back up and i said you see this thing i'm holding
00:51:57.960he said yeah i said if i back up and fall it's going to blow everything up including you
00:52:05.040so he's gonna have to back up so he backed up i mean it's a good threat it's a good threat like
00:52:11.740this is this is not a thing you want to mess with you might mess with me if i was by myself
00:52:16.720you're not gonna mess with me while i'm holding an explosive it's not it's got the they got the
00:52:20.620effective basically eight sticks of dynamite on this thing we don't want to do that you need to
00:52:25.440you need to be the one to back up yes and you know that was the only time you know he just
00:52:31.080kind of looked at me and backed up we didn't say anything more about it he was a little like okay
00:52:36.300fine fine his ego was a little messed up but he he's gonna live with that all right so usually
00:52:42.940with my mom the last thing we kind of wrapped up with was just kind of asking about a few like
00:52:47.720particular, um, historical events that happened, you know, the major historical events that happened
00:52:53.880while you were, uh, while during your lifetime. So I'm going to kind of do some of the same ones
00:52:58.380with you. Um, we start off with the JFK assassination. So how, uh, what, what do you
00:53:03.300recall about that? Well, it was 1963. I was 15 years old in high school, I believe. And
00:53:15.640I was sick and home at the time. So, who knows? Maybe I was sick. Maybe I just didn't want
00:53:26.200to go I think yeah right but I was at home and so I was watching the watching TV and they were
00:53:34.460showing the parade in in Dallas with the president and his entourage and all the other people
00:53:42.720and as I was sitting there watching this I'm thinking boy this is boring