Becoming a Ditty-Bopper

"Action is the real measure of intelligence." - Napoleon Hill
"Private, you're behind every student in this class. If I don't see some improvement soon, I'm going to kick you out of my course and recommend you be sent to the Infantry and to VietNam." (I left out the expletives in this 'pep'-talk, but feel free to use your imagination.) As I stood at attention before the senior instructor, my fists were clenched and tears of anger and embarrassment blurred my vision. It was bad enough to be cursed at by the sergeant, but to listen to the giggles from the junior NCOs present in the room was worse. Fortunately, my fellow-students were wearing headsets and could not hear the chewing out I was receiving.

For three weeks I had struggled to learn the sounds of Morse code characters. Although I had exceptional test scores on my vocational aptitude tests, the only low scores I had were in the area of foreign language - yet here I was trying to learn what was essentially another language - even though the vocabulary was limited to three distinct sounds: di, dah, and dit. While the rest of the class had learned the Morse alphabet, I continued to struggle. Little did I know at the time that the instructor's pep-talk was the motivation I needed to succeed; or that I myself would become a Morse code instructor one day.

I returned red-faced to my seat and put the headphones back on; but I could not concentrate on the sounds I was hearing. I fumed over the way I'd been called out and determined right there to get out of this class as quickly as possible. That night I lay in my bunk, listening to classmates dream about Morse code. "Di-dah. Alpha. "Dah-di-di-dit. Bravo," and so on. We spent the first hour every morning reciting this code and it became so repetitive that we'd dream about it at night, verbalizing the code in our sleep.

We had a nick-name for students of Morse-Code: Ditty-boppers. We had a habit of tilting our heads or using one hand to hold the headset tighter against the ear to better hear the sounds coming through the radio. In class you'd look around and see heads bobbing back and forth as students found the rhythm of the code - thus ditty-bopping. Back in the barracks, we'd talk to each other in Morse code: "di-di-dah-dah-di-dit" meant "What's up?" We cursed in Morse code. Some of us made the pilgrimage into Boston one weekend and paid homage to Samuel Morse by urinating on his grave. In a way, we were being brainwashed.

In order to learn Morse code you have to be young - meaning that you can't already have your mind filled with distractions like family, responsibility, etc. You must also learn to use a certain part of your brain. When you hear a sound, your mind instantly associates it with a character on your keyboard.

The morning after the sergeant chewed me out; I went into class and passed two lessons. The sounds started making sense to me. The following day I caught up with the rest of the class. Within two weeks I was so far ahead of the rest of the class that they cut my class time to two hours per day. I ended up graduating four weeks ahead of my class along with the previous class and was promoted to Specialist (equivalent to Corporal). Then I was selected for additional training because they needed replacements in Asmara, Ethiopia. The requirements to pass the course were to be able to copy twenty words per minute of Morse code. The requirement for assignment to the spy station in Asmara was twenty-five words per minute. I was copying thirty-five words per minute. Of the eighteen replacements needed, only nine of us would qualify. While the rest of my class was ordered to service in Viet-Nam, the nine of us headed to North Africa.

It was in Ethiopia that I met my first wife. She already had a son by another American soldier. Because he was of mixed race and parentage, he had no rights and no protection by the Ethiopian government or its society. I adopted him and brought him and his mother to the United States, where he now serves in our military. I used my ditty-bopper skills under the American consulate in Berlin, Germany during the Cold War, intercepting Soviet and East Germany radio traffic.

That over-weight, foul-mouthed Sergeant didn't teach me Morse-Code, but he did teach me to hate failure. Whenever I made mistakes after that, I made sure that they never had reason to chew me out for the same thing a second time. As a result of that painful experience, I became a Radio-Teletypewriter instructor at Fort Gordon, Georgia; and later I became the Army's authority on personnel records. Adversity is a great teacher. Although I have not used Morse code in the past thirty years, I still remember it. My kids get a kick out of asking me to 'Say something in Morse code, Dad!"