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The Military Auxiliary Radio System

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 MARS — Vol 1: From the Army Amateur Radio System to MARS In 1925 the Signal Corps asked the hams for help. A century later the arrangement is still running, under its third name.
    2. Vol 2 MARS — Vol 2: How It Worked — Phone Patches, MARSgrams and Nets A radio link that only goes one way at a time, a telephone line that goes both, and an operator in the middle saying \"over\" for two people who have never used a radio.
    3. Vol 3 MARS — Vol 3: A Voice From Home — Korea, Vietnam, the Ice and the Red Cross In 1965 the commercial lines out of Vietnam could carry about thirty calls a day to the United States. By spring 1970 Army MARS alone was running more than 42,000 phone patches a month.
    4. Vol 4 MARS — Vol 4: Desert Storm to Afghanistan, and the Mission Today E-mail and cell phones took away the morale traffic. What was left was the reason MARS existed in the first place: a radio network that does not need the internet.
    5. Vol 5 MARS — Vol 5: My MARS — Iwakuni, 1986, to Afghanistan, 2012 A Marine corporal with a correspondence course, and twenty years later a contractor in the desert with a microphone. Both times, the best part was handing it to someone else.