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.

5.1 Iwakuni, 1986–1987

In 1986 and 1987 I was a Corporal, E-4, an enlisted Marine stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan. My amateur callsign was KC5NDA. In Japan, every American ham signed with a KA prefix.

To work at the base’s MARS station, I went through the Marine Corps Institute’s self-paced correspondence course MCI 25.62, The MARS Operator, and earned its certificate. Volume 2 is largely built on that course, which was written for Marines in exactly that position. Its study tips tell a Marine to review “while waiting at sick bay, riding in a truck or bus, or just waiting to muster,” and to get “a fellow Marine to lend a hand” and quiz you, the “shakedown cruise” technique. Its region map lists Japan as an overseas MARS area of its own. Its sample MARSgram is from a Marine on Okinawa, dated November 1986. The book is dated 2 April 1987.

With the course behind me, I volunteered at the MARS station in my off-duty time. The Iwakuni station’s primary callsign was N0ENV, and N0MJI was its alternate: a parallel identifier, or a secondary operator designation, for the same location. Those were station callsigns; the operators, me included, signed our own callsigns with the KA prefix.

5.2 Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, 2008–2012

Two decades later I was back on MARS, this time as a civilian contractor:

Table 1 — Two decades later I was back on MARS, this time as a civilian contractor

Where	When
Kuwait	2008–2012, off and on
Iraq	2008–2009
Afghanistan	2009–2012

I worked several stations across those years. Just as in Japan, where we signed with a KA prefix, each country had its own prefix: 9K in Kuwait, YI in Iraq and YA in Afghanistan. The teams were small, only a few of us, so I did a bit of each thing.

5.2.1 A letter for Iraq

To operate in Iraq I had to get a letter signed by the Secretary of State, at that time Hillary Clinton. I’m not sure I still have that letter. If I find it, it goes here.

5.3 What it was like

It was always amazing to have one of the service members come in and actually talk home on the radio.

All the procedure in Volume 2 exists to make that moment work. It is the COMSEC warning read aloud, the consent form, the logbook, the “over” that nobody says naturally. Someone sits down in the chair a long way from home. The operator at the other end dials a telephone number. A family member answers a ringing phone and hears a voice they weren’t expecting, coming in and out on the shortwave. Then they both learn, in about thirty seconds, to say “over.”

And the people on either side of that microphone matter too. It was extremely rewarding to work on the different teams.

5.4 Twice in the chair

MARS is easy to miss in the history of radio. It never had the glamour of the ships’ wireless rooms or the brass-pounder telegraph lines. But for a hundred years, if you count from 1925, it has been where the amateur and the military meet: volunteers who learned military procedure and lent their stations, their nights and their skill so that someone far from home could hear a familiar voice. The Navy-Marine Corps branch I trained in closed in 2015. Army and Air Force MARS carry on, now mostly as a network that keeps working when nothing else does.

I sat in that chair twice: as a Marine corporal in Japan, and two decades later as a civilian contractor in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.