[Travis McGee]

I heard this story long ago. Some JO flunked out of whatever school he was attending, and put on his revised dream sheet, “anything but sea duty.”

He was sent to our (then) ally Ethiopia, where he supervised a quonset hut in the desert, where he and a few enlisted men changed giant reel to reel tapes made by their NSA-type antenna farm, and once a week loaded them onto a C-130. That weekly visit by the Hercules was their only contact with the outside world, other than via radio waves.

[PIF]

That was an ELINT site, which we turned over to the Ethiopians who sold it to the Russians. Most likely the JO flunked out of the language school in Monterrey, since he obviously already had a TS CW clearance.