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Date: 3/20/00
From: John Letsinger
To: invert go-fer <invert@att.net>
Topic: Invert GATR site (1967)

The front door to the GATR site. We built the teak-wood walkway during my tour. The shelters in the background were AN/TRC-32 vans out of the 507th TAC Control Group at Shaw AFB. The equipment was already installed in the Radio shop when I arrived. Note the guy-wires for the antenna masts leading to the right. We pulled the antennas down, but one of them broke during reinstallation. I was standing under it when it went and I ran like hell when it started to fall. Part of it crashed through the roof and through the ceiling into the radio equipment room.

We used bolt-cutters to free the cables from inside the tangled mast. Surprisingly, not too many cables or antennas were damaged. We had to scramble to get that mast back up, and pulled some replacement sections from the other TRC-32's. I heard in later years that another mast was lost in a similar incident.
The little shed out there was the latrine. It was still there when I left, but was rarely used.

Out of the Radio site front door, looking more to the right (north). The bunker was torn down and removed before I left in March '67.

Inside the Radio shop equipment room looking north. A1C Clayton, Rushville, IN seen performing maintenance on the RD-142 Tape Recorders. That rack was moved from that location into the front office /maintenance bench area to make room for additional incoming radio equipment. I think we put some BC-640 single-channel VHF transmitters and some matching BC-639 receivers in there.

The front office /maintenance bench area and test equipment. From later photos, it looks like the work benches were moved and stereo equipment moved in since then. Best we ever got was the base AM radio station. It was 1/2 watt when I arrived, and went to maybe 10 watts later. I heard "Good Morning, Vietnam" a lot of times on that AFTN radio station.

Me sitting at the desk in the Radio office /maintenance area. Note the rifle rack under the A/C unit. We had the same air conditioning freeze-up problems back then too, and I can remember shutting them down several times to let the ice melt. The wall unit in this photo looks to be the same one in your photos six years later.

Yours Truly, inspecting and maintaining the weapons. We were issued and kept M-16's with ammo boxes in the Radio Shop in '67, and they kept Thompson Submachine guns up in the Operations building.
As of March '67, we had not been issued jungle fatigues, but we did get them and the jungle boots shortly thereafter. We never got any chevrons or nametapes, so we used Magic Markers to put our chevrons and names on instead. We had to turn the fatigues back in, but kept the boots. Loved them boots.

The wall cabinet contained some of our meager things we accumulated. The Crisco was for making popcorn, and the tape recorder was for sending personal tapes back home.

By the way, it was not called the GATR site then, but just the Radio site. The building is the same as when I was there. Ops was not there, but was made of wood like all the rest, located along the road from the gate just after the orderly room
As time went on, the main base moved from near the fire station and Royal Thai Hq, on down to near the mailroom area. The year I was there, SSgts and higher were not allowed to eat in the dining hall, and were paid COLA to eat wherever you could find something. Sometimes, you could not find anything, or had the same food for days on end. This COLA ended when I left, as a much larger chow hall was built and used.

The wooden Invert Ops building was pretty rickety in '67, so it was probably torn down when the new Ops building was erected. The hootches were in the same place, and the 56CSG Headquarters building was just a bunch of surveyors' stakes in the ground when I left. There was no RDI hootch bar back then, either.

SAC brought in those Combat Skyspot MSQ-77 radar bomb-scoring systems and used them to perform precision bombing operations. We helped their Radio maintenance section out a lot, because those guys were only there on 6-month TDY's and didn't know a whole lot about GRC-27 UHF radios like we had to. I learned a lot about GRC's in those days because most of the Invert Radio guys came out of AC&W sites that used them extensively. We only saw a few of in them in the AFCS Comm. Squadrons before then.
The Harley Wolfe amphitheater was built in '66 for the Bob Hope show Nov/Dec.

We got spooked several times with alerts on base. One night, everybody reported for duty, picked up weapons and took stations around the compound. Unfortunately there was no real cover and we would have been killed instantly if there had been a sapper attack.
The second worst I was scared was one night when an explosion occurred near the Radio Shop. I shut off all the lights at the shop, opened the door with my M-16, and saw a gigantic light coming from the ground about 150 yards away. I closed the door, called Ops to see what was going on, and it turned out an A-26 had taken off, lost an engine, and dumped it's entire flare load and small munitions off the end of the runway.
The worst scare I got at Invert was the night I fell off that little foot bridge that crossed the ditch on the way from the GATR site up to Ops. I thought I had been shot for sure in the 6-foot fall, but I still saw stars.
Finally realized what had happened and crawled out of the ditch. After about 30 more yards on down the road, I came across the Thai guard who roamed inside the compound at night, and he gave me that "Ba-ba Bo-bo Fallang" look. According to the Capt. who put together the MARS station during my year, the US did not negotiate for anything with the Thais for TV or FM rights for the base, because they thought we would not be there that long.
I believe the MARS station was very small or non-existent during the first part of my tour. However, we had a Capt. who was interested in that sort of stuff, and we put together a cubical quad antenna made from bamboo poles and wire. Then they made a nice booth in the station, and starting using it like a MARS station should be. I got one call back to the states during that time. It was on a night that the Vietnam stations couldn't get through. So people were running around the hootches wanting to know if anyone wanted to talk to the states, which a lot did.

/John Letsinger, SSgt. Invert Radio Maintenance, Nakhon Phanom RTAFB, 1966 -1967