SwiftVets.com

[NavyChief]

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[Wing Wiper]

Nice work, chief, he's busted. You see where, right?

[NavyChief]

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[James Rebe'l]

So what this says is he received the purple heart twice for the same incident because it was reported twice a month apart???????
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marineus

[Nathanyl]

[NavyChief]

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[NavyChief]

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[Wing Wiper]

He's claiming the wound happened from a mine while his private journals admit it was from a grenade in the rice bin. Chief, once it's all sorted and you're sure, put this out no matter who it "hurts". If somebody else lied, they'll have to take the consequences, too. That's how I feel about it, anyway. You're doing good work here, buddy.

[NavyChief]

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[Wing Wiper]

Navy Chief:

I understand your concern. Do all the analysis you can, make your case, and pass it up the chain to the lawyers in the Swiftvet group. If your ducks are all in a row, they won't be coming after you personally, I would guess. Something like this will put them back on their heels too much. That's my opinion, but I'm not privy to exactly what you've uncovered. Be careful, and I wish you the best of luck. NSA records, huh? Priceless!

[jwbarden]

In naval telcommunications, "TOR" is the abbreviation for "Time of Receipt." Sometimes, when the receiving teletype machine is programmed to do so, the TOR line is printed in the same type as the rest of the message, and sometimes it is scrawled in pen by the radio operator. It is there for internal accountability, so that messages don't get lost in the ship's radio central or at the shore based comm center.

The originator of the message is always assumed to be the commanding officer of the sending unit. In cases where the drafter neeeds to be identified there is a separate paragraph saying, "Engineer Officer sends" or "N4 sends" or "LTJG Kerry sends." This is discouraged in general message traffic, but could have been more common in less formal ship-to-ship messages over TGO.

Most Naval messages are pulled off of the Fleet Boadcast. The same teletype/cryptograph set would be used to broadcast all messages to all units in a given part of the world at a given period of time. A unit maintaining guard on the Fleet Broadcast would print out those messages addressed to itself and other units it is supporting and distribute them locally by hand. In rare cases, where small units have very limited comm resources, a larger unit can guard the Fleet Broadcast and then retansmit the relevant ones over a local secure radioteletype net.

[NavyChief]

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[IDLE13rebelsMC]

I worked in naval communications during the era in question and wanted to observe the following:

The odd 7 letter, capitalized letters are not numbers of "teletype machines," but AUTODIN routing indicators (such as "RUMUGKD," which, at least for a time, was the AUTODIN router that covered for COMNAVFORV). Note that a command is not necessarily tied to one AUTODIN routing indicator for the life of the command.

- Those AUTODIN routers are not to be confused with "internal staff" routing instructions which will vary from command to command. Some will be handwritten, some typed on the copy of the message, some rubber stamped. In the infamous "spot report" on PCF-3's mining (131620Z MAR 69), you will see the internal routing indicators (hand-typed) on the top right of the message, underneath some handwriting. That's the staff of COMNAVFORV, Admiral Zumwalt's staff. You can also see, in the top line of routing instructions, right after "CCCC" which tells the system a Confidential message is coming its way, you will see the AUTODIN routing indicator covering, at least for that period of time, for COMNAVFORV: RUMUGKD. Later on, in the "TO" lines (the action addressees of a naval message), you'll see that same routing indicator repeated and, next to it, a slant, then "COMNAVFORV."

- Overall, Navy Chief has done an interesting analysis, but he/she really must accept that "TOR" is "time of receipt," not "time of release." Time of release is the date-time group of the message itself. I might add that it is not uncommon for busy message centers, when they receive an approved write-up to transform into a naval message, to stamp the approved draft with a time-of-receipt marking. That may be the "TOR" Navy Chief refers to in Admiral Zumwalt's "BZ" message (though for the life of me, I can't see a thing there). That way, if the Radiomen (the "tape apes," as they were called) slough it off and don't transform the approved draft into a flying-out-the-door naval message, you know who was on watch at the time. Oh, they were called tape apes, because their teletyped version of the message came out as a paper tape in those days, and that's how the finished message was sent.

- The writer suggests that the radioman at NAVFORV's radio shack -- the RM with the initials "KJW" -- "is possibly Kerry, John, Wayne..." Later, he points to a 210530Z FEB 69 message -- a personnel casualty report -- where the magic "TOR" and KJW" letters appear together. He reasons that the message is TO the Secretary of the Navy who is in Washington, so "TOR" can't possibly mean "Time of Receipt" by this fellow "KJW," because "KJW" is in Vietnam. True, but... we are looking at the *copy* of the message found in the files of COMNAVFORV, still there for the inquisitive with time to burn at the Navy Historical Center. And how do we know that what we are looking at is COMNAVFORV's copy of that message? The AUTODIN routine indicator *AND* the internal staff routing both of which reflect Zumwalt and his staff.

- Also, a small point but worth noting for sake of accuracy, the meaning of "NOTAL." Navy Chief maintains that the abbreviation "NOTAL" means "Not all cleared - more a personal message." That's not accurate, at least not in 69-70. You find this abbreviation (or at least in those days, you did) placed after a REFERENCED message or a directive. You can see any references organized in a naval message two lines past the classification of the message,...basically:
DTG [date time group]
FROM [originator]
TO [Action addees]
INFO ["CC" addees]
BT [means "break"]
CLASSIFICATION [UNCLAS, CONFIDENTIAL, etc.]
SUBJECT [e.g., Personnel Casualty Report]
REFERENCES [And you'll have only the letters A, B, C, etc., not the word "reference(s)"]
TEXT
BT

The personnel casualty reports at johnkerry.com and elsewhere almost always reference a BUPERS instruction or manual.

Well, when the originator of a message cites a reference that is not needed by all to get the gist of the message, he/she used the abbreviation "NOTAL." It literally means that the reference cited was "NOT [sent] TO ALL OR NEEDED BY ALL," and don't ask me how in the name of God I can remember all this naval communications trivia, but I do.

Hope this helps.

Idle

[jwbarden]

Chiefie:

Idle is the expert here.

The reason the TOR . . . KJW line would be on messages directed to different addees is that KJW was guarding for an info addee posted futher down, even when SECNAV was the action addee.

I suspect that KJW was a Communications Watch Officer for the message center serving all commands located at AN THOI.

Let us follow the progress of a typical Naval Message. As Engineer in LSD-4x, I direct my Main Propulsion Assistant to prepare a Casualty Report (CASREP) on a piece of broke d**k gear. The Ensign prepares the formatted message reporting that the ship will be degraded in its mobility readiness rating until the equipment is fixed. I review the message for content, formatting, and textual error. The Ensign then takes it to the Operations Officer, who is in charge of readiness reporting, for entry in the CASREP log. It then goes to the XO for hiz 2 cents. And then the Ensign knocks on the Captains door and enters with trepidation. I have greased the skids for him with a full voice report. The Captain "RELEASES THE MESSAGE" with his signature. The Ensign then carries the released message to Radio Central. There, a tape monkey sits at a teletype machine and converts the copy into an unencrypted ticker tape and the typed record copy of the message. With my luck, it comes back to me as Command Duty Officer with 50 other messages for me to proof read and release by direction. It takes 3-5 trips for the tape monkey to get everything right and produce true copies of all outgoing traffic.

At this point, assuming we have the comm guard on the ship, tape monkey takes hiz ticker tapes up to radio and feeds them into the obsolete KW7 cryptograph, and encrypted ticker tapes are produced. These encrypted tapes are fed into a teletype which sends them through a radio transmitter into the ether.

At the receiving end of this is a Navy communications master station, which turns the messages around in order of precedence (urgency) and arranges to rebroadcast them wordwide.

The addressees receive their messages by copying in various ways the worldwide fleet broadcast, pulling off the hundreds addressed to them out of the many thousands that they receive and decrypt.

Radio at the receiving end then distributes the messages to those who need to read them in accordance with protocol.

Hope I haven't burned too much classified info by posting this.

[NavyChief]

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