Mike Durant

And the old story is, you know a recruiter's lying because their lips are moving.

And I said, OK, well, is there something else I could do?

He said, yeah, you're a fairly smart kid.

You did pretty good on a test.

We can send you to language school, which is pretty good, and you'll be in military intelligence.

OK.

So I signed up, joined, was enlisted, went to DLI, Defense Language Institute in California, which again, I mean, that's a great school.

I didn't know you could join just to go to that.

Well, if you have an MOS.

So I was a Spanish voice intercept operator.

98 Golf was my MOS.

So my job is going to be, after learning Spanish and then going and learning the technical part in Texas, I go to Panama, and I'm listening to broadcasts mostly from Central America, Nicaragua, other places.

At the time, heavy use of high-frequency radio, so HF.

just the way the signals work on hf is they can go i mean they go around the world so you can pick them up from a great distance so we're listening basically every night scanning scanning you hear this conversation okay that sounds military start the recorder write up a summary give it to the analysts and then they go back and do a full translation so my job was just sort of front end try to find it summarize it and see if it's got any value

Sounds kind of cool, but it was kind of boring, actually.

There were actually, at the time, still Morse code people.

Believe it or not, they were still using Morse code in Central America.

Oh, shit.

And they're sitting next to me.

Now, can you imagine, all freaking night long, listening to da-da-da-da-da-da-da?