Michael Landis, CTR3/CTT3 USN, 1970-1974
 

My story begins in the Fall Semester 1969 at the University of Maryland.
Back then, the local draft board would give you 4 years of student
deferment and if it took you longer, they handled that stuff on a
case-by-case basis.  I was one of those cases.  A couple of bad
semesters early on set be back a little, so it was going to take me 4
and a half years to graduate.
 
I was not a rich kid.  I was a commuter at Maryland and the tuition was
dirt cheap - $300 to $350 per semester, so a part time job and summer
jobs financed my tuition easily.  In the caste system on campus,
commuters were lower than whale poop.  I stuck to my own kind, having
mostly commuters as friends and acquaintances.  One such person was a
guy named Charles McLeod.  We were both Economics majors and I had a
bunch of classes with him.
 
Anyway, back to the draft, that fall semester, my draft board
reclassified me from II-S deferment to I-A no deferment to I-S temporary
deferment until the end of the semester in January.  On December 1,
1969, the Selective Service System held it's first lottery for young men
19 - 26 years old.  My number was 34, which sealed my future.  I was
going to have to join or be drafted.  One day in early January, Charles
came to one of our ECON classes and said he was thinking of joining the
Navy.  About a week later, I said the same thing to him in class.
 
Well, we graduated on January 23, 1970 and 3 days later I got my
"Greetings from the President" draft letter.  The next day I signed some
papers and was going on active duty in the Navy on April 1, 1970.
Charles apparently signed up for March, because I saw him once at boot
camp in Great Lakes and he was a month ahead of me.
 
With all those tests in boot camp, I was advised to go for linguist.
Sounds great, I was going to be a Communications Technician.  Little did
I know that I was going to learn the language of dits and dahs!
 
After Basic Training, I went to CT-R school in Pensacola and saw Charles
again.  He was going to CT-O school.  I saw him a couple of times there
and he got orders to Hawaii.  We never met again.  When I finished at
Pensacola, I went to Taiwan.
 
Taiwan was a 15 month tour, but for whatever reason, after a year there
BUPERS gave me orders to go to Guam as a T-Brancher.  I got to Guam and
for the first two weeks I was in charge of a work party to clean heads,
then finally to go to the site and learn how to be a T-Brancher.  Some
Day worker gave me some technical manuals to read and after a week of
this I actually started to do real work.  After 14 months on Guam, I got
orders to Adak for the rest of my time - what did I do wrong!
 
After the Navy, I went back to the Washington D.C. area and got a job at
the Federal Communications Commission.  I'm still there, only now in
Gettysburg, PA and will retire in a year.  One of my co-workers, he was
my supervisor for a while here at the FCC, was Tom Shirley, who retired
as a CTRC before he came to the FCC.  He retired from here about a year
and a half ago.  We were stationed on Guam the same time but did not
know each other then.
 
What I thought was going to be a 4 year sentence of almost prison like
proportions turned out to be an experience I'll never forget.  Good
Times!  Thanks to a great bunch of people I met along the way, it was a
great time in my life.
 
Mike Landis
CTR3/CTT3
1970-1974