AN OLD MAN'S CROTCHET

In July 1957, just a bit more than 64 years ago, I got on a bus in Central Square, Cambridge and rode off with a bunch of other six-monthers to do basic training at Fort Dix,That New Jersey. When basic training was over, I was sent to Fort Devens, Massachusetts to be trained in communications. This was before computers, cell phones, and other such technological marvels, and communications training consisted of such things as learning to climb telephone poles with gaffs strapped to your ankles so that you could string wire. Our principal form of actual communication was a little handheld wired radio called the PRC 10 or Prick 10, as it was universally known. The Prick 10 was not a telephone. It was a very simple radio. You pressed a button to talk and so long as you held the button down and talked, the person at the other end could listen but could not answer. To facilitate communication, we learned to end each part of a message with the expression “over” which was a shorthand way of saying “I am finished talking and I am taking my finger off the button so you can answer me now and I will listen.” A conversation consisted of a series of statements, each of which was punctuated with “over.” When you were done talking and were going to hang up rather than listen for a response you said “out,” which meant “this is the end of our conversation, do not reply.”

 

I was 23 at the time and all of this made a considerable impression on me, so it drives me absolutely bonkers when somebody in a movie or on television says “over and out.” These are flatly contradictory messages and no one who sad received communications training in the Army would ever combine them in this fashion.

 

But then the Vietnam War happened and because it almost destroyed the U.S. Army, the generals decided to move to an all volunteer army, which was much better suited to America’s new status as the leading imperial power in the world. There were lots of consequences to this transition to an all volunteer army, but the one that really eats away at me is that almost nobody anymore seems to understand that it is impossible, absurd, contradictory, not done, to say “over and out.”

 

I am sure there are more important things going on in the world at this moment but this really gets to me so I thought I would say something about it. Do me a favor. If you ever call me on a Prick 10, please do not say “over and out.”