From: Jasper
Date: Friday, June 29, 2007
Time: 02:56:43 PM
Jean, …These look more to me like examples of codes in general. I don’t see enough to tell me more than these people have a common interest that can’t be openly communicated to everyone. I have no doubt that “home crown carrots” and “turnips” are code words. .My best guess is that the messages are about marijuana (the active ingredients in carrots AND marijuana are good for the eyes but for some vision problems marijuana works infinitely better). However, that guess is no better than any other guess because I don’t have a systematic pattern of equivalent terms to match the code. I don’t have a decoder. ………… In Vietnam, my battalion commander was 4-1 or 4-4. The only number that mattered was the 4 because we were the 4th battalion of the Herd. Our company commander was Hotel, the Army’s phonetic alphabet name at that time for the letter “H.” I had one unforgettable experience with an Air Force spotter pilot called Headhunter. …………The thing that matters here is that all of these codes referred to people with particular jobs. The enemy could not have known who they were unless they tracked the pattern of communication between them. If they figured out who 4-1 was, 4-4 could give them fits. If they figured how who Hotel was, Headhunter screwed up the whole system because he used a different system. It worked fine because his job was to attract attention, to draw fire and to tell us where it came from so we could take the appropriate action. ………..The Herd used a simple green, yellow, red radio-telephone code to check the status of units in the field. You’d be on guard where your squad set up for the night and you’d get a call from someone in the platoon asking, “How’s your applesauce?” If everything was fine you’d reply, “Green apples” or “Got’em green.” If things looked shaky your applesauce was yellow. You never had to say “red” because gunfire and explosions would say it for you. ………… “Redlegs,” were artillery forward observers. Our redlegs carried “KACK wheels” to code and decode our locations when communicating with our nearest artillery firebase. A KACK wheel was a thin, plastic wheel within a wheel with a number changed every day to set it for a different code. To be sure the redleg got the code right, he would tell the firebase guy, “I KACK 3UB87” or whatever his code book said was the equivalent of the correct master setting. His code book decoded our map co-ordinance and he sent it to the firebase. We could therefore bring “Arty” to visit the enemy very quickly in a hot situation without “Arty” dropping in on us. …………. Everybody uses codes, even children, and all codes work on similar “us vs. them” principles. Without a decoder, you can’t know the code. –Jasper