Buck Matthews

Dogpatch Days

Recollections of a Non-Combatant in the Combat Zone

Air Force Type

The Communications Office for the 18th Fighter-Bomber Wing in Korea, 1952.

I have often wondered if the Government’s paper conservation efforts might have been better served had they been instituted years earlier, when obfuscation and redundancy seemed a requirement in any official document of the United States Air Force.

My service folder shows phrases such as, “…exigencies of the service having been such as to preclude the issuance of competent written orders in advance….” – all that to grant a guy in my last duty post permission to eat off base.

In many of the orders in my file, no matter the subject, the first sentence is followed by, “All orders and PAM’s in conflict with this order are revoked,” much as our mothers used to say, “And I MEAN it!”

Yet, most orders were also written in language so abbreviated as to look as if they came through a cryptograph. “PAC AFR 39-9/50, as amended,the fol named having enl this date USAF, in the gr, a/sv and for the prd of enlmt as show below, WP o/a 8 November 1950, RUAT CG, ect…..”

There are better (worse) examples in the file but if going through it all tends to dull the mind, what must it have done to the orderly room clerks?

And if rebellion were to come over this weird use of language in the military, however, I would have expected it to arise within the ranks of the guys in supply. How many millions of times in accounting for the stuff they were so stingy in handing over to the rest of us were they required to write the phrase, “One each, Air Force type?”

A duffel bag was a duffel bag, no matter the uniform.

© Copyright 2008 Buck Matthews. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes without permission in writing from the author. Used with permission by BelleAire Press as a tribute to those American servicemen and women who served during the Korean War.