The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 35: The Code Breaker

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

His ear for hearing patterns served him well.

This is the way I heard it. The radio buzzed and hummed, struggling to home in on the right frequency. The interference was distracting, but the codebreaker's highly trained ear was the best in the Air Force. And now, all his concentration was focused on picking out the distant rhythms banging through the ether. Did da, didda, did da, didda, didda, da, didda, da da da, didda, da da. The tones came fast and furious, buried and static, but the codebreaker heard their message. loud and clear, and their message was big news. He checked his transcription twice before he left his post. He knew he was good, very good, in fact, but he didn't want to get this one wrong.

Da did dit for D, a single dit for E, didda for A, and then another D, D-E-A-D. The young airman removed his headphones and contemplated the impact of what he had just learned. The most notorious mass murderer in the history of the world was dead, and right now he was the only American who knew it. He rose stiffly and shook out the kinks. The long, lonely hours hunched over the receiver were wearing on his back and hips. He walked to his superior's office and entered without knocking. This annoyed his superior, but the codebreaker was never much for protocol.

I have some news, said the codebreaker. and I have a door, said the superior. Maybe you'd care to knock on it before entering. The codebreaker just stood and waited, his soon-to-be trademarked snarl, curled across his rugged face. Is there something you need, Airman? Not particularly, replied the codebreaker in his distinctive baritone. I just thought your boss might like to know that Joseph Stalin is dead.

The psychopath responsible for more than 50 million murders was gone, and the Soviet Union was, for the moment, without a leader. What that meant for the United States was far beyond the code-breaker's pay grade, but he knew the truth would take just a few minutes to find its way all the way across the North Atlantic and into President Eisenhower's hands. Hours later, it would be the headline in every newspaper around the world. Back home in Arkansas, his friends and family would read all about it, but none of them would ever know. It was he who unlocked the secret first. It's funny, thought the codebreaker, how fast news can travel.

Once you put it in a language, everybody can understand. The airman returned to his gray cubicle and resumed his shift. He listened for new information, hidden in the static, but heard nothing. So he wrote a plaintive letter to his girl back home. Nothing about his work, of course. That was forbidden. and he knew his letters would be read carefully by the censors. He just told her he loved her and missed her

and looked forward to the day when his time was once again his own. Later, though, as he lay awake in his steel bunk, pondering the gray walls and the bad food, the restricted privileges and the officious bosses that called the shots, his thoughts returned to the hidden code that announced the death of a murderer. On his old guitar, he repeated the rhythm on the A-string before finally drifting off.

Didda, did-d-da, did-da, did-da-da, did-da-da-da. The next day, in what can only be called a happy coincidence for music fans around the world, the men of the 12th Radio Squadron were treated to a film. It was a movie about another group of men stuck together, far from home. They too were living in tight quarters. they too were confined against their will, and they too were desperately lonely. The codebreaker understood their pain and resolved to put it into a language that everybody else could understand. That night, the young airman who missed his sweetheart and yearned to escape his post in Germany,

reached again for his old guitar and captured the nuances and rhythms of loneliness and isolation, translating them into a melody recognized today around the world. You know him as a country music legend with three Hall of Fame inductions, nine CMA awards, and 17 Grammys. But back on March 5, 1953, he was just a homesick airman, far from friends and family, who just happened to figure out that Joseph Stalin was dead before the rest of the world. The codebreaker who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. The man in black whose songs would forever change country music along with Folsom Prison.

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