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Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

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Charles Deemer

Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

The eagle flies!

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Finalist, Oregon Book Award

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Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants

Darren Barefoot
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Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.

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Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."

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The Writing Life
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It Beats Working 9-5
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The Writing Life...
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
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The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

 
Friday, May 09, 2003  
The Additive
[from a memoir in progress]
The work-related “problem of the additive,” which my friends thought I would be able to solve in a jiffy, was this:

The charge of the small company of linguists was to translate and analyze the audio traffic of various units of the Russian military in East Germany, military communications that had been intercepted during spy flights along the border. The various units used call signs by which to identify themselves. A code book of these call signs had been captured, and we knew this much about how the Russians used it: once a military unit changed its call sign, which it did every three to seven days, then all call signs throughout the Russian army changed in a discernible pattern. By rotating the pages in the code book to fit the new identification, the call signs for all the other units would fall into place. This page change from A to B was called “the additive” and it was always a number between 00 and 99.

Intelligence units like ours learned of an additive change whenever a known entity, like a particular colonel in a particular unit, started using a different call sign from one he had used only days earlier. When this happened, there was a frenzy of activity as we tried to verify the change with a second piece of data to corroborate it. This search could go on for anywhere from a few hours to most of a day, a period during which we weren’t quite sure who was who and what was what in East Germany, which in the climate of the Cold War provided considerable panic. It was important, in other words, to know the additive as quickly as possible, so we would know how to arrange the code book to keep tabs on everyone with their new call signs.

More than one officer in our company had considered how convenient it would be if we knew what the additive would be ahead of time. There would be no moment of darkness and panic. However, if the page changes were selected randomly, as some believed, then this dream was hopeless.

There was some reason to believe the additive wasn’t random. For example, during a period of two years, it had never repeated itself in a calendar year.

I arrived in Baumholder and reported to my company of linguists – and immediately was presented with the problem of the additive. The company commander (our C.O. was a captain) wanted to know if I could solve it, which meant if I could predict the pattern of numbers so the next additive would be known ahead of time.

I had no idea. In fact, no one had prepared me for such a question, and I was taken aback by it. I said I’d have to look at the problem and think about it. That evening, over many beers in the Enlisted Men’s Club (E. M. Club), my friends brought me up to speed. I wasn’t particularly pleased by the spot on which they’d put me with the captain.

When I told the company commander I’d look into the problem of the additive, an amazing thing happened. He gave me my own office. I was expected to do nothing all day but study – and, of course, eventually solve – the problem. At first, I took the matter very seriously and began charting the sequences of two-digit numbers in each of the two years for which I had complete data. We now were in the beginning of the third year. I soon became convinced that indeed the additive sequence was not randomly selected.

However, I also knew I couldn’t solve the problem. I was puzzled why the Army didn’t hire a Ph.D. mathematician to solve it. In fact, the problem was being studied in Washington D.C. by these very minds. Our company commander had delusions of grandeur, coming to believe that one of his own troops was going to beat the professionals at their own game, making his future bright. I was going to win the captain an early major’s maple leaf.

The C.O. kept asking me to make a prediction for the next additive. I didn’t want to because I knew I’d be wrong. But I needed to admit either I was in over my head or I had to come up with a way to stall for more time. Since having my own office and being treated like a big shot had their appeal, I finally did the latter.

I created a graph that made it look like I was getting closer to predicting the next additive. A black line traced the additive sequence. A red line traced my predictions from data over time. As you moved along horizontally from left to right, the red line got closer to the black line. The black line was real. The red line was a complete fabrication. Anyone with the most elementary knowledge of algebra would have caught me in this scam. No one did.

This kept me going for a few more months. But the captain still wanted a more specific prediction than the encouraging red line on the graph. Finally he ordered me to make a prediction for the next additive change.

The gods have a sense of humor. I reluctantly made a guess, which is all it was. A wild guess. Two days later the additive changed – and my guess was right!

Talk about being treated like a genius! Talk about being frustrated! No one in the outfit was mathematically literate enough to understand how my graph was a fake, which meant no one understood the stress I was feeling, knowing that now I’d be expected to predict the additive correctly each week.

So I guessed again – and was wrong. I immediately felt better. Maybe in the eyes of the C.O., I wasn’t a genius after all – I was human. Now I could say that my theory had a hole in it – a minor one, to be sure, but a hole nonetheless. Now it was time to talk my way out of the office and start doing the work I was trained to do.

I rehearsed and delivered a long speech filled with mathematical mumbo-jumbo in which I admitted to the captain that I was on the right track but had reached the limit of my knowledge. I had only gone to Cal. Tech. to my sophomore year, I explained, and what was needed to solve this problem was someone who had taken the courses I would have taken as a junior had I remained in college. This bullshit actually worked.

Reluctantly the captain gave in. First, however, he had me write a letter about my theory and the progress I’d made, including the successful prediction, so he could forward it to Washington D. C. and look good. I did as I was told. I imagine more than one government mathematician must have had quite a few laughs when they read my letter, which was sent over the captain’s signature.

But at least I was off the hook. Several months after my arrival in Baumholder, I finally began working as a Russian linguist.

I immediately missed my private office. The work for which I had been trained sucked. I sat at a tape recorder all day, wearing earphones, surrounded by linguists doing the same, translating Russian military communications from audio interceptions of quality that varied from poor to pure static. The work was tedious, frustrating, tiring and repetitive. I wanted out.

There were two ways to move from translating to analyzing the translated material, which at least provided more mobile working conditions: be so good at translating that you got promoted; or know someone with enough rank to pull some military strings for you. I took advantage of my lingering reputation as the boy wonder who predicted the additive to get transferred to Operations section, where I became a kind of executive secretary to the sergeant in charge. I mainly wrote reports and business letters, which was fine with me. I had my own desk again.

Often my boss, the sergeant, turned over the section to me to run, so he could wander through the building and tell war stories with other seasoned old sergeants who were bored when not in combat. After only a few months of being a translator, I spent the rest of my military duty never translating a word of Russian. But my job, with its top secret codeword security level, gave me an overview of everything, and I felt very much like a spy.
5/09/2003 10:50:00 AM | 0 comments

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