I was Stationed at Camp TUTO for 179 days from Sept 1961. Camp Century from about May 1962 to Oct 1962 and then back to Camp Century after a brief break at Ft. Belvoir (PR&DC) from Nov 1962 to May 1963.

I was just 22 years old at the time and was a radio-teletype operator and Ham Radio Operator. My normal duties operating the AN/GRC-26 radio equipment was performed on our usual 12 hour shift and the hours I spent on the Ham Radio (KG1BA-Tuto and KG1CC-Century) were my own time but was the only way we had of talking back home to our loved ones.

My first tour was at TUTO, which is about 12 miles from Thule AB and is located close to where the ice cap begins. Camp TUTO was actually on solid ground but there was so much snow usually that it was hard to tell.

TUTO in the warm season is pretty much uneventful with everyday life pretty much like it is at any Army base around the world. But when the snow begins, it all changes. The time spent backed up to the space heaters increases and at the layers of clothing gets thicker and thicker. Eventually the Mickey Mouse snow boots do not work for you at all so everyone starts wearing the big thermal boots, which actually make your feet sweat while the temperature is minus 30 or 40 degrees.

It becomes a ritual to put on all the arctic gear before leaving your barracks and walking to the mess hall or your work site. You learn early on that you don't skimp on wearing the proper clothing because frostbite is very painful. I remember I missed many meals because I just didn't feel like putting on all those clothes. But eventually I would get really hungry and since there were no fast food outlets, I had to go to the mess hall.

I remember the food served in the mess has was always first class (except for those watery scrambled eggs) and the men that operated the mess hall were dedicated professionals to their art. One of the best meals I ever got I believe was the Thanksgiving meal served to me at Camp TUTO in November 1961. I will never forget the white zinfandel wine was so tasty and I had never experienced alcohol before in my life. I tried drinking it one more time at the New Years Eve party at the club and wound up drinking some concoction that one of the Cat operators made up of Vodka and Grape juice. I drank that stuff until someone had to carry me back to my hooch.

I remember waking up the next day around noon, after having missed my shift by about 6 hours with a purple shirt, pants, sheets and pillow. I was so sick from that episode that I did not drink so much as a beer for the next 8 years when I turned thirty years old. Sad to say, that is about the highlight of my tour at Camp TUTO. I will add that the fellow that carried me back home that night was a rather large black soldier named Savage, an ex-golden gloves champion of the Army and just in case he reads this I will apologize once more for my words as he carried me out the club door, I turned and said to the cheering crowd "It's a fine god dam thing when the damn laundry man (and a racially explicit term) has to carry you home" :)

But carry me home he did, and I got my one and only ride on one of the "banana boats" they used to get the drunks back home. The banana boats are simply sleds like the ones used in Alaska by Eskimos to pull individual supplies across the snow.

I hope I'm not boring you but I do hope someone that I know from that time period reads this and contacts me. Names I can remember are Mellesmoan, Sp King, Capt Sokhacki, CWO Bell (My favorite) and the original Arctic fox, Capt Page at Camp Century. I should remember more but after all it has been 40 years ago. I still have excerpts of a magazine printed in Great Briton of a story they did on Camp Century and they called it "Moon City" The correspondents for that tabloid actually wintered over with me at Camp Century in 62. They also accompanied us on the heavy swing (series of large D9 caterpillars with 54" treads pulling little rectangular huts on sleds) and were just like a member of the team. I operated the radio and they would constantly want an update from TUTO as if we were to be lost forever.

The trips to and from Camp Century definitely were dangerous. We were either scooting across at a relatively fast clip on the light swing of small snow cats or lumbering along on the heavy swing. It was a good solid 138 miles from TUTO to Camp Century and fraught with danger the entire trip. We had to worry about crevasses that would suddenly appear in the ice cap and the depth was so great that you could not see the bottom.

Specially trained cat operators would "blow" the crevasses until deemed safe to cross-using dynamite brought just for that purpose. I remember hearing the explosions but never realized the danger we were in all the way to Century. On one such trip on the light swing, I was the radio operator and lost contact with TUTO during a Phase III storm which is a total "white out". It was touch and goes trying to find a survival hut by circling around but we did and had to weather out the storm in the hut. The huts were rather small and we all had to endure each other's farts in close quarters with little air. I know that sounds gross but it was a fact of life in that little hut. As a matter of fact, I learned to recognize who the farter was by the sound or the smell or a combination of both. hahaha

Well, enough of that. The strangest thing that happened on that particular trip where we could not get out of the hut until it was nearly covered with snow was we lost our direction. The WO in charge of the swing forgot which way you were going if the different coloured flags were on your right or left. I believe they were red on one side of the trail and maybe blue or green on the other side. In any event, the WO said we were in grave danger of the storm coming back and since "Sparks" he called me, could not make connection with Hq., he did not want to take a chance and go on to Camp Century but rather turn back and go back to TUTO.

Well, you guessed it after about 6 hour of travelling, we came up on little metal objects sticking out of the snow and of course that was Camp Century. Nothing else marked Camp Century unless you arrive in the summer time when the main trenches from end to end of the camp are open. In the winter, they are covered over with loose blowing snow and all you see are the escape hatches and air handlers. An erie Site. As it turns out, the WO would have been in trouble with HQ if he had not made the successful run delivering much needed mail and fresh vegetables which had long since frozen solid.

I was on board as a replacement radio operator and the guy that I replaced of course took the swing back to TUTO. Aircraft were not flying at that time since the last attempt to deliver mail by helicopter was marked by tragedy. The helicopter was returning with the pay officer, and other personnel returning for their rotation back to the States. The chopper lifted off and simply turned upside down after a few seconds and crashed into the snow. That was so sad and there was nothing they could do with the bodies except let them freeze solid awaiting a break in the weather to bring them back.

During my second trip to Camp Century we set the record for the longest continuous running portable nuclear plant. I still have a copy of the telegraph message we sent was quite lengthy as was most of the correspondence from the nuclear power people or the scientists that were constantly drilling and smashing core samples. I never knew what all they were doing over there, I only knew my job was to support them.

I would operate the radio for 12 hours then fire up the Collins S line Ham Radio gear and run phone patched for the guys that were homesick and needed to talk back to the states to momma or wifey. We had constructed a rhombic quarter wave antenna and terminated one end so as to make it directional in one direction instead of the usual two and it was aimed at the East Coast of the United States. I made contact easily and was able to get long distance phone calls from New York to any place in the states. It was there at Camp Century that I made what was dubbed the longest radio contact on earth on ham radio. I talked to our sister station in Antarctica. The station at McMurdo Sound called "Little America" which had a similar radio set-up.

There is lots of wonderful stuff to tell about Camp Century but I'm afraid it's mostly nostalgic for me, and boring as hell for the reader. But if you would like to know anything else let me know. I have a complete set of maps of the site as originally constructed and can explain how we survived when the Nuclear power plant went down. The beautiful "water" well made by dropping a steam generator hose into the ice and melting it out into giant bells and then dropping it lower to form another bell. We drank water that had fallen to earth during the time Christ walked on earth. Now that is special!

One more item that happened on my last stay at Camp Century.

It was biting cold outside with temperatures hovering around 50 below zero or even lower perhaps but the wind chill factor was much lower. The wind hadn't stopped blowing for many weeks and we had no mail or anything fresh for that long or longer. It was decided at Capt Tuto that they would fly the fixed wing Otter to Camp Century and dive bomb our mail into the small opening at one end of the large trench.

The opening is normally about 15 x 20 feet, large enough to drive vehicles into the city's main street. But with the wind blowing snow for so long, the opening was maybe a bare 5 or 6 foot square. Anyway, the pilot tried to make the mail dive bomb into that opening but the bag burst open and the mail went flying. On the OUTSIDE of the city of course.

The base commander quickly organized a search party of about twenty hardy souls all connected by a long rope for safety to search for the mail. However, it was just too cold so the search party only lasted about 10 or 15 minutes at the most. When the search team arrived in the command hut to warm up, they had exactly ONE letter that had been retrieved.

Everyone crowded around to see who would be the lucky person to get mail but alas, the letter was addressed to a person that had left Camp Century neary a month earlier! That was really a sad evening around the space heaters there in that city under the ice. It's hard to describe the emptyness of being so ICEolated with hardly no contact with the outside world. For that terrible month, most of us watched the free movies we had on hand over and over again at our little makeshift movie theater. We could watch those old movies and try to forget our loneliness for a couple of hours.

Since you published my comments several years ago, I have been contacted by many old timers from the same time period (1961-1963). Most recently I was contacted by Arthur L. Choate, one of my best friends while at Camp Tuto the first trip. I like that guy so much because he was so kind and honest that I later named my first born after him. My first son's name is Arthur Leon Anderson born just months after leaving Greenland in 1963. Since I have had no contact with Art since 1963, I was finally able to tell him of the honor. He was quite impressed and we had a long conversation reminiscing about those times up in the frozen north.

Thank you Steffen for making these contacts happen. It sure gladdens an old heart.

Warmest regards,

So Long.

Jimmy Anderson