SGT Ronald A. Payne 25th Infantry Division, Checks a Tunnel Entrance Before Entering
Photo Credit: SP4 Robert C. Lafoon
Photo Credit: SP4 Robert C. Lafoon
It's Monday morning, November 10, 2025, 00:59, and I've updated this Web page. I think it's almost done. I've put in a link to the archive of this program, and I've posted Radio's Pickles of the North's piece about a moose and an almanac that's ceasing publication, those are two different topics she covered on this program, and I've put in a couple of other pieces. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Once again I'm rushing to get a Web page done before the program airs. I will be updating this Web page soon, so it might be worthwhile to check back for the updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday November 12, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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Today, November 8th, 2025, is the 57th anniversary of my landing in the Republic of Viet Nam. It was not a place where I'd wanted to be.
When I arrived one of the first things I saw at the airport was a bunch of what looked like 10 to 12 year old boys sitting on some cargo or maybe it was the outside of a vehicle. Turned out they were ARVN looking like children at the airport. It was very hot and it was half past Noon when I stepped off the plane. Since we'd crossed the International Date line on the trip over I think it may have officially been November 9, 1968, but in my experience it was November 8.
We sat around the airport with our luggage just waiting. I can't remember the name of the airport, but from looking around it may have been Tan Son Nhut Air Base that we landed at. It was certainly a military as opposed to a civilian airport. There were benches under a corrugated iron roof held up by 4 by 4 lumber, which was a common way for the army to set things up in that theater of war.
Other people were also in transit and we sat on the benches while guys with all sorts of armament, some heavy, lounged about waiting for a flight to whatever hell hole they were going to next. We were almost all cruits,
which was what new guys in Viet Nam were called, for a while. They bussed us off to the 90th Replacement Battalion where we went through the army bureaucracy to get sent to the units we'd be with in Viet Nam. We had to muster a number of times a day and they'd take attendance. I think that one or two guys were missing already.
Some of the people who handled the bureaucracy looked at me and said that I'd be a tunnel rat.
That was what they called guys who were sent into the tunnels and caves that the Viet Cong had dug in the earth in Viet Nam. The tunnels were pretty much bomb proof and they varied between something that went for 50 feet and had some stuff cached in it to extensive subterranean complexes that branched out in many directions and which occupied three dimensions with upper and lower floors and which had openings in various places. They had to choose short young men for that job and at 5 feet 2 inches tall I was pretty much ideal for it. Tunnel rats did not have a good time. They had to go into enemy tunnels, sometimes they entered the tunnel through the pre-existing entrances and sometimes, after a hole had been blown in the ground that revealed the middle of a tunnel, they'd enter through that. The Viet Cong would set up traps in the tunnels, and I've been told that some tunnels were just there to trap and kill G.I.s A Tunnel Rat could run into a whole bunch of Viet Cong just waiting for him in a tunnel, in which case he didn't last long. The tunnel Rat was given an M1911A1 .45 that only held eight rounds in its magazine, a hand grenade and a flashlight and he went down into the hole. With those weapons he was supposed to defend himself and then deliver information to those waiting topside. Sometimes the Tunnel Rat's mission was to kill enemy troops or destroy equipment. That meant that the young man had to carry a bunch of high explosives with him while he wended his way through the enemy tunnels. It was a not a job that featured a high rate of survival. I was lucky enough to not end up in an infantry company and those guys at the 90th Replacement Battalion never got to send me off to be a Tunnel Rat.
We spent a day at the 90th Replacement Battalion and we got sent to all sorts of places. It turned out that unless you were trained for the infantry, an MOS of 11B meant you walked, an MOS of 11C meant you rode, usually in an armored vehicle, you were pretty definitely going to an infantry or armored unit. It turned out that one's MOS didn't factor into things much outside of that. The rest of us were liable to be sent anywhere for any purpose. I had an MOS of 05C20 which was a radio teletype operator. When another guy with whom I'd been training in radio teletype school and I were dropped off the bus at the 71st Transportation Battalion we saw that they had a radio teletype and an antenna on the roof. We figured that we were going to be spending our time in the battalion headquarters building. But as it turned out they had a lifer who had no training doing the job of handling the teletype traffic. We were sent to separate companies to be cargo checkers or stevedores.
As an added complication while rushing to get off the bus while holding my duffel bag full of my new Viet Nam uniforms and boots and a lot of other stuff and hauling my own suitcase I was also carrying my orders and a large file jacket with my entire army history in it. As I stumbled through the bus with everyone crowded in and both people and bags sticking out into the aisle I dropped my big file jacket which was bulging with information about me. That caused me six months of problems.
In the end I was lucky to not have been sent to an infantry unit. Besides not being able to see all that well I had failed the camouflage course in Basic Training. A guy dressed as a tree was totally invisible to me. Of about 200 guys I was the only who didn't see him even when he came up close. I only spotted him after he was told the do jumping jacks in his Christmas tree costume. Yeah, I think that I probably wouldn't have survived if I'd had to go fighting my way through various parts of Viet Nam.
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Pickles here. We talked about a news item from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news Web site about a woman who found a young moose hanging out in her horse paddock in the wilds of British Columbia. Who knew the way to keep a juvenile moose calm was to talk to it calmly, as she and later a couple of law officers did. Eventually all the talking worked, along with the officers draping the Canadian Maple Leaf flag on a small flagpole on the moose to guide it back to the woods.
My favorite quote from the article: That is not my big horse.
It sure wasn't!!
Also we talked about the confusion in many reports over various platforms that The Farmer's Almanac was going to cease to exist. It got conflated with The Old Farmer's Almanac, with reports showing both different publications for The Farmer's Almanac. The Farmer's Almanac is a much smaller publication, first published in 1818. The Old Farmer's Almanac was first published in 1792, and is still going strong. I wish there were a healthy market for both publications.
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On this program I mentioned that I've been at WBAI for 44 years this month. I don't remember exactly what day I was admitted to the hallowed halls of the radio station as a producer, but it was in November 1981.
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So last weekend we slipped back to Standard Time. This is a yearly transition that I do not like. It saddens me to see the Sun set so early. It's setting before five o'clock in the afternoon now. I prefer to have the Sun set no earlier than seven o'clock in the evening. But it happens every year. And I am saddened by this first week of early sunsets. And it will get worse until the first week of December when the Sun will set at 4:28 in the afternoon. While preparing this radio program I was briefly very concerned that I had very little time left to get things ready, until I realized that I was just seeing everything outside going so dark because of the time change. And, yes, I do hope that people do not banish Daylight saving Time in the future.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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