It was December 1968 and I had just arrived at my new duty station, Eielson AFB, Alaska. What a difference! From the steaming jungles of Vietnam to the frozen snow covered tundra of "The Last Frontier," our 49th state.

In Vietnam I had been flying the Bell "Huey," which was (at the time) a state-of-the-art jet powered helicopter. In Alaska my unit would be operating the 1951 era H-21 "Flying Banana" powered by a reciprocating R-1820 engine, a design introduced in pre-World War II bomber production. 

Our mission in Alaska took us back and forth, for the most part, on an east-west route between Fairbanks and the western coastline, at Norton Sound. Much of the flight itinerary was along the Yukon River, Alaska's original interior lifeline. I met a lot of interesting people: Indians, Eskimos, prospectors, missionaries, hunters, bush pilots, state troopers, and people who just wanted to be in the wilds to "get away from it all", whatever "it" was.

During my first trip to Galena AFB, a remote outpost on the Yukon, I flew with another squadron pilot, to learn the ropes. We were up at a thousand feet with a good view in every direction. As we approached Nenana, where the Alaska Railroad (from Anchorage) crosses a large river, the other pilot said, "That's Nenana, our first good checkpoint." I noticed Nenana rhymed with banana. 

After a few miles the river town of Tanana came into view. To show I knew where we were via my map reading I pointed it out and named it, rhyming the name with banana as "Tah-nanna." A goof on my part. Tanana rhymes with "ban-a-claw" as "Tan-a-naw". 

A week later I found myself on the route to Galena again, but myself, with a flight mechanic as a passenger in the co-pilot's seat. This time I was down at just 300 feet or so, maybe less. A lot of military helicopter flying is "legalized buzzing." Sometimes I get very sleepy flying so I drop down on the deck. In that situation you are flying the ship every moment and you don't ever nod off to sleep.

My recent experience in combat had taught me to closely observe everything on the ground, looking for anything unusual and/or out of place, particularly when out in the "boonies" or rural areas. We were passing over a zone with a light covering of trees, clumps of them here and there, and a few small ponds. There strung through the trees --- WIRE! The infamous "comm wire" "Charlie" strung along the Ho Chi Minh Trail as his favorite mode of communication via his field telephone system.

NVA or Viet Cong out here in the desolate Alaska interior? Who else in this day and age of microwave, satellite and single sideband radio would be stringing comm wire in the trees? 

I didn't figure it out at the time but later was told the answer to the puzzle. The wire, in pieces here and there, was left over from a project of sixty years earlier, the U.S. Army's Alaska telegraph. Things truly are "frozen in time" in Alaska.