Covering Rural Nevada Alone part 5

In December, 1985, I received a phone call from the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C. asking if I would be interested in taking a Temporary Duty active duty Assignment in Central America. The Guard was looking for a radio announcer at the Armed Forces Radio and television Network station in Panama.

I left just after New Years Day, arriving in Panama just in time to go on the air the next day. But things were not what they seemed to be.

Once the Guard found out I had just spent close to two years as a TV reporter and anchor, they decided I should be doing something other than simply announcing football scores, and military press releases.

My boss, Army Captain John Smith, (his real name), asked me if I’d be interested in training Army and Army Guard PADs, (Public Affairs Detachments),  who were being deployed to Honduras, Columbia, Bolivia, and the interior of Panama to cover road building projects by National Guard Civil Engineers. 

I now had a new title. (The military loves titles.) I was now the Director of Broadcast Services for the National Guard Bureau. In addition to training Public Affairs personnel, I was also tasked to the US Army as a television consultant for the Central Command in Central and South America.

The job was great. For ten months, I bounced around Central and South America teaching military officers how to deal with the press, and training public affairs units as well. It was getting dicey too. Civil war between the Contras the Santinista in El Salvador was in full swing.  Machine gun fire was not uncommon in the middle of the night in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. And the helicopter crash I got into over a road near Yoro, Honduras wasn’t much fun either.

Despite a bad case of dysentery in Bolivia, I managed to survive the ten months on active duty, and was released on October 10^th, 1986. I took the train home, and climbed off just in time for Channel 8 to hire me on October 16^th.

Thus began a new career in television that continues to this day.

Next. Covering Nevada Alone because nobody wants to go with you.