This week’s veteran is Dan Edwards, who served in the United States Marine Corps from June 1981 thru June 1984. Dan was 17 years old when he departed for Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina just three days after high school graduation. Growing up on the dairy farm, Dan was accustomed to getting up at 3:30am to milk the cows so as to get to school on time. For Dan, Marine Corps boot camp was like going on a vacation. He remembers enjoying watching the much older guys getting flustered and in trouble with the Drill Instructors for being unable to complete what seemed to be fairly simple tasks.
Dan turned 18 years old while in boot camp and after graduation, he was assigned to telecommunications school at Marine Corps Base, Twentynine Palms, California. This training entailed very basic telecommunications technical skills and many hours typing on manual teletype machines, very similar to 1920’s Western Union teletype technology. For the Marine Corps in the early 1980’s, budgets for up-to-date technical gear was pretty much non-existent. Dan’s primary training function was to learn the Baudot code system which was the global standard for telecommunication message processing from the 1920s through the 1980s. Baudot code operates as a 5-bit binary code that allows teleprinters to transmit text over telegraph lines. The Marine Corps needed young Marines that could quickly and accurately receive manual dictation from senior officers and prepare (type in Baudot code format) and send those messages via telecommunications to other Marines, anywhere in the world. The Marine Corps standard is that every Marine regardless of their MOS is first a basic infantryman. The ability to fight, and type, in any environment was key to mission success. Dan’s graduating class had a total of twelve Marines. Of the twelve, eleven were assigned to exciting new places all over the world. Dan was assigned to stay in not-so-exciting Twentynine Palms. The next day, Dan reported to the 9th Comm Battalion. As it turned out, his assigned Company was out on deployment and nowhere to be found. Without a home unit, the Battalion’s Executive Officer (XO) sent Dan via the Field Assistance Program (FAP) to the Base Headquarters Battalion’s Communications Center. This was about as far away from an infantry-ready Marine Corps experience that one can get. Dan was put on 24-hour shift rotation and spent the next 2 ½ years manually typing Baudot code messages for the Marine Corps.
Always able to find the good in any situation, Dan made the best out of being assigned to Twentynine Palms. In the summer of 1982, at 18 years old, Dan married his wonderful wife of 44 years (in August 2026). They paid $100.00 to get married on the strip in Palm Springs, California. The skills he obtained by uniquely working at the Headquarters Comm Center (vice being a field Marine) landed him a job with the United States Department of State. Dan’s first task at the Department of State training center in Washington D.C. was to learn morse code! Teletype and morse code – not exactly high tech stuff. However, Dan’s first assignment with the Department of State in the summer of 1986 was at the American Embassy in the remote city of Kathmandu, Nepal, where he used teletype and morse code everyday. In December 1987, Dan was assigned to the American Consulate in Douala, Cameroon, on the western coast of Africa. Again, teletype and morse code everyday. In the summer of 1990, Dan was promoted to OIC and stationed at the American Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. While in Bulgaria, Dan oversaw the upgrade of the onsite teletype and morse code gear to much improved and automated data processing equipment and satellite communications. Through it all, the travel and opportunities to serve in really cool mission operations with the Department of State was amazing. None of which would have come about had it not been for the experiences Dan obtained while stationed in Twentynine Palms with the United States Marine Corps.
Now at just age 27, Dan had a lifetime of experiences under his belt, but was just getting started. Navigating a very non-traditional career path, Dan eventually graduated from the Mays School of Business at Texas A&M University. Living in Houston, hard work earned him a promotion to Vice President with a promising software company. After the terrible events of 9/11, his patriotic calling pulled him back to a U.S. government position and back to Washington D.C. Working on projects of ever increasing responsibility for nearly 10 years, Dan and his wife were finally given a supervisory assignment to Frankfurt, Germany, in the summer of 2014, where his work took him to more than 50 U.S. Embassies all over Europe in just two years. From there it was off to Buckley Air Force Base in Denver during the summer of 2016, and from there on to Alice Springs, Australia in the summer of 2018. Dan’s final assignment was to Kabul, Afghanistan, the summer of 2021. While there, Dan assisted in the closure of the U.S. Embassy when Kabul was overtaken by Taliban forces. Dan closed out his career with the U.S. government spending several weeks on the ground in Afghanistan assisting with humanitarian relief and evacuation of more than 30K souls from the airport compound at Kabul airport. He was on one of the last planes to depart from Afghanistan on the evening of August 30, 2021.
Today, Dan spends time with family, landscaping his yard, and loves volunteering for veterans, right here in Montgomery, Texas. Good luck Dan and thank you for your service! Congratulations on being MCN’s Veteran of the Week.
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Publisher: Community