Gordon Mathieson enlisted in the Air Force in 1962 at the age of 17. After discovering an affinity for languages at boot camp, he was sent to Yale University to study Chinese for ten months, and then to Goodfellow AFB for intelligence training. He was given top secret clearance and sent to USAFSS 6987 at Shu Lin Kou in Taiwan, where “… we listened in to Chinese pilots. … Radio intercepts … we would transcribe what the pilots and the ground controller were saying. … And so that's what we did, exciting job because we listened in to transport planes, Chinese bombers, and Chinese fighting planes. … we had all different frequencies and we were trained on all of them.” In November 1964, Airman First Class Mathieson was sent TDY to Da Nang, Vietnam to serve as a Chinese language translator with the USAFSS 6925th Det. 2 until February 1965. As it turned out, he did not “ever, ever hear a Chinese pilot while … in Vietnam, Russian lots.” He describes a night of terror waiting for an attack from the VC, having had no combat training, side by side with cryptographers and Morse code operators, who also had no combat training, armed only with M16s on which none of them had been trained. He discusses Agent Orange, setting up a makeshift library, spy-in-the-sky satellites, the lack of an “entrance strategy.” He also recalls “listening to the president of the United States tell us one thing and here I am live on the ground and it's just the opposite of what he was saying.”