Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Listening at the Border

LISTENING AT THE BORDER TRANSCRIPT
Produced by Jay Needham

While you’re looking for something it sounds much like it does when you're looking for something in your car stereo or your home stereo. Just intense static because you have the volume jacked up so you can here even the faintest, you know, voice. The static is just this roar, like the electronic...an electronic ocean wave or something. It's just that white staticy noise and then it fades in and fades out and fades in. And then, when you do here a voice more often than not it sounds like you had taken a voice recorder and put it in a coffee can and then sunk it to the bottom of a lake, and then were trying to listen to it. It's almost unintelligible, and in fact is unintelligible to probably 95% of those who hear it. And that's where the training comes in.

After a 63 week training course in California and then another six months of the actual listening training, I was sent to Korea in January 1996. My primary job was to monitor the North Korean military communication. So the language training itself, eight hours a day, five days a week for 63 weeks studying nothing else–it was intense. All native speakers were our instructors. It was an amazing time. But what I wasn't really as prepared for was the second "phase" of the training I guess, the actual listening portion. Doing the job that I would be doing later on in Korea we would have samples of audio that you had to transcribe. And you would have to loop it, over and over and over and slow it down and speed it up and try to break up syllable by syllable trying to find out what it was that they were saying. Not moving, not even breathing that heavy, just trying to listen and catch every word. And that became a stress in itself, I mean you try to listen so intensely and get everything right, knowing that if you don't it could be your job lost. I ended up giving myself an ulcer over it. You know, so you have to be listening to the code words you have to know what the code words are, then know how they're said, then know how the Korean...the North Korean dialect differs from the South Korean, and how that makes words sound different. Because not only is it under static, and not only is it in a foreign language, but it's also in code. It's almost simplistic to say, but it just takes doing it and doing it and repeating it and repeating it and doing it over again, kinda bringing yourself into your own head almost, just so where the only thing that's registering is the sound. Finding out exactly what was going on, who was around what was happening, and then once I knew exactly where I was in space, put the headphones back on then there was that "bringing the curtain down" so to speak on all of that that I was just taking stock of. Listening in for any kind of voice activity. And after awhile you got very adept at discerning even the faintest of voices. It's tiring because there's an activeness to it because hearing is definitely a passive activity and listening requires so much more engagement on your part.

The listening on a day-to-day basis, the material–it was always the same. Most often the same, but at any time it could be different, so you still had to listen very closely. It's as if you were reading the same page of a book over and over again. Even though you knew what the words were, you still had to read them even more carefully. It was so taxing mentally. And I never thought I'd be a spy, I mean that's what spying is, looking and listening when people don't know that you are. Then again, I guess I thought spying would be a little more exciting; this is no James Bond here. Well, so much for the exciting spy life.
I mean, I wonder if they know. I mean, not that they know that I personally am listening to them. But I wonder if they know that they're being listened to. I'm just listening to people's voices trafficking in something that doesn't exist anymore, and we make a record of it, use it for our own purpose. If I'm sitting here listening to them, and there are other linguists all over the world listening to other people, well certainly somebody is listening to us too.

I remember one time going down into the market, outside the base in the ville, there was a little narrow street that lead right outside the main gate, barely wide enough for a compact car. The place was just packed business after business after business six inches from the other. And I went down there to get some yakimon-do, it was a fried dumpling from a vendor who had a little canopied stand with his little deep fryer and he handed me the food and as I'm eating it I look at the wrapper and it says "Top Secret" on the top of it. I'm eating fried fish dumplings out of classified material. So just as I'm collecting information everyday about the North Koreans and what they're doing, these South Koreans outside the base are checking us out, seeing what we're doing. It's this circle of secrets and information. And once you are in the know, in the circle, got the dish, the lowdown, the skinny, it's a weird feeling because then you start to walk around head a little higher, you're walking a little taller. You've got something that nobody else has got. You kinda feel a little like a Bond, James Bond. And it's interesting because you feel like you have a certain power. I mean, you may not really have power, but it feels that way. It's a strange kind of power that comes from having something that you really can't use in any way, but the mere fact of possessing it imbues you with some sort of feeling of power. Because that's the other part of this listening business is because you are in possession of information that you cannot share with people. And that's the other thing about secrets. Everybody wants to know a secret, but there is something in us where everyone wants to tell a secret as well. And here I have this information and yet cannot share it with anyone. And that itself is a bit of a burden. It doesn't bother me that I have this information, but the fact that I'm not allowed to tell it creates a certain feeling inside, but at the same time it creates this kind of sense that while you’re there, the linguist, the spy, there becomes almost a class system within the listeners and the people that are listening to very complicated multiple sound streams of Air Force material or Navy material, the stuff that we're listening to is categorized. Not officially, but unofficially, and the people that listen to the very complex things occupy this higher social caste and the people that listen to this certain target are the serfs of the linguists.

I was on the rack on a particular day, and all of a sudden the voice that I was listening to became very labored, very tense, and this new plane that they were following was coming straight down and we became aware very quickly that the plane she was talking about wasn't a South Korean airplane or a U.S. airplane, but one of North Korea's own jets. A pilot had taken one of their jets while he was doing a routine training flight and took off, went straight to the border. Defected. And once he got into the South Korean space, I looked behind me; I hadn't seen so much brass since basic training. Colonels, Lieutenant Colonels, Generals–the place was a mad house. I didn't know it because I had the headphones on staring at my little green screen. But that plane came all the way to an American air base, landed. It was the most exciting day that I had there. That's what's interesting about the North Korean target. Because, as we are all trafficking in secrets, there is hardly a country on Earth that is more secretive and people know less about than North Korea. It's the last bastion of strict Communism.

I left Korea in 1998, January. I was sent back to the States. I was stationed at a base outside of Washington, in between Washington and Baltimore, and it was so different from Korea in that where I was in this cavernous room with the movie screen with the map of Korea on it and the people walking around, not unlike what you see in the movies...to the regular office, the cubicles, the three sided little universe that you inhabit and walk around and talk to your colleagues while they do what they do in their little cubicle.

I can't really tell you about where I worked exactly, but I can tell you about the gift shop. The gift shop at this government agency's building was full of all array of tchotchki’s, with the logo of the secret government agency emblazoned on it. There were giant golf umbrellas polka dotted with the logo. There were shot glasses, ink pens, mouse pads, fleece tops, beach towels, toddler t-shirts with a Crayon version of the logo. There were beer steins, and coffee mugs and pencils, and bucket hats and visors and baseball caps and embroidered sweatshirts all with a giant logo and name of the exact place that we're not supposed to talk about. So when I was there and went into the gift shop, I bought a t-shirt and a sweatshirt and a t-shirt for my father-in-law and some magnets for my parents, some books for my brother. But, I can't tell you about it.

Once I had realized and grasped the idea that we are soaking it in from every point in the globe, in terms of intelligence and information, it really resonated with the unofficial motto that we had around the building: "In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor".

Gathering up that much material, and not just me but every other shop in the building, there was a lot of worry attached. Am I missing something? Is there something important in that month old stack or that you're translating or haven't gotten to yet that affects a whole lot of other people? And that becomes a burden after a while. And it wasn't because we hated being in the military or didn't enjoy our jobs anymore. But it was a kind of pressure and a kind of weight that sat on you.

Leaving that culture, that culture of listening, there was definitely some transitions that had to be made. I came out of my time in the military with a certain set of skills and experiences that I didn't think was going to benefit me in the civilian world. I would go the job service and everything that I knew how to do was not anywhere to be found in terms of jobs. In some ways I think my present day experiences create a kind of full circle. Military to civilian, soldier to artist, listener to doer. The act of listening that I did, the ability to key in and hone in on syllables, words, sentences, and squeeze every bit of meaning out of what people are saying, has been an invaluable gift in my acting training. A military member, a spy, and an actor, those are two polar opposites almost. It's been a strange realization as to how those two worlds have collided and kind of came together and served one another. But the one has really informed the other in a strange and in an ironic way has made me a much better actor having been a military spy.

The idea of borders. Listening at that border. The border between north and south. The border between military and civilian. The border between listening and hearing. The border between text and subtext. Borders are not only physical; they're not only property lines or demarcation lines or something that can be seen on a map or chart. There's all sorts of borders in relationships, in geography, in nature, in art, and if we go up to the border and straddle it and even cross it, we make a further step to dissolving all borders. And being able to roam freely, in our ideas, in our hearts, in our intentions, in our actions, we can truly see that we don't have to have the borders.