How pagers became a status symbol for Delta Force operators

Delta Force and Special Forces operators once relied on pagers.

I think it reasonable by now to say I have successfully experienced the life and the death of the pager. Pagers were around in the 1950s and 60s, important in the 1980s, very important in the 1990s, and now are all but dead, replaced by smartphones and similar technology.

Pagers are simple: they only receive signals and carry no transmitter in them. In other words, it is not possible to respond to a message on a pager. More often than not a message received on a pager would urge the recipient to get to a phone and call the sender for a full-duplex conversation.

The first experience I had with the magnificent device was in the Army’s Combat Diver (underwater operations) School in Key West, FL during my time in the Green Berets. There were no situations in our day-to-day operations that required an emergency recall of all the unit personnel. But our Commanding Officer came fired from the venerable Delta Force, who indeed required such a recall.

Before not too long we all found ourselves wearing pagers and scratching our heads. It seemed that the commander was pining away for his Delta Force days by introducing us to a measure of technology that we greatly did not need; wearing pagers did not lend itself well to men who were constantly in the sea!

The boss (commander) organized an on-call system giving the Staff Duty a second pager besides his own. The Staff Duty kept one man at the school headquarters for a period of 24 hours to answer phone calls and provide for the essential security inspections though the night.

He also organized our Dive Medical Technicians (DMT) to respond to any dive-related emergencies among our students and even severe compression injuries among the local civilian population, as we had dive injury medical treatment capabilities that even the local municipal hospital did not have.

And so it came that a DMT came down on the duty roster for Staff Duty. He now sported his Staff Duty pager, his DMT alert pager, and his own cadre member pager. All those and a knife and flashlight clipped to his tiny DMT shorts made him look like he was wearing the Bat Belt. Now that the boss had his pager infrastructure in place it came time for the no-notice emergency planning exercises.

And then it happened.

Combat Divers in basic underwater demolition training floatation vests and shorts. (Courtesy picture)

My pager sounded the alarm as it buzzed itself across my nightstand. A gander told me it was an emergency and to respond with no delay. I raced to the School toward the hour of midnight to spot a body lying in the parking lot. I crept up to it, and when I drew close enough I discovered it was a fellow SCUBA instructor lying on the pavement with a card containing his medical symptoms.

“Chuck – you’ve got to be sh*ttin’ me!!”

“Nope. Fraid not,” the body replied. “It’s the boss getting crazy with his pager network.”

The whole event went over like a pound of poo-poo in a punch bowl. The after-action review for the exercise almost lead to the lynching of the Boss, and we never had a similar event after that. What’s more, the men slowly stopped wearing their pagers altogether, and throughout the whole awkward event nothing was gained or lost.

Soon after, I went to the Delta Force where the pagers were back in full serious swing and there was no joking around with them this time. They were still rather new and, as a result, there was a bit of mystique about them and the men around town who wore them. This was in the ’90s and the men in the Unit wasted no time parading around the local pubs with their pagers clipped to their belts to entice females. It worked.

To better illustrate the strength of the pager as a status symbol, I can account for the time I rode shotgun with a Louisiana drug enforcement unit for several days. We busted suspects all day. I aided by helping with the searching of the suspects that we detained. I found some quite unusual stuff in the pockets of hoodies: a pipe, a river rock, a block of exotic hardwood, a toothbrush, and a slice of exposed bologna – a find that displeased me at length.

On as many as three occasions a day I frisk-found pagers. They were odd, too light to be pagers and the hooded clientele I got them from were not typical of people that could really afford to own and operate such a device.

Related: Before the Navy SEALs came the Underwater Demolition Teams

A Motorola pager. (Wikimedia Commons)

“They are fake pagers,” explained one cop. “The kids in these hoods buy them at quickie marts and wear them as status symbols. They are essentially empty black boxes with buttons on them.”

I just couldn’t imagine that.

Finally back home in the real world with Delta there came a night – a late night because these events are never convenient – that my pager went buzzing across my coffee table. I sat up and observed that there was a solid row of number threes on the screen indicating that I was to report to the Unit immediately for a real-world event. I sprang into action and learned as soon as I got there that we were presented with an airliner hijacking/hostage crisis event in Amsterdam.

The halls were buzzing with men preparing to launch overseas to where the highjacked airliner was. I ran into Major Pete B., my friend, and troop leader. He paused a moment and with a sly grin remarked:

“I’m glad to see you here, Geo. As cerebral as you are, I was afraid you woke to your pager, saw that it was only a row of 33s, and went back to sleep.”

By Almighty God and with honor,

geo sends

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in February 2022. It has been edited for republication.

Feature Image: The author (left) during assault training while in Delta Force. (Courtesy picture)

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