WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — One Kansas veteran who served the nation twice in the Army served as a first responder between his two stints.

Clearwater's Roger Dawson joined the Army right out of high school in 1960 and learned to become a Morse code intercept operator.

"In order to do this job, I had to have a top secret security clearance. And some people wouldn't be able to get that, but in a little town, you didn't have much trouble unless you had a record," Dawson said.

He was sent to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, where he spent more than two years intercepting messages from the North Vietnamese Army.

"Most of the things they sent were in code, so we'd be intercepting messages that were either a bunch of letters or a bunch of numbers or a mix of those," Dawson said.

After returning

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