TM 9-1575 Series
Technical Manuals
Depot-level deep dives on the watches worn in service: the history, the engineering, and the threads that tie a piece to the people who carried it. In the lineage of TM 9-1575, the 1945 War Department manual for servicing military timepieces.
TM 9-1575-0006A Bit of Good Luck
A G-Shock at Ten House on September 11
I remember laying there on the floor next to Smitty looking at my watch and praying for God to make it quick.
TM 9-1575-0005Time Stood Still
An NYPD officer’s black Timex, a gift from her mother at Academy graduation, and the timestamps she read off it on September 11, 2001. A first-person account by Sharon Kirby Mottola, NYPD (Ret.), as told for the Department’s 9/11 series.
0853. 0905. 1510. Sharon Kirby Mottola read the morning of September 11 off a black Timex her mother gave her at Police Academy graduation in 1986. Her account, in her own words: Red Hook Court, the pier that was meant to be a morgue, the Staten Island landfill, and why she never wore a watch again.
TM 9-1575-0004I Cannot Wear That Watch Today
Fourteen months at Ground Zero with POPPA, running peer support groups for cops who could not talk to anyone else. A first-person account by Dr. Richard L. Levenson, Jr., Psy.D., clinical psychologist and Police Surgeon, as sent to the Department.
A clinical psychologist spent fourteen months at Ground Zero with POPPA, running Critical Incident Stress Management groups for police officers. A Rolex Submariner from 1991 was on the wrist for every one of them, recording the time and date of each conversation. It has not been worn since.
TM 9-1575-0003On Time and In Rhythm
A Citizen Promaster Aqualand from the Persian Gulf tanker runs to two IEDs, and then to his son. A first-person account by SSG Eric Lindsey, U.S. Army (Ret.), as sent to the Department.
He was a merchant mariner on 9/10/2001 and a 33-year-old National Guard soldier not long after. The Citizen Aqualand he bought in Shiogama, Japan went with him through Iraq, an IED that destroyed his gun truck, Afghanistan, and a second blast that fractured his back. It is thirty years old, still running, and it belongs to his son now.
TM 9-1575-0002I Found the Weekender
A Timex Weekender and a women's Ironman, worn by a National Guard infantryman on September 11 and found again twenty years later. A first-person account by MAJ Joel Jessup, U.S. Army (Ret.), as sent to the Department.
He enlisted between junior and senior year of high school and was a Guard infantryman when 9/11 kicked off. He retired a Major in 2023 and took a patrol job eight months later. Two decades on he went down a watch rabbit hole, found the same Timex Weekender he wore then, and started building a collection with one watch from every era of conflict from WWI to OEF.
TM 9-1575-0001The Long Watch
Inside the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum on Fort Bragg. From the Devil's Brigade to a man who counted nineteen hundred days in a cage, the lineage of American special operations turns out to be a story about time.
The JFK Special Warfare Museum holds the lineage of Army special operations, from the First Special Service Force to the Green Berets. Read it closely and it is also a museum about time: raids timed to the second, exfils measured in minutes, and one officer who survived 1,903 days as a prisoner by refusing to lose count.
TM 9-1575-0000Time as Ordnance
In 1945 the US War Department published a manual on how to service a watch. TM 9-1575 is the document this section is named for, and the reason.
Mid-war, the US Army published a depot-level manual on maintaining watches and clocks. TM 9-1575 is why this section carries the name: a watch in service is ordnance, maintained like a weapon, because the time it keeps is part of the fight.