Well as you can guess leaving home to go overseas for 18 months was very difficult, even though I knew I would be coming back in November, 6 months still seemed like a long time. Remember back then there were no internet or cell phones so communicating with home was mainly done by letter writing. Of course, there was a lot of crying at the airport but we made it through the best we could. My flight was not direct, the first stop was California for a long layover where I was able to call June to see how she was doing. Those times in the airports were long and boring. We always had to be in full uniform so we were often targets of religious groups especially Hare Krishna. They would surround me at times and bug the heck out of me, some were very pushy and not very pleasant so I had to keep moving through the airport. I’ll never forget getting on the plane that would take me over to Okinawa, it was huge with 3 rows of seats (3 seats on each side and 5 in the middle). The plane seemed only half full (many empty seats), so after we took off the stewardess seeing me in my uniform asked if I wanted to move to the center row that was completely empty, so I had 5 seats to myself for the entire trip to mainland Japan. I put the armrest up and was able to lay down for most of the flight. We had stopovers in Hawaii and Guam before we reached Japan. I landed in Hawaii in the middle of the night, it was raining and we couldn’t leave the terminal, that was my only experience ever in Hawaii. When I arrived at the airport in Naha Okinawa I was met by my sponsor who would help me find my luggage, and drive me to the airport. Just like in Pensacola, the airline lost my luggage and it took almost a week to get there. I again had to buy some clothes from the base commissary to get by. The ride to the base was sort of a culture shock. The roads were narrow and busy and all the signs were in Japanese. It was weird to see almost everything in Japanese and not English. Plus just seeing all the Japanese people (they were really Okinawans) and very few Americans on the ride I knew the next 18 months was going to be different from anything I had ever experienced.
LIFE ON OKINAWA
Okinawa is a very small island, and very populated, at least in the southern section where most of the military bases were located. All four major branches of the American military were represented on the island. The Air force had the biggest base called Kadena Air Base. We would spend a lot of time on that base in the next 18 months as it had everything, cloths department stores, food stores, dancing club and of course a lot of military airplanes. One jet that flew out of Kadena was the SR-71 Blackbird, known in that part of the world as the “Habu”. It was an impressive looking jet of black sinister appearance, great stealth, and lightning-fast. It got its name after the deadly Habu-cobra snake that populated the island of Okinawa. There were also a lot of Marine bases all throughout the island, though most were in the northern section. Okinawa was the main island used during the Vietnam war for training troops in jungle warfare since the northern part of the island was similar terrain to Vietnam. They would often say that when the Recon Marines came down from a month of training in those jungles, that you should try to stay away from the town of Kadena and other small towns where all the bars were located. They would often come down and create havoc and they liked to drink and fight. A friend of mine one night didn’t listen and ended up getting beat up by a bunch of Marines. There was also a Navy base on the eastern coast of the island where the Pacific Fleet would dock. I actually was not stationed on a Navy base, but an Army base called Torii Station located on the western coast of the island right on the China Sea. The base had a nice view of the China Sea though at the time the beaches on the base were small and rocky. I checked into the base and was assigned a room with 2 other guys, one whose name was Mike Hooker. Mike was a tough kid from Texas. He told me he joined the Navy to keep from going to jail as he got into a lot of trouble back home. Since sitting in your dorm room as a new guy was depressing and I needed friends, I started hanging out with Mike and a few other guys. When I first go there they assigned me to a work party before placing me in a Division where I perform my duties as a CT. I remember some guy walked past us and had a sort of blank stare, didn’t even acknowledge us. Someone there said he had been stationed on the USS Pueblo during its 11-month capture by the North Koreans and that he rarely talked to anyone. On the work party was a guy who claimed to be a Christian and invited me to his house for dinner with him and his wife. Being new and lonely I went. I hung out with him for a little while but stopped (more on that story in the chapter “Finding Jesus”). A few weeks later my friend John Convery who was with me in Bootcamp and school in Pensacola arrived. Me, John and Mike Hooker started to hang out a lot together. Torrii was a small base but had an outdoor swimming pool, a movie theater, EM Club (place for drinking and dancing), a gym and a baseball field. At first most of our time off was hanging out on base since none of us had a car. One night a bunch of us were hanging out on base and had been drinking. We walked past this car that belonged to a guy that Mike for some reason didn’t like. Mike jumps up on his car and puts his foot right through the guy’s windshield. In a panic, we all run because it surprised us all. Someone found out who did it and who was with Mike. We were all called in Captains Mast which is a military court made to punish guys who got in trouble. We all told our stories that we had no part of it. Mike vouched for us and we were all let go without punishment. As for Mike, he was demoted a rank and had to pay a big fine, though he didn’t seem to care. A few months later I bought a car and moved into an apartment complex right across from the base. To help me pay rent, Mike and John moved in with me and would live with me until I left to go home to marry June. I had my own room and they would sleep in the living room on Japanese futons. For the few months they lived with me we never cooked a meal since we always ate on base for free. We only kept junk food and beer in the apartment. Both Mike and John ended up buying motorcycles and parking them at night in our small apartment. In the beginning, we did a lot together. We would often drive around the island to different beaches to swim and hang out and go to visit some historical sights. Most of the sights were associated with the war (WWII). As I mentioned Okinawa was one of the bloodiest wars in the Pacific. There were a lot of sights commemorating certain events that happened, especially stories of suicide jumps from civilians and soldiers trying to escape the Americans. As I mentioned, to end the battle of Okinawa, the Navy bombarded the island (June’s Dad’s ship was part of the bombardment) and practically leveled the island. Even when I was there in 1976, 30 years after the war, they were still finding bombs that had not been detonated around the island. They would announce on the radio the location and inform people to stay clear of the area. I also got into snorkeling while over there. The water was beautiful and full of very colorful fish. One was called the Tigerfish which they say could be deadly if you came in contact with it. On one snorkel outing, we spotted a few swimming among the fish. We quickly surfaced and got out of there. At another snorkel outing, we were with a guy named Mike Brown who also hung out with us. Mike had a speargun with him and ended up spearing this long silver barracuda. They had very sharp teeth and were known to attack people in defense. Mike speared it and held it up and yelled that it was coming at us. Another time a bunch of sea turtles were swimming close to us as we were out snorkeling, they were harmless.
Of course, another popular activity was going out to the bars drinking. As I look back we spent far to much time doing that but at the time it was the thing young Sailors would do. The bars were often small and dirty. I learned to do card tricks that seemed to entertain the Okinawans we would meet. A popular activity was the Habu-mongoose fights. This was a fight to the death between the deadly Habu cobra snake and a Mongoose which was a long weasel that was fast and also had a deadly bite. These were supposedly illegal but we would occasionally stumble upon them in the towns where you could place a bet on which creature would win. The Habu won most of the time, but the mongoose would occasionally win. If you bet on the mongoose you could win big money, I never bet but they were interesting to watch. Every so often we would go onto Kadena Airbase to their dance club, it was huge, when June got there we would often go there to dance. One time before June got to Japan, the club hosted the American Rock band “Grassroots” they were popular in the 60s and 70s. A friend of mine who had his own band was the cover band that night and opened for them. At intermission, he invited me to go backstage to meet the band. I sat and had a beer with a couple of them before they went back on stage.
THE END OF FRIENDSHIPS
As I said Mike Hooker and John Convery were the guys I did the most with, since they were living with me. That started to change as one night Mike who had a short temper ended up pulling a knife on us, I can’t remember why. I remember asking him to leave and move back onto the base. He apologized but since I was going home to bet married soon I thought it was the best for him to leave. After that our friendship pretty much ended. John Convery also started to change. He rode his motorcycle a lot and ended up hanging out with a group of young Okinawan men who also rode. He would often bring them back to our apartment which I wasn’t very happy with. Mike was changing and seemed to like hanging out with them more than us Americans. He even started to date an Okinawan woman who worked on the base. She was much older than him and to tell you the truth not very pretty. Well, one night he was out drinking and riding his motorcycle with no helmet which was how most young men rode motorcycles on the island. Apparently from what I was told, he was coming around Kadena Circle going to fast and hit a curb, he had been drinking. He lost control of the bike and ended up crashing through a store window. He got seriously hurt and ended up in the hospital with his head split open. Since he had no family there and I was his roommate the base contacted me to tell me what happened. I asked if I could go see him and was given permission. John was laying in his hospital bed awake but very groggy and still hurting from the accident. His head was all bandaged up and had cuts all over his body, he was a mess. He told me they were shipping him to a hospital in Hawaii and he didn’t know if he would ever be back and I needed to bring all his belongings to the base. Before he went though he asked if I could bring his girlfriend to the hospital so he could say goodbye. I really didn’t want to because to tell the truth, I was embarrassed to be seen with her, but for John, I said yes. I arranged to meet her on the base after work one day. She also wanted to bring a friend of hers. I told them both to sit in the back seat of my car and lay on the floor. I then placed a blanket on them so no one would see them in my car (I told them I would get in trouble taking them off base, but was lying). I took them both to the hospital so they could say goodbye to John. After the visit, I dropped them off in town close to where they lived. John ended up being away for 6 months but came back. June and I were married at the time. He knocked on our door and we talked for a bit, I introduced June to him. He was never the same after the accident. The impact on his head seemed to have changed his personality, to tell you the truth he had become sort of strange. We really didn’t hang out with each other after that. Two years later in late 1979 while I was in Scotland, John Convery shows up. I was getting close to leaving Scotland and was told by my friends Al Nagle and Hink (more about them in the next chapter) that some guy named John Convery just checked into the base and was looking for me. I remember coming to the base to say hi, he was very friendly and glad to see me. He told me that after Okinawa he was sent to Misawa Japan for duty, got married to a local Japanese girl but it didn’t last. He still seemed different and I really don’t remember seeing much of him after that, as I was getting close to leaving Scotland. A couple of years later after I got out of the service and saw Al and Hink, they told me that John got picked on a lot while in Scotland, people just found him a bit strange. Just a few years ago I found a web site made for people who served as CT’s. You could log in your name and history of where you were stationed, which I did. I decided to look up John’s name to see what happened to him. I found his name with the service dates 1975-1995, apparently, he had made the Navy a career. To my surprise, at the end of his service entry were the words – ” R.I.P” followed by the date February 1, 1999. I was shocked to see my old friend had died. I don’t know what happened to him as I tried to find an obituary online but never did. I often wonder if his death had something to do with that accident on Okinawa, as he was never the same after that. I think of John every so often. Through Bootcamp, Pensacola, and part of Okinawa he was my closest friend. Even now I think of him whenever I hear a song from the band “America”. America was his favorite group, and he played their songs a lot when he roomed with me in Okinawa. R.I.P shipmate, I hope you found some peace the remaining years of your life.
OUR WEDDING AND RETURN TRIP TO OKINAWA
Well, it was finally time to go home, get married and bring June back with me. After being away 6 months and not seeing her I couldn’t wait. Our only communications for the past 6 months were letters. I was able to call her once and talk briefly. The only accessible phones were on base and you had to make an appointment and couldn’t talk very long because of the cost. June was a great letter writer and even started getting creative and making cassette tape recordings of her voice, which I loved. While I was away, June was busy taking care of all the wedding arrangements with the help of my Mom and hers. She often told me through letters and later on that her Dad had a hard time with the whole thing. When I look back I don’t blame him. As a father, I guess I would react the same. His baby girl was leaving home for the first time. To do that she was giving up her job and education, or putting them on hold which didn’t sit well with him. He tried to talk her out of it but we were determined to go through with our plans. I had secured the apartment, furnished it, and had it all ready for her to come to Okinawa. I had only one week of leave to fly home, get married, and come back.
Coming home after being away 6 months was great. Of course the airport reunion with my Mom, Steve and June was a happy emotional moment. It was a busy week as the wedding was just a few days away. I went to get my tuxedo. I had gone to get measured and fitted before I left for Okinawa, thank God back then I never gained any weight, I was as skinny as when I left 6 months earlier. The whole week was a blur and many details have slipped my mind. I do remember the night before the wedding a bunch of people who came in for the wedding were at my parent’s house on Atno Ave. I was standing in the kitchen next to a couple from Connecticut – John Cabral and Debbie Hadaway. I hadn’t seen them in years. John all of a sudden says “So where is the groom?”. I looked at him and said, “John it’s me David, I’m the groom”. He told me he was expecting someone much older looking and started to laugh. I was one week away from my 19th birthday and if you look at my wedding pictures I looked 15 years old. Our wedding was great, not only were all our family there but many High School friends with some as part of our wedding party. Also, some old friends from Connecticut, the Hadaway’s, and the Johns came to the wedding. June and I stayed a couple of nights at the Governor Morris Inn in Morris Township, then stayed the last night at her parents before leaving. I’ll never forget how quiet her house was the morning we left. Her father could barely say anything as he was very emotional. He said goodbye to us and left for work (he was a school teacher at Dover HS). He couldn’t go with us to the airport because it was too hard for him to say goodbye to June. So Steve, my Mom, and June’s mom took us to Kennedy Airport, where it was an emotional goodbye. We took a flight to Japan (mainland) with a layover in Alaska. I remember the plane hit a lot of turbulence on the way to Japan and I got really sick on the plane. When it landed the crew had to wait for me to get out of the bathroom before they could depart as I was throwing up. It was an embarrassing way to begin our marriage. The plane to Okinawa was leaving the next day, so we stayed in a nice hotel in Tokyo. That evening we ate in a restaurant ( I guess I was feeling better) that had a 360-degree view of the entire city. The next day we flew to Okinawa, where we would spend our first year of marriage. So, in reality, June and I never really had an official honeymoon. Though, to this day we can say we had a one-day honeymoon in Tokyo Japan.
NEWLYWEDS IN OKINAWA
I barely remember our time at the airport when we landed on Okinawa, but I do remember part of the ride home to our apartment. As I said, Okinawa was small, and very densely populated in the southern section where I was stationed. Though the island had a lot of beautiful, beaches and other nice parts around the island, the small towns were not only crowed but a bit dirty. Most people were poor and lived either on small farms in rickety homes or in crowded towns similar to our urban areas in the US, but on a smaller scale. In most places they had very poor to an almost non-existent sewer system, What they did have were these open sewers that ran next to the sidewalks called “Benji ditches”. They had a very unpleasant smell in the warmer months. As June and I were heading to our apartment from the airport we were going through one town that had these “Benji Ditches”. We stopped at a light and already June is looking around probably thinking “I thought Okinawa was a tropical paradise, where the hell am I?”. Just then a man walking on the sidewalk stops and takes a pee in the ditch right in front of June on her side of the car. This was a normal sight, as you would also see women squatting and relieving themselves in these ditches. I thought June was going to say “I’m catching the next flight out of here, see you in a year” but of course she didn’t. I was excited for June to get to our apartment. The apartment complex was very small, made of concrete with windows that had bars on them, they were to protect the window during the typhoons – more on them later. So they were not appealing looking from the outside. The inside was not much better as we had a kitchen, one bedroom and a small living room, and a bathroom. The entire apartment was probably only about 400 sq. ft. in size at best. We lived on the bottom floor. The best thing was it was across the street from the base and close to my work site which was up the hill. I didn’t work on the base but at a small Communications Facility up the hill about one mile from our apartment (see the picture of the round antenna). The complex also had a great view of the ocean from the roof. The roof of the building was flat surrounded by a 3-4 ft concrete wall. It was made for people to go and sit and look at the view. We would often have parties on the roof and look at the ocean and the outdoor bullfights which were right next to our apartments. The bullfights were great entertainment for the locals and for us. They would bring two huge bulls inside a large ring, place them nose to nose and then entice them to try to push each other out of the ring. People would be cheering for the bull they wanted to win, usually because they bet on them. It was great entertainment for those of us who lived in the apartments.
Our complex had many young couples around our age and we ended up becoming good friends with some of them. They were from different branches of the service, not just Navy but Army, Air Force, and Marines. One couple that was our age that we became very close to and still stay in contact with to this day were Pete and Gay LaRoche. They were from New Hampshire, Pete was in the Army. They lived right next to us. There were many nights when we would all sit outside, about 4-5 couples and drink and listen to music. One couple who also hung with us were Mormons. They didn’t drink and never tried to push their beliefs on us. The only strange thing they did was they stored up lots of cans of food in their apartment on these shelves. They believed that one day the world was going to face a large famine and were going to be ready for it when the famine came. I told them if it came while we were still living there I knew where to go to get food. One night when we were all sitting outside, an Okinawan guy went up to the roof and stood on the edge. He was screaming and sounded very distraught, he was drunk. He took his sandals off and threw them down to the ground, which was a sign he was about to jump. All of a sudden these to big Marines reach over and grab him and pull him to safety. We heard they then beat the crap out of him after they brought him down from the roof. He was probably better off jumping. I don’t know why the guy was up there but it never happened again.
June settled into her new life. It must have been difficult for her, being away from home for the first time, no job, she would just sit around the apartment and wait for me to get off of work. I worked shift work – 2 days (7am-3pm), 2 mids (11:00pm – 7am), 2 evenings 3pm – 11:00pm (one day was a double shift) so we did 6 work shifts in 5 days then we had 3 days off. The days I had mids (11:00pm – 7:00am) June would try to stay up as long as she could (sometimes all night) so she was on my schedule and sleep when I slept which was all day after a mid-shift. I couldn’t call her from work so it must have been long nights for her trying to stay awake but I appreciated it as being newlyweds you wanted to spend all your time together. One night when I was on a mid-shift, I called into the local radio station, which was run by the military, to have them play our wedding song by Stevie Wonder “For Once in My Life”. I thought it would lift her up on a long night. She never heard it as she said she dozed off to sleep, but appreciated my efforts.
All my days off I made sure I spent every minute with June, she sacrificed a lot coming to Okinawa, and of course being newlyweds we loved spending time together, just like the summer of 75′. We would go to various beaches which were the biggest attraction of Okinawa. The beaches were white sand and the ocean a beautiful blue color, like most tropical islands around the world. As long as you stayed out of the dirty towns, Okinawa was like a tropical paradise. A few times we would take off for a couple of days and head to the northern section of the island and stay at these mini resorts built on the beach. We did a lot of sightseeing of Japanese shrines and WWII monuments. We both loved to go to Kadena Airbase for the day. We would often go to the base like many others and sit to watch the military jets take off and land. Especially the Habu stealth jet as it was a magnificent sight to watch. Kadena was a very popular base because of everything it had to offer the military people. When you were on the base it felt like you were home in the states and not on Okinawa. To this day I can still remember it was while June and I were riding on that base that we heard over the radio the news that Elvis Presley had died. Funny how the one place that felt like home was the place we heard that news.
One of the great things about being overseas was experiencing the different cultures you would not get to, living in the US. The Okinawan culture was unique with many festivals and traditions foreign to us. One such festival was called “Obon”. Obon is a 3 day holiday set aside during the summer to honor deceased ancestors. Many Okinawans believe that after people die, they continue to exist in the spiritual world where they sometimes continue to exert powerful influences over the living. The festival was marked by dancing on the streets with drums and other instruments. June and I along with other couples from our apartment attended a festival that summer and had a great time. It was these types of activities that made our time away from home enjoyable and have created wonderful memories. Another memory from Okinawa was a puppy we decided to purchase we called “Rusty”. He was a mixed breed rescue dog that someone talked us into buying. He was cute as most puppies were and we quickly fell in love with him. I remember one time right after we got him, June and I were in the house and for some stupid reason, I decided we should both learn how to use the fire extinguisher in our apartment. I was reading the directions of what to do and pulled the ring from the extinguisher. Well, it went off and started spraying all over our apartment until it emptied. We had this blue film over everything. June and I started to clean and move things out of our apartment, we looked down and there was Rusty doing the same with his toys. Carrying them one by one out of the apartment. We started to laugh and it helped a very stressful situation. We soon found out though that bringing a dog home was not only costly but they also had to be first shipped to Hawaii for a time of quarantine before they could be sent stateside. June and I decided that it was too much of an expense to take him with us when we leave so we arranged to give him to some guy and his wife who lived in base housing. We cried when he came to pick him up. A few months later he and his wife invited us over to see Rusty. He had grown but still seemed to remember us. We left there a bit sad for two reasons; seeing Rusty made us miss him again and the new owner had Rusty tied out in the backyard in the dirt. The owner was a big guy and would yell at him if he barked. We hoped he was treating him well but both had a feeling for some reason he wasn’t. We never visited him again it was too hard.
TYPHOONS, TSUNAMIS AND TROPICAL CREATURES
Like any place in the world, nothing is perfect. Along with the dirty towns we lived near, the climate, especially during the summer months, was hot and humid. Our apartment had no air-conditioning so you felt it all the time. June loved the humid weather and often took advantage and would often sit outside our apartment in the sun, getting tan, and losing weight. She also totally transformed her look by dying her hair blonde. If I must say, between her tan, and newly blonde hair, she was hot looking. Of course, there were other living creatures that loved the hot, humid weather such as tropical insects and small lizards called Geckos (like our friend in the Geico commercial but not as cuddly-looking). These creatures thrived in this type of weather and often right inside our apartment. We would often be visited by these little gecko lizards who would run around our apartment, sometimes across the headboard of our bed in the middle of the night. The insects all seemed larger than normal especially the spiders that would invade our apartment, some with lots of colors which signaled they were dangerous. Killing them was an adventure, they seemed to thrive on the poison we would spray on them. Once when I went outside to the enclosed dumpster behind our apartment, which was right outside our door, a larger flying insect was sitting on the hatch, I guess sunbathing. I didn’t want to get close to it so I threw a rock to scare the creature and it let out this horrific screech and flew away. To this day I still don’t know what it was but I was always careful from that point on when going out our back door. The Pacific was also known for its share of Typhoons. They are like hurricanes but on an island as small as Okinawa they were horrific. One time before June got there I was at work when a typhoon hit the island and we were in a Condition Red which meant you couldn’t go outside. So I was stuck at work for a couple of days. When the food ran out we had to eat K-Rations which are small emergency meals packaged to stay edible for many years. Some were telling us they were leftover from WWII. I’m not how true it was but they sure tasted like it. When a typhoon would hit the island, we would have “typhoon parties” with other couples at our apartments. The men would go up on the roof and drink and see how long we could stand outside. Tsunamis were not as prevalent, but the year June and I were on the island we had a Tsunami warning. An earthquake in the Solomon Islands had apparently created and Pacific-wide Tsunami. We had received warning that it may be headed for Okinawa and if so they would be evacuating as many U.S military people as they could. Those they couldn’t evacuate would receive instructions on how to get to higher ground. It was a scary time since Okinawa was very small (looks like a pinhead on a map) and even the highest ground may not be high enough. Fortunately, the all-clear was given as the Tsunami never made it as far as Okinawa.
CT’S – “WE BUGGED THE WORLD”
As I mentioned I worked at a small Communication Site just about a mile from our apartment. The site was fully secured and was guarded by Marines due to it’s TOP Secret Secret nature. Our main mission was keeping track of Russian Navy ships around the world. I can say all this now but couldn’t back then, so June never knew what I did, only that it was all Top Secret. I loved the job and always felt I was doing my part in keeping the world safe. As I look back it was one of the most exciting jobs I ever had. Learning new skills, using the different electronic surveillance equipment, working with Top Secret information material and just working together in a common mission to keep the world safe, excited me. I was told that is was on a submarine in the Atlantic when a group of CT’s intercepted transmission of the Soviets back in 1962, they would become world news. They discovered a secret mission that Russia was moving Nuclear Missles to Cuba for a possible attack on the US. This event is known in our history books as the “Cuban Missile Crisis”. The communications that the CT’s intercepted eventually made its way to the desk of President Kennedy. He decided to deploy US Naval ships to the area as a blockade, which helped stop a possible war between the US and Russia. A supervisor on a shift I worked with in Scotland said he was on duty that night and all hell broke loose. The events are told in the book “Red November” which I ended up reading years later. Though our main mission was Russia, we also kept an eye on the Chinese, especially since Okinawa was close in proximity to China. I was switched for the Russian mission to the Chinese mission which I really enjoyed as I got to learn new equipment and used my morse code skills a bit more. Everything we did had a direct connection with NSA (National Security Agency) and the CIA back home in Washington. All information we intercepted was sent back to both groups for their analysis. We often had people from NSA come out to visit our sites and work with us. As I said, it was exciting work and I loved it. Along with the Marines guarding our facility, we were also trained to defend the site with them in the event we came under attack. I was placed on what was called the “Emergency Reaction Team”. We went on a one-day training exercise with a group of Marines up in the mountains to learn how to use an M-16 and a M-240 machine gun. An attack never happened to the site but one time there were rumors going around that a group of Okinawans were planning an attack on our site. Something was going on between the Okinawan government and our government about land leasing on the island. The US Military leased all the land the bases were on from the Okinawan government, and the lease was apparently due to expire. They were in negotiations of a new lease but in the meantime, word got around that some radical groups that were against the US Military’s presence on the island were planning multiple attacks on certain sites, our site was on their list. So the “Emergency Reaction Team” for each shift had the “stand ready” command just in case it happened. We had to stay down in the bunker with our weapons during our shifts. Well, nothing happened as we found out the new lease was successfully signed and all calmed down.
SHORT TIMER
In the military when your tour of duty was winding down and you were 100 days from leaving you were called a “short-timer”. I think it was a term used during the Vietnam War. Well, my time was winding down I was now a “short-timer”. I, like everyone else, would keep a map of the island made up of squares. You would color in the squares which represented “a day”. as each day passed until the entire map was red which meant you were going home. Along with the excitement that you would soon be going home, was also the excitement of your next tour of duty. When I was due to leave Okinawa I would have just under 2 years left of my 4-year enlistment obligation. So, both June and I were excited about where we would go next after Okinawa. Of course, June was hoping that they would send us back stateside for my last 18 months. I knew that going stateside was a longshot. I was being told by my supervisors and others who had been in the Navy for a while that most likely they would keep us somewhere in the Pacific. Rarely do they move people across the world, especially during there first 4 years in the service. You would have to reenlist to get the duty of your choice. So I was preparing June for that news that we would probably be coming back to the Pacific, maybe Guam or Hawaii, but mostly likely Misawa Japan. There were a bunch of guys who left right before me who were sent there so I was being told to expect the same. I’ll never forget the night my orders came in. I had just arrived for my evening shift (3:00 pm) and was told by my supervisor that my orders came in. They handed me a large manila envelope all sealed, so not even my supervisors knew. I sat down, nervous, getting ready to see Misawa Japan on the top page. I looked and to my surprise, my orders read “EDZELL SCOTLAND”. I yelled, “I’m going to Scotland”. My supervisor and others who were standing there were stunned but happy for me. I was so excited I asked if I could quickly go home to tell my wife as I couldn’t call her since we had no phones. Since I lived so close they let me. I jumped in the car and pulled into our apartment complex parking lot. There was June sitting outside by herself doing crossword puzzles, as was her normal routine. She asked why I was home and I told her I got my orders. Of course, she was anxious to hear where we would be going and hoped it would be the states. I told her we are going to “Scotland!!!”. I remember that she tried to look excited but I could tell she was a bit disappointed but glad we were not coming back to the Pacific. The only stipulation for me going to Scotland was I had to agree to extend my service time by 3 months since Scotland was a minimal 2-year duty tour. I happily agreed to the extension in order to go to Scotland. So instead of getting out in October 1979 I would get out in January 1980, it was well worth the 3-month extension.
TIME TO GO HOME
As the day drew closer for us to leave Okinawa, June and I had to figure out the timing of when she would leave. We had to sell our car and all our furniture. A few weeks before we left all of our friends took us out for a going-away dinner, it was a great night We sold everything except for our bed. Our good friends Pete and Gay said they would do that for us after we left. They invited us to move into their apartment and stay for the last week. We were very grateful and we moved our bed into their apartment in their living room. June left a few days before me. She first flew to Tokyo Japan then took a non-stop flight to Chicago and then a connecting flight to Newark. All this by herself, hard to believe but June was much more daring back in her younger days. I left Okinawa a few days later, with many good memories, good friends left behind, most we have never heard from again. My flight was not so direct as it was a military hop. We first landed in Tokyo Japan then onto Anchorage Alaska, each time we had to get off the plane for a layover. I remember when I got off the plane in Alaska, the customs officer saw my uniform and asked me where I was coming from. I told him I had just spent a year of duty in Japan. He said, “Welcome home, sailor”. It was a great feeling. I went outside, it was dark and snowing and I reached down and touched the ground, happy to be on U.S. soil again. After Alaska was Travis Air force base, then Edwards Air Force base both in California. Then came a 2-hour taxi ride to LA airport. After stops in Denver and Washington, then finally after traveling through 11 times zones, 30+ hours after leaving Okinawa, I arrived in Newark Airport, greeted by June and my family. With the vacation days I had accumulated, plus built-in extra days the Navy allowed for travel, I had 45 days of leave before I had to head to my next duty station. June and I got to enjoy both Thanksgiving and Christmas with our families. It was a great time and was so good to be home for that length of time before heading to our next adventure – one of the most memorable places I had even been in the world, EDZELL SCOTLAND.
