lynn kopatich

In 1967 I learned that Les Widick is my father, that he joined the Marines at the tail end of WW2 when he was 16 years old, and in 1967, he was assigned to a year in Vietnam.  I met Les in 1987 and we had an off-again, on-again relationship until the 90s when he decided it wasn’t all that bad to have a daughter like me.  We emailed and spoke by phone.  I stayed with Les and Pat in Florida several times and they visited me in NC on several occasions as well.

Les wrote his Vietnam story in 1996 and sent copies to his children and a copy to me.  Since I am older than the others, Vietnam was my era, and 20 years after his death, I decided that his story should be made public.  I cleaned it up a bit and added some pictures.  Now I know where I got my penchant for writing life stories.

In his original manuscript, Les used both knots and miles per hour when referring to his plane’s speed.  I left these terms in the story as he wrote them because I didn’t want to add incorrect information to his story.

Les was from Burlington, Iowa, and met my mother, Mary, at Burlington High School.  When Mary became pregnant with me, Les wanted to marry her,  but in his words, ‘she wouldn’t have me’.  When I was 3 months old, Mary gave me to the Yohe family who adopted and raised me.  Les and Mary remained enamored with each other for the rest of their lives and I called them the Teenagers.

Les joined the Marine Corps when he was a teenager and served in Korea and Vietnam.   He met Pat in Pennsylvania in the early 1950s.  They married and had five children, 4 girls and a boy.  After  24 years, Les retired from the Marines in 1970.   The family moved to Florida and they lived there until their deaths.

My first chance of disaster came about December 15, 1967.  It was a routine mission in the “Tally HO” area to seed mines at the ferry crossing.  These were 500-pound bombs with a magnetic fuse.  When the bombs were dropped, they didn’t go off but would lay in the river until a boat or something passed through the magnetic field, then BOOM!  It was a moonlit night with a few puffy clouds.  This ferry crossing was about 35 miles north of the DMZ although that had no bearing on what was about to happen.  My B/N (bombardier/navigator) was Jack, and we took an easy path down the river.  I was at 3000 feet with an airspeed of 400 miles an hour.  As we continued down the river and made the turn, Jack told me that he had lost his aim point.  I couldn’t believe it.  This was as easy as they come.  Nevertheless, I turned around and went back to our initial point to make another run.  It was so well-lit that I could visually hit the initial point.

I slowed the plane to 300 knots so that it would be even easier for Jack to get on his aim point.   As we went down the river, suddenly, fire opened from the ground, and it was like the Fourth of July with anti-aircraft fire in front of the plane, on both sides, and in the back.  With only one in ten pieces of ammo being a tracer, I realized how much steel was out there that I could not see.  The bombs started to drop, and I continued until they were all gone.  The fire from the ground had stopped so I was safe.  When the last bomb left the plane, I went full throttle, pulled around to the left and climbed.  I wanted to see where all that fire came from.  I couldn’t see anything even with the moonlight, but I knew there were people down there who didn’t like me.  I knew better than to fly the same route twice.  I was lucky and I didn’t make the same mistake again.

“My name is not on the Wall!”

I applied for and received my first R&R at Christmas so I could be home with my family.  I felt some apprehension as I boarded the 707 plane at Da Nang, but the plane took off destination Honolulu.  With a refueling stop in Guam, the plane wasn’t on the ground for more than thirty minutes, and we were on to Honolulu.  Less than 14 hours after leaving Da Nang, the beautiful Hawaiian Islands came into view, and we landed at Honolulu International Airport.  While going through customs, it seemed like an eternity for Pat and the children who were on the other side of the glass.  It only took about 25 minutes, and I was free to go, and we went home.  It was great to be with my family who I had left four months earlier.

We drove across the Pali to our rented Kaneohe house which was stuck into the side of the mountain.  All the houses were like this, not just ours, but the driveway had what appeared to be a 40-degree slope to get to the house.  The kids all piled out of the car at the bottom so the muffler wouldn’t drag, and we made it up the driveway.  I didn’t think that Pat could make it through a year going up this driveway without an accident, but she made it with flying colors. Like many other tasks, when the pressure was on, Pat came through with no problems.

We celebrated Christmas, with our five children, Pat and me.  We went to Waimea Beach to watch a surfing contest.  It was great because I hadn’t seen one before and the waves were the highest on North Beach where Waimea is located.  After spending the rest of my R&R not doing much, Pat arranged a night out to see Don Ho sing and other entertainment.  We had a wonderful friend who did the babysitting.  All too soon, the five days were up, and I was taken back to the airport to take another 707 back to Da Nang. The R&R was wonderful and did wonders for my spirits.  Now it was back to flying missions.

Next came a daytime mission in South Vietnam just south of the DMZ.  We went across the beach at more than 500 miles an hour.  As I crossed the beach I was surprised when I looked down and saw a man standing in the sand holding a rifle.  I mentioned to the B/N that a man was down there, but I don’t think he saw him.  We continued to our target and then flew out of there.  When we got back to base, we looked and there was a hole where a bullet had gone into the fiberglass radome on the front of the plane.  It was on the B/N’s side of the plane.

“My name is not on the Wall!”

I had another Rolling Thunder mission, and for some reason, I had a B/N named Rudy Schwanda.  He was a very enthusiastic person and he had planned the mission before I even looked at the flight schedule.  I looked at what he planned, and it all looked good to me.  The target was down in the southwestern part of North Vietnam and was supposed to be a military installation. The only thing I didn’t like about the way Rudy planned the flight was that he had me pulling off to the right and I always pulled off to the left.  I had a bad habit of looking down to see whether anyone was firing at me, and I never pulled off right because I couldn’t see as well because the B/N sat on the right side of the plane, and I had to look over him.

After the bombs dropped and I was pulling off the target to the right, it was a milky night, and I became confused.  By the time I realized what was happening, I was losing altitude and heading to the ground.  I taught flight to students at Pensacola for three years and I knew that I had to recover from this altitude.  I knew that the proper procedure was to roll the wings level and reduce the throttle setting to idle.  I leveled the wings, but I was still losing altitude.  I started to watch the altimeter and saw it go through 2500, 2000 feet and then I really pulled back on the stick.  I failed to pull the throttles back to idle so I was going really fast by this time.  I was going 500 knots and the plane was still losing altitude.  I saw the altimeter read 1500 and I was pulling very hard on the stick.  I looked out the canopy to the left and I saw a shadow.  I looked out to the right and saw that I was in a valley between two hills.  I pulled out of the dive and the altimeter hit 1500 feet.  I was lucky enough to hit the valley instead of one of the mountains.  When I saw the maps, I realized how close I had come to disaster.  Rudy never said anything, and I didn’t either.  The G-meter read over 6 Gs and I downed the airplane to have them check for too many Gs on the plane.

Lynn’s note:  Rudy Schwanda 1943-2022.  Rudy stayed in the Marine Corps and retired as a Lt. Colonel.  He received the Silver Star for his service and did additional tours in Vietnam.

“My name is not on the Wall!” 

Once in Da Nang, George, one of the pilots from the squadron I was going to join, came with a Jeep to pick up me and my baggage.  He took us to the squadron area, and I left my baggage in a hut that was to be my home.  Then we walked to the mess hall, and I was ready for a good meal.  I met many people at the mess hall that I had known at Cherry Point.  Everyone was interested in the new blood for it meant that they were one month closer to going home.

Breakfast tasted great.  All you can eat – bacon, eggs, toast, coffee, and a few other choices if you want them.  The food category appeared to be the one fact of life that might improve in the combat zone.  I seldom ate at home.  Coffee was always available in the ready room, and I could always find a sweet roll from the snack bar.  There was outstanding food in GCI (ground-controlled interception) squadron when I was in Korea and Da Nang seemed to be almost as good.  With the squadron flying the airplane that I would fly, the A6A Intruder, I could have gone to either Da Nang or Chu Lai.  I chose Da Nang because I thought that I would receive my mail faster.  I suppose that it didn’t make much difference, but Da Nang was my choice.

Checking into the squadron was like old home week.  Everyone had been in one squadron or the other back at Cherry Point.  I spent the next three days getting used to the weather and being briefed on the rules of engagement and all the problems of flying in Vietnam.  Finally, I got to fly my indoctrination flight.  This meant going up with another pilot and flying around the local area looking at all the fields that might be used for an emergency landing.  These were Hue, Phu Bai, and Con Thien.  Then we flew over to Ashau Valley to have a look around.  We had twenty-eight 500-pound bombs on board and after looking over the valley, we were supposed to drop them on a target.  The valley had been in the news before I left the States and there was a big story about an Air Force pilot getting caught at the field there and he went out on the wing of an AD Skyraider that another pilot had flown in to get him.  I was amazed that he was able to hang onto the wing while the pilot flew him out.

After this, we looked at the Ho Chi Min Trail where it crossed into the valley, and we dropped six bombs on the path that crossed the mountain and went on to drop the rest of our load where a stream ran through the valley.  A Colonel at the 1^st Marine Air Wing decided this would be a good idea, so we dropped the bombs where the stream crossed the trail and, when the rains came, the VC wouldn’t be able to cross.  It was a real mess down there because the bombs made a muddy mess.  The only problem was that we didn’t have a monsoon season.  Oh well, we dropped 22 five-hundred-pound bombs in the mess and then we went home.

My first combat flight was back into the valley.  It was a daytime flight, and you don’t get many daytime flights.  Once again, I spent considerable time looking at things in the valley.  Later, I worried whether I was being fired on by the VC (Viet Cong) from the mountains on either side of me.  I thought that it might be really bad to get shot down by rifle fire.  The mountains were only about three miles apart and the Ashau Valley ran down between them.

Once again, I dropped either six or twelve bombs on the trail and put the final bombs down below on the dump where the stream crossed the trail.  I went back to Da Nang and made a practice GCA (ground-controlled approach) landing and called it quits for the day.

I eased into the “Rolling Thunder” flights.  This was an Air Force code word for missions north of the DMZ (demilitarized zone).  We normally worked the area between the sixteenth and seventeenth parallel which was an area about 65 miles long by 30 miles wide.  The Ho Chi Min Trail was on the western edge of the area, and I can’t believe anyone could live anywhere in the area because we were up there nightly dropping bombs.  We would take off from Da Nang with a load of 28 500-pound bombs.  This area was called the “Tally-HO” area and was only 20 minutes or about 100 miles north of Da Nang.  We would come in from the sea and turn our lights off before crossing the shore.  Then we would look for moving targets for about fifteen or twenty minutes, drop our load of bombs on our pre-briefed targets or we could drop them on any other target we wanted to, but we had to put at least 6 bombs on the pre-briefed target. Then we went back out to sea, put our lights on and went home.  The reason that I can’t believe that anyone was able to live there was because we went up there every night and we would drop the bombs anywhere in the 60 miles.  It must have been a terrible place to live because bombs were going off all night long.  We had sixteen planes, and the Air Force and others hit the area during the daytime.  Most of our pre-briefed targets were a truck park or a ferry crossing.  Sometimes it would be an airfield, a grass strip that was impossible for an aircraft of any size to use.  I would love to go to this area to see what it looks like today.

Occasionally I received anti-aircraft fire on some missions and the next day I would spend most of my time looking at aerial photos trying to determine where they had guns set up.  I would drop my bombs on this area until I was shot at again.  I only saw fire once after dropping my bombs.  I really don’t know what it was that I hit but after the bombs went off, something on the ground lit up, possibly a truck or a fifty-five-gallon drum of gasoline.

My next mission was a night mission, and it could be at any time during the night.  I thought that 4 or 5 AM was the best time and everyone would be tired or asleep, but I had to fly when I was told to fly the mission.  We had 28 500-pound bombs and flew up and down throughout the 65 miles of the area just north of the DMZ.  We had been briefed on a target and we had to drop 6 bombs on this target.  The rest of the time we looked for moving vehicles.

Occasionally, I would have a Rolling Thunder flight and I would put more effort into this flight just because of the location.  Our targets on these flights were usually a military installation, a bridge, or some other infrastructure.  Since these were only occasional flights, I didn’t pay much attention to them unless they were near Hanoi or a place deep up north.

In late October we were assigned a target on a bridge that was just east of Hanoi.  Hugh was the pilot and Steve was his B/N (bombardier/navigator).  We all knew about the mission and, of course, worried whether Hugh would make it back alright.  That night, they had a target time of ten o’clock.  When their time came to return, there was no sign of Hugh’s plane and we all tried to think of a reason for the plane to be at another field or somewhere else.  It turned out that nothing was possible except that Hugh and Steve were knocked down.  It made a big difference in the squadron for the next few days.  Hugh had called ‘feet dry’, a code word we had for announcing that we had crossed the beach but there was no call of “feet wet” as reported by another plane that was in on the mission.  Now we had two men missing in action.

Lynn’s note: Hugh and Steve were both KIA (Killed in Action) that night per a list of VIETNAM AIR LOSSES, USAF/USN/USMC compiled by Chris Hobson and Grumman Aircraft Corporation and reissued 1992.

This was followed a month later by the commanding officer of the squadron being knocked down on a Rolling Thunder mission.  Lew lived next to me in Cherry Point.  He was going on R & R in Hawaii to meet his wife just about a week later.  It’s terrible to lose somebody and it is unusual to lose the commanding officer, but it happened to us.  Lew wasn’t the greatest pilot in the world and did some things that weren’t highly recommended.  It was said that he would come in at 500 feet or below, drop his load of bombs, and pull up to 1500 feet then continue at this altitude.

Lynn’s note: Lew and Bob (his navigator/bombardier) were both KIA that night per the list of VIETNAM AIR LOSSES, USAF/USN/USMC compiled by Chris Hobson and Grumman Aircraft Corporation, reissued 1992.

We had one other set of flights that was about as easy as could be and they were called a TPQ flight after the radar that they used.  After you took off and climbed out from Da Nang, you called the radar people and told them where you were.  They would tell you to take a heading at a certain altitude between 20,000 and 30,000 feet.  You told them how many bombs you had and once they identified you, they would turn you to another heading.  You would continue that heading until you came to the drop point, and they told you that you had three, two, and one second to go to the drop point.  Then they said ‘Mark’ and you dropped all your bombs by saying “Mark!”.  It was an easy mission and most of them were in South Vietnam.  It usually didn’t take more than 30 minutes and if you went out right away, you could finish the mission and be back on the ground within 45 minutes.

Sometimes I would return to the flight line about 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning and I would be asked if I wanted to turn around and fly another flight.  It usually was an ordnance man, and I couldn’t say no to them.  It was a lot of work loading 28 bombs on a plane and they were willing to do the work, so I couldn’t refuse to fly no matter how tired I was.  Usually, they had just taken rocket or mortar fire on the base, and it was up to me to get those no-good so and so’s.  After they got the plane ready, I would go out and fly a TPQ flight off the end of the runway.

We received incoming fire every other night while I was in Vietnam.  The night before I was to leave to come home, something hit about 500 feet from the hut where I lived. Another night, there was an attack at 7 PM and I ran out of the club with a drink in my hand heading towards our bomb shelter.  They usually tried to put their ordnance on the flight line or the runway.  It’s odd because the damage to our morale would have been much worse if they hit our quarters.

Back to flying again.

I had another night in April 1968 that should not have happened as it did,  I had someone other than Jack as a B/N.   We were going on a TPQ flight, and it was raining as I taxied out.  I noticed that I didn’t have any windshield air.  It was the first time that happened to me, and I didn’t know whether it was serious or not.  I asked the B/N if he wanted to go without the air.  I said that I could see the center line of the runway, so I didn’t taxi back and take another plane.  This was a mistake.  I taxied out and lined up on the center line of the runway.  It was raining harder as I began the take-off roll.  As the plane picked up speed, I immediately lost the center line.  I watched for the left side of the runway because I saw the centerline go off to my right.  I couldn’t see anything except rain.  All of a sudden, I saw the runway light under the left wing.  All I could think of was that the bomb dump and the fuel pits were ahead of me.  I pulled back on the stick and was surprised when the plane left the ground.  I was flying.  I went on instruments to fly the plane out of there and somehow, we completed our mission.  When we came back it was no longer raining and we landed and taxied.   I wrote on the yellow sheet that it had no windshield air, and it needed to be fixed.

“My name is not on the Wall!”

Soon it was September, and I was waiting for my orders to the USA.  I was very happy when I got on that commercial 707 and left Vietnam for the last time.  All I could think about was that I was going home.  I had made it through my year in Vietnam.

I left on September 5^th, 1968.  My name wasn’t on the wall!  It possibly could have been, possibly should have been.  But with luck and the grace of God,

“My name is not on the Wall!”  

The Tet Offensive began at the end of January 1968.  It was really something.  During the night we had an attack that hit the flare locker.  The base was all lit up by the flares and there was firing everywhere.  I really don’t know what happened, but someone said that they saw three hundred bodies in a pile on a corner in town.  Another person said that an Air Force pilot was receiving machine gun fire as he taxied in from landing.  For security purposes, we immediately lost all the waitresses in the mess hall and people who were working in the PX were no longer allowed in the gate.  It really put a damper on all activities for about a month.  Even our mamasans weren’t allowed in and that meant we had to make our own beds.

About three days later they brought in artillery and put them outside the fence across from our huts.  It was one loud bang after another all night long.  If we landed after midnight, we were forced to go to Thailand and de-brief then return to Da Nang after daylight.  The reason was that they didn’t want to lose any more aircraft.  We had two planes that were hit and burned in the initial attack.  We brought in two more planes from the Philippines, and I supposed we could keep doing that.  It took about a month before we got our waitresses back in the mess hall and club.  And, best of all, our mamasans came back to the huts.

Soon it was February 18^th which was my real glory day.  On the night of the 17^th, I was in the back of our hut with a couple of guys when someone came in and said, “Guess who has Phuc Yen tomorrow?”  This was a Rolling Thunder target and one that you would have to be lucky to get in and out.  Anyway, I had it and it really sent a cold chill up my spine.  I went outside to think about my next mission.  I thought about how I was going to get to my target and get back home.  I didn’t have any answers, so I went to bed and still didn’t have any answers.  I lay in bed for a long time before I went to sleep.

The next day I went to the briefing room where all the charts were, and I found that Phuc Yen was completely surrounded by anti-aircraft guns.  Within four miles of the field, there were about 4000 guns of a size that could easily knock me down.   Phuc Yen was a master MiG base, and they really protected it.  MiGs were  Russian planes the North Vietnamese used to combat American fighters and bombers during the Vietnam War. The base was about 20 miles northwest of Hanoi and I was sure that I wouldn’t be received too well up there.  There was a 3000-foot mountain that ran from the north into Hanoi, so I decided to use that as my avenue of approach.  I spent most of the day planning this target even though I could plan everything in an hour or less.  There just wasn’t a good way to get to this target.

I decided to go up the western part of Vietnam and cut over to the mountain and come in that way.  There was navigational gear located on a mountain in Laos and that would help me to know where I was all the time.  I planned the route to cross North Vietnam in the middle of the country, go over to the border with Laos, go up to the northern part of the country, turn east to the mountain then go south into the target.  A great plan if there wasn’t someone waiting there for me.

I spent the rest of the time that day just thinking about the mission and how it would be to become a POW.  Everyone said something to me about Phuc Yen and some even asked how I was going in.  They might be the ones who had to go there the next time, so I told them.

I went to a four o’clock briefing and I was told where all the guns were and where SAMS (surface-to-air missiles) might be.  This information really made me feel good even though I already knew it.  A pilot in an anti-radar plane was going to be 60 miles west of the target, but that would be no help to me.  His plane was meant to jam the radar to keep the SAMS from being effective.  After all this was covered, there was nothing to do but eat supper and kill the rest of the evening.  I had a target time of about ten-thirty, so I would take off about 8:30.

I was relieved when the time finally came to take off.  I climbed out and away from Da Nang and proceeded up the China Sea to the point where I had to turn in to cross North Vietnam.  It was a nice night but there was a milky mist in the sky, and I really couldn’t see too much, but I did see the sea and shore.  When I turned and crossed the beach, my B/N Jack said, “I think that I’m going to wet my pants.”  I commented that he had better wait for we had almost three hours to go.  We went on and I don’t know whether Jack’s pants were wet or not.  Upon reaching the western border, I turned to the north.  I tuned in to the navigational aid, and it was working great, so I figured that was good.  After flying about one hundred miles to the north, I turned to the east.  Everything was going well, and it looked like everyone must be asleep in North Vietnam.

There was a large town on my left as I turned to the east and it appeared to be sleeping too.  I went east until I came to the mountain range and then I turned south to the target.  I was flying at 4000 feet, and I wasn’t very far south when all hell broke loose.  I saw one SAM launch and I watched it go past me to the rear and explode.  A second one went under me and exploded off my left wing.  I turned the plane back on course and the next SAM was coming right at me.  I thought that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on it, so I banked to the right.  I continued to keep it in sight, and it got brighter as it came at me.  Finally, it passed right under me by about 10 or 20 feet.  It sounded like a freight train and was close enough that it rocked the airplane before continuing out to my right and exploding.

“My name is not on the Wall!”

I continued to the target with two more SAMS fired at me, going behind the plane and exploding.  I turned the plane back on course to the target and dropped bombs from the plane.  I turned the plane back the same way I had come in and proceeded out to go home.  I didn’t have enough fuel to make it home, so I had been briefed that an Air Force tanker was on station.  I didn’t want to go to Thailand and land, I wanted to go home this time.  I tuned in the radio frequency that I had been briefed on but first heard someone say “The MiGs are launching” from an airport that was about forty miles northeast of Hanoi.  I continued north and turned to the west, but I had the throttles pushed as far forward as they would go. This was a calamity that I hadn’t planned on.  I figured that I was about fifty miles away from the MiGs so my only chance was to go as fast as I could.  As I approached the large town, I saw tracer fire above the town.  I didn’t realize that they were shooting at me, and I had no plans to go anywhere near that town.  I don’t know where the MiGs went or whether there were even any MiGs, but I forgot about them and throttled back.  You were only allowed full throttle for thirty minutes and I had long since passed that time.  I called the tanker and guided into him by his radio.  He was over western North Vietnam and Laos, so I got in position and took on the fuel.  Then I unhooked and returned to Da Nang.  I pushed the throttles up a little and returned home shortly after midnight.  We reported the plane as being up and ready for the next flight.  I went to debriefing and told them about the flight and then went to my hut and went to bed.

I was really feeling high and couldn’t go to sleep.  When I finally did fall asleep, it seemed as if I had just gone to sleep but it was 7:30 when someone from the maintenance department woke me up and said that I had upped the plane, but it had eight holes in it.  I didn’t argue with him and signed the yellow sheet which contained the information about the eight holes.

“My name is not on the Wall!”

I walked around like a zombie for the next few days.  I felt great because I was still alive, and I asked the flight surgeon to give me a down slip which he did.  I just walked around for three days then I went back to the regular routine.

It was August 25, 1967, and I was on a civilian 707 airplane and had just landed in the combat zone in Da Nang, Vietnam.  I would spend the next year in this location.  On one side of the field was the U.S. Air Force and the other side of the field was the First Marine Aircraft Wing and that was to be my home.  I took in as much of the surroundings as I possibly could after I got off the plane, but it was midnight and raining and I couldn’t see much.  All I knew was that I was finally here and, if I did everything right, I would be going home in little more than a year.

The stewardess closed the door and the pilot taxied out to the runway and flew the plane off into the night mist.  The very irony of coming into a combat zone on a chartered civilian 707 was the first of many strange things I would see in my year in the crazy war.  The airliners usually arrived at night and spent very little time on the ground.  The possibility of rifle fire at night was minimized because you couldn’t see the airplane.  Staying on the ground a short time limited the possibility of incoming mortar or rocket fire which happened almost every other night.

It was too late to do anything, so we were assigned a cot in a tent, and with a blanket, I stowed my luggage under the bunk.  Before I went to sleep, I did a lot of thinking.  First, I wondered whether my family was doing all right in Hawaii where I had left them.  Then, would I make it through my tour okay and leave here in thirteen months?   After a half hour of these thoughts, I fell off to sleep with no trouble because I was tired.

I left Cherry Point, North Carolina about six weeks before with my wife and five children, and we went on vacation across the northern US in our travel trailer.  Our trip included a stop in Pennsylvania to see Pat’s mother and father, then a stop in Iowa to see my mother followed by our vacation to the Bad Lands and Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, Reno, and Lake Tahoe before going to our intermediate point which was San Francisco.  By this time, we had rented a station wagon for our final phase before flying out to Hawaii.

After checking in at the airport at Fairfield, California, Travis AFB, I found out that our flight left at four AM and there was nothing to do with my family until that time.  I attempted to get a motel, but they had no available rooms.  One clerk told me I could try one in Fairfield.  It was really great, no air, very small and no other facilities, but I took it anyway.  This is one problem of a military career, finding motel rooms on short notice.   We made it through the evening, and I even went to sleep because I was dead tired.

We made another trip to the airport; I turned in the rental car and we were Hawaii-bound.  Once again, the kids were tired from being awakened in the middle of the night, so we had to put up with them at the airport.  But we let all the hardships go, and everyone agreed that this was the best vacation we ever had.  When the plane took off in the early morning hours with all aboard, we were able to sleep on the airplane.  We landed at 10 AM to bright sunshine at Honolulu International Airport.  It was another world for us, but we still had a lot to do.  We left the airport with another rental car.  We went to a hotel and found they had a room for us for only $60.  I was running out of money, but I figured we could stay there a night or two.

We did stay two nights but with a lot of luck, we found a house in Kaneohe that we could afford.  There was no furniture or anything to cook with and we were only a little better off.  We bought a used car the next day and got rid of the rental car, but our car wouldn’t be here for another month.  We drove our 1960 model Dodge convertible to the downtown junk shops where we bought some used pots and pans.  We still have some of them to this day.  We also got a courtesy kit from the Marine base at Kaneohe.  This gave us quite a few dishes, but it was made for the average family, and we were a family of seven so we were short a few things.  It would be another month before our furniture arrived so being short a couple of glasses or plates didn’t matter much.  Pat and the kids had a lot of picnics using paper plates and cups until the furniture arrived.

I left my family in these conditions and flew on to Okinawa. In the middle of October, I got a letter from them to let me know that the furniture had arrived but one of the boxes leaked and the china closet was damaged.  We really didn’t need it anyway.  Pat and the family had everything they needed to live in Hawaii for the next year.  When I arrived home at Christmas on R & R everything was great, no one was sleeping on the floor, and no one was sitting on a suitcase to eat.  Pat had done wonders.  Pat’s car also arrived, so it was time to sell the convertible.  Pat said that she would live on the beach if she could go to Hawaii.  So far, no beach.