I Hate to Break It to You...

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But this is Andrew's last guest post.

I went ahead and left the keys in it.

Yup, poor fool actually accepted the King's shilling and is officially  signed up to The Chant. He's now entitled to all of the pay and benefits enjoyed by Tuna, Juvat, and LUSH. Yup, the sky's the limit for our boy. (Actually, you guys don't tell him that the pay sucks, the hours are miserable, and that LUSH, as the boss' daughter seems to be on a permanent vacation.)

So say goodbye to Andrew the Guest Blogger and say hello to Andrew, the FNG.

But first you all will need a...

SAFETY BRIEFING

So, at the tender age of 7, my father, wait, so when I was at the tender age of 7, that’s much better, my father was assigned as the Air Force Liaison Officer to the Army Base at Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands (just in case nobody here knew that.) So, in the middle of 1970 we (the family) flew to Honolulu, Hawaii and then boarded a beautiful military charter Boeing 707 for the wonderfully loooong flight to said Kwajalein, MI.

Oh, on the way we stopped off at a secret squirrel location, also known as Johnston (sorry, yesterday I wrote Johnson, but there’s a “t” in it) Atoll and the island of the same name. So, things being secret squirrel on Johnston Atoll, we weren’t allowed to look out the windows of the plane, we were transferred under cover to a bus with covered windows to a building with no windows and we waited and then went back under cover to a covered window plane and then flew away from there. Much fun was not had by not being able to see the one and only location that has been accidentally nuked by the USA.

Well, actually, we didn’t nuke the place after all. We, the USA, just managed to ‘dirty bomb’ the location three separate times. “Starfish” in 1962 was an air-distributed ‘db’ due to the Thor missile launching a 1.45Mt warhead up to high altitude didn’t want to work right, and the Range Safety Officer blew up the whole shebang, thus distributing contamination all over the atoll and surrounding ocean. “Bluegill Prime” later in 1962 was supposed to do the same high altitude explosion, but the Thor also misfired and was blown up, along with its W50 warhead, just off the pad, really screwing things up, blowing up stuff and burning stuff for a long time and scattering plutonium all over. Then in October 1962, “Bluegill Double Prime” carrying a W50 set at 400kt (supposedly) malfunctioned 90 seconds into that test and was Range Safety Officered into oblivion, radiating the poor place yet again. Fortunately, the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty was ratified and spared the island another glow-in-the-dark shellacing.

Instead, we (the USA) used it for Biological and Chemical Warfare Testing, Anti-Ballistic Missile testing, Satellite Recovery (photo pods dropped from space and stuff,) Chemical Weapons storage and finally Chemical Weapons demilitarization. Whew, only thing worse would be to make it a resort for the Kennedy clan or something equally heinous.

Now it is a supposedly clean location inhabited by lots and lots of birds and is a wildlife sanctuary

By the way, Johnston Island is basically a coral carrier with a flight deck long enough to handle a Boeing 707 with launch pads for ICBMs and ABMs and buildings and quarters and bunkers and lots of birds and other buildings and stuff off to the side of the runway. A totally scenic trip into the hell of modern warfare, now covered by bird crap.

So, back to the actual meat and bones of the story. Finally.

So, the whole family, heck, the whole plane carrying the family and lots of other people (including the cabin crew and stewardesses (yes, Stews, not Flight Attendants, this was 1970 after all) finally, after a long long flight, land on the southern island of Kwajalein Atoll, known by the completely shocking name of Kwajalein (Kwa-ja-lane) being roughly 1.2 square miles overall, with a big chunk of it being runway, and radar sites (regular golf ball covered ones, a phased-array pyramid and the elephant pen radar (hey, the Army guys called it the elephant pen because it was big enough to house, well, elephants. It was also the driving range for golfers when the unit wasn’t on.) and a desalination plant, and fuel depot, and basically a whole base on an island, including housing and several restaurants (including one ‘fine dining’ that at the time was located on the ocean side on a pier that went over the reef to almost to the reef end. Really neat to walk out at low tide and look doooown past the end of the reef into the deep ocean.)

Story Break: Atolls. Okay, several times I’ve said the word Atoll. What the heck? So, an Atoll is basically the top of a sea mountain, usually volcanic, that is covered in coral and has some portions of the coral structure (or actual mountain structure) poking above the ocean, making islands, and other portions that are usually submerged, making reef or reefs. Usually it is in the form of ring or closed squiggly loop (maybe from the cauldera of the volcano) formed by the reef (or reefs). So, the inside of the ring or loopy shape is a shallow to deep(ish) lagoon, while the ocean side of the reef drops down and down and down and… really down to the side of the sea mount. Deep. Big Deep. Hopefully there is a natural (or artificial) break in the reef big and deep enough for ships to use, which then makes the atoll a reasonably safe place to harbor in with an island or islands to use as a base. Some dredging and wharf building may be needed to finish the base structure of the naval side, kinda like what the ChiComms are doing in the West Pacific in their not-so-subtle territorial grab that is now going on.

Examples: Makin Atoll has a funky loopy lagoon with only one main island, Tarawa (Bloody Tarawa) has a few islands, and Kwajalein Atoll has a scoop full of islands (97 islands and islets making up a whopping smidge over 6 square miles of landmas, whoooooo!) along with some major sea cuts, and is acknowledged as one of the largest atolls in the world.

Story Unbreak: (Come on, Andrew, get to the friggin point! Stay on target, STAY ON TARGET!)

…we step off of the 707 into the hot summer tropical sun (no covered jetways, we’re talking stairs, baby) at Bucholz Army Airfield on beautiful Kwajalein island and immediately saw the tops of waves breaking on the outer reef. (Last post was Vandenberg AFB in California, between LA and SanFran, on the cliffy coasts, so being almost at water level (9 feet above sea level) for living was a totally new thing) and headed into the Base Operations and Terminal building for our ‘Welcome’ and initiation to three years of lovely island life.

In a nice room in the building, we future Kwajers prepared for our introduction to our new home. Which immediately turned into what seemed like a 30 minute slide filled SAFETY BRIEFING complete with “See this fish? (picture of what looked like a rock but is a stone fish) Step on it and you die. See this fish? (picture of a lion fish) Don’t touch it, it will make you wish you were dead. And so forth down the list of dangerous fish (Sharks were on the bottom. You had to be stupid dumb to get bit by a shark.) See this pretty shell? (Pictures of various cone shells over and over, all starting with the same statement) It will kill/hurt/maim/ruin your life, don’t touch it. See this X? (show slide of jellyfish, coral, other misc marine life) It will kill/hurt/maim/ruin your life, don’t touch it. See this (insert name of unexploded ordinance) (show slides of various instruments of death of WWII origin) It will kill/hurt/maim/ruin your life, don’t touch it, call an adult, back up, back way the heck up, run away, run run run away.” And so forth. And then the final straw was a base medical Officer saying basically, “This island is coral sand, if you get it under the skin it will fester and rot off any portion of the body it is left in, come to the Hospital immediately and we’ll clean it out (ominous chuckle) and make sure you don’t die/stay hurt/be maimed for life.”

By the time it was over, all the parents’ eyes were the size of dinner plates from the knowledge that they just brought their precious children into HELL ITSELF, THE VACATION VERSION. Us kids, we were salivating like Dobermans staring at a burglar, thinking about what horrors of Hell Itself, The Vacation Version, we could first encounter.

Game ON!!!

(My final score from July 1970 to July 1973 was: several stonefish seen(none touched, they will kill you!), several moray eels caught by hand (they are kinda tuporish when it’s really low tide, lots and lots of pretty and dangerous sea shells collected alive, one case of burns from fire coral from getting away from the full case of Japanese hand grenades I discovered one day while snorkeling, and one trip to HELL, The Hospital, to get a serious wound cleansed by demons of the Medical variety. No permanent wounds or scars, all 20 digits still firmly attached. Me for the WIN!)

This is gonna be fun!