A Veteran’s Day Tale

From 1986 to 1989, I was stationed at Kadena Air Force Base, smack in the middle of Okinawa. Which wasn’t hard. Being in the middle, I mean. The island is small, about 60 miles long, a long string bean with an outgrowth in the north, the whole floating in the East China Sea.

I was with the 1962nd Communications Group. We fixed telephone lines, teletype machines, and (me) cryptographic whoozits. But since some of those scramblers and descramblers had to go over telephone lines, I had to fix those, too.

We spent endless hours “running lines.” Two guys at one remote location with an “o-scope” and two guys somewhere else shooting a tone down the line. We’d fiddle with some doodads and ensure the impedance of the wire was just so (the crypto stuff was finicky). Mostly it wasn’t. The wires had been run right after World War II in a hurry. The Okinawan telephone company had just begun to replace them.

At least the phone lines were buried, which means they weren’t snapping off in the frequent typhoons the island experienced.¹ But since many of them ran shallow, every time it rained, which was always, and the cables were leaky, out we’d go and readjust.

We could only adjust so much, and if this wasn’t enough we’d have to swap out pairs of lines. Meaning we’d have to search the thick trunk (a cable) for unused telephone numbers with our “butt-sets”, a portable part rotary, part DTMF phone with alligator clips which we could use to listen in on calls, or even make them. Sometimes there weren’t any free pairs. Oh well, some colonel’s wife would have to do without a second line.

Sometimes even this wasn’t enough and we’d have to call to the switch, then still mechanical, a building-sized tangle of wires and relays, and have the Japanese phone company swap out the carbon block at a line’s termination. Think of these like charcoal filters which eliminated noise. Since the Japanese didn’t speak English and only Airman Enos (guess what his nickname was) could speak Japanese, things did not always go as planned.

So it was a relief to volunteer for temporary duty as NCOIC of Correctional Custody. Six weeks of guarding mostly minor offenders and a few of those being “PCSed out”, i.e. booted dishonorably. The bulk of inmates committed Article 15 offenses. It sounds grand to call these petty offenders “inmates” since the brig was just another building on base which was less well guarded than my ordinary station

Article 15 covered infractions such as failing to show up to duty, passing bad checks at the BX, insubordination, reckless driving and the like. These were people who were being rehabilitated, i.e. punished, and who would go back to their units after serving their time, usually three to six weeks, and maybe loosing a stripe or two. Those engaged in large-scale blackmarketing—usually buying booze from the Class VI store and reselling it to Okinawans—were kicked out or held waiting their courts martial. Blackmarketing was tempting because, say, a bottle of American whiskey bought on base for a few bucks could fetch ten times that amount off base.

Anyway, the crew had light duties. Marching from paperwork appointment to paperwork appointment or policing the grounds for stray bits of paperwork. I would daily mark down on paperwork that the inmates had completed their paperwork.

There was a TV in the barracks which inmates would be allowed to use for an hour or two at night if they had behaved. People looked forward to this time, but it’s not clear why. We only had AFRTS (pronounced A-farts) which ran ten-year-old sitcoms, some sports, and old movies. Like all TV, the level of programming was aimed at the lowest common denominator, i.e. marines.

One afternoon we couldn’t located Airman Jones. He was supposed to go out with the rest of the crew and march from A to B. The tangle nearby was searched, the toilets were searched, a nearby building was searched. But no Airman Jones. This was bad because if we couldn’t find him we’d have to fill out more paperwork.

Finally, another sergeant called me to the TV room. There was Airman Jones, crouched behind the TV in corner, holding a pair of rabbit ears above his head hoping we would mistake him for the base of the antenna. He didn’t want to miss his soap opera.

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¹Most of the island, unlike the P.I., is built in concrete and rebar, so typhoons were only a problem for the water supply. We liked typhoons because all the planes took off for Guam and we got the day off.