Okinawa

Okinawa:

We arrived at Kadena AFB in Okinawa which is a tropical island south of Japan. The island is rather hilly and has a great beach which the US military owns... Torii Beach. We had a squadron BBQ there once plus I went once just to check it out. The Kadena e-club was 1000 times better than the crap we put up with in Japan. But I still managed to go out into town a few times just to check it out. We had to get shuttled to work in a school bus every day because the Hanger was across the other side of the base. The barracks, which can be seen in the pic I will attach was pretty run down. For every four rooms there was a common room for the TV, which had our one english channel. The person on duty also had a vcr player which broadcast to every single room. So sometimes we were forced to watch crap I would never consider normally.... like faces of death :P

The air force was a little to agressive on their security there. They had these red lines painted on the runway / taxiways. If you ever crossed them they would come out of nowhere and pin you down and put a rifle to the back of your head. This was pretty dumb, sometimes you had like 6 feet from point a to b but because a stupid line was painted there you had to walk an extra 25 feet to walk around it.

We also had our first near accident here. A pilot went into full afterburners to take off and about a third of the way down the runway a piece inside one of the engines shot through the top of the aircraft leaving a big hole. Luckily he was able to bring it to a stop before reaching the end of the runway.

Speaking of pilots.... most of them tolerated your presence but weren't very warm. They had to keep their distance so you would respect their rank. But there were a few that were friendly to me. One guys name was Maj. Boodry. I once saw him out at a bar in Korea and he sat down with a few of us and shot the shit for an hour or so. They were forced to patrol the town to make sure us enlisted behaved.

We also ran our PFT here. I hated PFTs, I usually started preparing for them about a month before the fact. In this case I started prepping as soon as I got word that we would be having one while on the island. Luckily they had a nice 1/4 mile track across the street from the barracks. Unfortunately there is no flat cross country tracks so our 3 mile run had a little bit of a hill to climb. Running was my least favorite activity, but I trained the most for it so I knew I could pass. I prepared by starting out at a mile and working my way up to 3 miles over the course of the preparing. I would run every other day to give my body a rest between. It worked out good there in Okinawa despite the terrain as I posted one of my best run times 23:35 which is real good for me. But as my luck would have it the pull up bars were slick and I slipped off after about 7 pull ups keeping me in the 2nd Class range. If I would have gotten my average I would have made 1st class for the first time.

I also continued my training on the use of stick shift vehicles here. The only thing that saved me here was a very friendly clutch as some of the traffic lights forced you to stop at a steep incline which can be very tricky when switching from brake and clutch and gas at the same time.

After about 5 weeks we headed back to Iwakuni.

Thats enough for today....