[I don't drive very much these days with the twice daily trips to the Board and Care Facility no longer a norm. But I do go weekly to the cemetery to visit with the XYL. It is a 40 Mile round trip. I gas up the car about once every two weeks. Yesterday I paid $6.10 a gallon. I want to thank the majority of Americans who put in office the man who caused the gas spike. My only consolation is the majority is paying the premium too and are responsible. Surely everyone is seeing with gas and tariffs, the food and medication budgets are on life support.]
So, what was there to do on Midway aside from work?
Our normal 5 day a week work shift was from 8 AM until 4:30 PM. Quarters were at 8 AM but my arrival at 7AM gave me a chance to organize things and get ahead of any problems. A Saturday may involve a base inspection or other military ceremony. Often, I would have OOD duty on the weekend.
Midway was like being a trustee in a minimum-security prison. You pretty much could go anywhere except you couldn't just leave. I put in an employee suggestion that we erect a small gate so you could at least say I went out the front gate. It was rejected!
We had a commissary, Navy Exchange, movie theater, bowling alley, library, a small golf course, a beach area, fishing off the beach and of course snorkeling. There were three service clubs one for the Enlisted, another for the Chiefs and one for the Officers. I always joked that Navy Exchange carried two sizes of clothing... Too Small and Too Large.
Protocol was always in play. Only Officers could use the Officers Club, but if you were an Officer and OK guy, you could be a guest at the Chiefs club. I was invited as a guest on several occasions. One only had to realize that the Chiefs ran the Navy, and it was good practice to always ask their input and to respect what they had to say.
For the Enlisted troops they would like to have weekend picnics on the beach. There was a process where a request was made in writing to the Division Officer (me). I would sign the form, and the party organizers would provide that form to the General Mess, and they would be given hot dogs, hamburgers, buns, condiments, potato salad, chips and soft drinks for however many were approved on the form. I was always happy to do that.
But these were Seabees and so one more item not on the list I signed and that was beer. I'll be damned our division hand built a special vehicle made out entirely of scrap materials. It was a trailer that could be towed by a bike and on that trailer was a salvaged refrigerator installed horizontally and at the far end a small gasoline powered electric generator. The refer was a large beer "cooler" box. Wow, Can Do.
One of my activities was snorkeling. The Midway Islands are surrounded by a Coral reef, and the beach gradients are such that you can go 200 feet away from the shoreline and the water is only waist deep. There are so many amazing fish to be seen like the Parrot fish. One of the Officers was an official Navy diver, and he helped me order flippers, booties, a mask and diving knife.
One more piece of gear which I made and was taught how to make by the Hawaiian civilians was a Hawaiian Sling spear gun.
The video is an uptown version and the one I built was made from a broom handle, a small hinge, some surgical tubing and a 1/4-inch steel rod fitted with a barb. You drilled a slightly larger than 1/4-inch hole through the broom handle and then drilled a 3/8-inch hole through both sides of the hinge and the affixed the hinge to one end of the broom handle. You then cut a notch in the spear so when you had the spear gun armed the movable part of the hinge snapped into the notch on the spear. Quite effective and deadly at close range. You fired it by moving the hinge out of the notch and away she flew.
The library on Midway was quite excellent, and I read over 50 books in my time on Sand island. I actually went back and read some books that I had to read in college. While in school I just sort of breezed through them and then of course were The Cliff Notes. The books made much more sense when I actually read them.
Then of course was ham radio where I was custodian of KM6BI. I didn't do much operating as such but did run a lot of phone patches. One notable operation was the Alaskan earthquake in 1964. I put the station on the air and for about a 4-hour period ran emergency traffic from Anchorage to the Red Cross in Washington DC. The Alaska to DC circuit was not open and so I was a relay station. It was an amazing time to be a ham. But I marveled that on the Anchorage end came a call for specific recovery supplies, but the Red Cross kept asking and seemed only interested about causalities. Everything is political! In time the circuit opened up and they were direct
The O Club showed 1st run movies and typically I would see two or three movies a week. I really enjoyed seeing the John Wayne movie The Fighting Seabees which of course was about the Seabees and taking place on an island just like Midway.
Often guest lecturers would pass through Midway and we had mandatory attendance. On November 2, 1963, an Army Colonel passed through Midway to give us a briefing on what was happening in South Vietnam. As he was speaking, he was handed a note about the assassination of President Diem in Vietnam, that very day.
He said the cork is out of the bottle and his concern was history could repeat itself. He suggested we get really familiar with a book entitled The Street Without Joy. The author was Bernard Fall. It was about the French in Indochina and how they lost the war to the Viet-Minh.
In a sense the visiting Colonel's presentation was prophetic. Count the months from November 2, 1963, to May 7, 1965. The answer is about 18 months and that was how long it took me to go from Midway to Chu Lai.
Them that know can make things go.
73's
Pete N6QW
