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The island of Kwajalein is about
the same size as the Brea Mall but without the shops, cars, people,
cleanliness and charm. It is in the shape of a boomerang with one leg of the
boomerang devoted to an airfield and the other leg contains housing for
about 3,000 people. Even though it was a United Nations Trust Territory when
I was there, under the authority of the U.S. Navy, only about 300 of those
people were attached to the Navy. The rest were United State Defense
Department contractors. Most of the technical people on the island worked
for one of the big aerospace companies involved in the missile programs and
the non-technical people were Hawaiians making a lot of money driving taxis
and doing other mindless activities. The only way they could get people out
to this God forsaken place was to order them, which they could do if the
workers were Navy personnel, or pay them a lot of money if they civilians.
Only senior technical people could bring their families to Kwajalein, which
created an atmosphere where a lot of young single men, who were making a lot
of money, were looking for a place to vent their testosterone. There was a
lot of drinking, a lot of gambling and a lot of fighting. I thought it was
great when I first got there but I wasn't so sure how my new bride was going
to like the atmosphere when she arrived in July. Two airplanes arrived weekly in Kwajalein. The Naval Officer I was relieving left Kwajalein on the same plane that I arrived on. Therefore, I didn't get much of an orientation to the job at my duty station. But the Officer of the Day met me at the plane and he had me driven to my quarters at the Officer's Club by one of the highly paid taxi drivers. The Officer's Club was new and modern while many of the other buildings had been left over from World War II. It even had air conditioning. If I had complained about the humidity in Florida or Maryland I didn't know what I was talking about. Everything metal on Kwajalein was completely rusted in about a year. Everyone threw out most of their kitchen appliances annually because they became inoperable. Toasters would disintegrate into a pile of rust. As you walked down the hall of the Officer's Club on the linoleum tile you left footprints because of the moisture in the air. One of the other men that met me at the airplane was the Senior Chief Petty Officer assigned to my new diving unit for the Marshall Islands. The next morning I met him at the diving shack and I met the other two members of our team. One of the other men had once been a Chief Petty Officer but had been stripped of that rank for disciplinary reasons. The other member of the team was very young (almost as young as me). I knew I was in for a bit of a rough ride because the Senior Chief made it clear to me that he thought he should be in charge and the disgraced former Chief Petty Office still gave every appearance of being a disciplinary problem. The only one that seemed to respect the fact that I was an officer and gentleman was the young third class boatswain mate. As it turned out over the next 20 months, I got along great with the Senior Chief, but I had to take the previous Chief to Summary Courts Martial and had him further reduced in rank. I became good friends with the third class Boatswains mate however. The reason that I had to take one of the men to a Courts Martial was because he had pulled a gun on his wife. The Military Police of the island stopped him from doing whatever he thought he was going to do but I felt that his behavior did not reflect well on the Navy (and I certainly didn't want him diving with me). I got a lot of pressure to cut him some slack because he was drunk. His wife even pleaded with me to drop it because he was getting out of the Navy soon. But he had developed a pattern over a long period of time and I wanted him out of our diving team and off of the island. He received orders to report to a carrier out of Pearl Harbor and he thanked me for what I had done for him (including the Courts Martial) as he left Kwajalein. We got another young guy to replace him and, as Mother Goose would say, we lived happily every after. Actually we lived happily as a team because I put the Senior Chief in charge of the diving shack and I took an office in the office building that had been built for the missile program. Kwajalein had become the site for the testing of the Nike Missile System. I would normally go by the shack once a day and often there was no one there. One of the reasons we got along so well was that we didn't see each other much. The Marshall Islands are made up of a collection of atolls covering a distance from Los Angeles to Seattle. An atoll is a string of islands in a circle (best explanation is the top of an underwater volcano) connected by very shallow reefs. The largest island in the Kwajalein Atoll was Kwajalein Island (surprise). The only other island with any Navy installations within the Atoll was the northernmost island of Roi. There were a variety of smaller islands where the native Marshallese lived. The two islands that provided the native labor on Kwajalein came from the two islands immediately adjacent. The natives would come and go to Kwajalein on the reefs when the tide was out. When the tide came in the Navy would shuttle the workers back to their islands. One island that had the largest native population was Ennylabagen, about 100 yards east of Kwajalein. The reef between the two islands was used for many of the local activities in addition as a path to get to Kwajalein. In the evenings we would sometimes go down to the reef on the Kwajalein side and watch as the natives would all get into the water at the same time. Some were taking a bath, others were brushing their teeth and, still others, were going to the bathroom. Yuck... It was great fun.. Diving was spectacular in the Marshall's. The water was clear and warm and the underwater fish and fauna was the greatest in the world. There was a large diving club amongst the civilians on Kwajalein and one of my additional duties was to supervise those wannabe divers. I tried to make sure everyone was qualified but they weren't in the Navy so I had little authority to enforce anything. I felt grateful that no one died during a diving accident while I was at Kwajalein. It was fairly safe to dive inside of the atoll because it was reasonably shallow and the underwater creatures were relatively small. But the more aggressive amateurs wanted to dive on the outside of the atoll and the land shelf fell off pretty rapidly and you would be in very deep water in a hurry and the animals, particularly the sharks, were much bigger. You soon came to realize that sharks would not be your biggest problem because they are scavengers and they could find much smaller targets than human beings to satisfy their hunger. I probably went diving in the Marshall's nearly 200 times and I don't remember a time we didn't see, at least, one shark. But, on the outside of the atoll, when the animals get bigger and the depths get greater, you are more likely to do something stupid. And stupidity kills.. An atoll a few hundred miles south of Kwajalein was where the Underwater Demolition Teams were originally formed during World War II. As the Americans were trying to invade the Tarawa Atoll, the landing crafts were continually getting grounded on the reefs. The Navy decided to put swimmers in the water ahead of the landing crafts to discover where the spots were that were deep enough to get the ships through. And, at that point, the Navy diving units were born. By the time the Americans got to Kwajalein, about 4 months later, they had reconnaissance diving teams that allowed them to land with far fewer casualties. Nonetheless, Kwajalein was the site of a major World War II battle that required five days for the Americans to dislodge the Japanese Army from area about the size of Lake Gregory. When I landed on Kwajalein 18 years later several reminders of that battle still remained. There was the Japanese pier that we still used on the rare occurrence when a ship would put in at Kwajalein. There were Japanese bunkers that we used for a variety of things including one that was assigned to me to store explosives. There were American, Japanese and civilian ships that had gotten hung up on the reefs and had been abandoned and were now just rusting away. There were rusting Japanese gun emplacements that were now used to remind us of what happened there. But it was a very small place and we were isolated from the civilized world. We got airmail delivery twice a week when a flight would arrive from Hawaii. However, if you were looking for a package it would probably come by boat and a boat would arrive at Kwajalein every two or three weeks. No need to pay for expedited delivery; there was none. And there was nothing that even resembled telephone service. The only possibility of talking to Dianne was to know a Ham Operator on Kwajalein who was in contact with a Ham Operator in Hawaii and, then, have Dianne go to the Operator's house in Hawaii at the same time I was with the Ham radio in Kwajalein. And even if you made connection, the reception was so bad you couldn't tell if you were talking to the Hawaiian Ham Operator or your future wife by the sound of the voice. So we relied on airmail, I didn't realize the number of questions that could come up when planning a wedding. I needed to know if Dianne wanted to live in a Navy concrete duplex or in one of those new trailers that had been assembled to house the personnel working on the new missile program. I let the housing officer know her preference and as soon as she arrived on the island she realized that her first decision as Mrs. Lamming was not a good one. She thought I said, "trailer", when, I'm sure I said, "mobile home". The trailers were very nice but she thought they would be like the trailer park facilities back home. However, Dianne was faced with other decisions that were more pressing. Where to have the ceremony? Who to marry us? Who to invite? A reception? I don't know. What to wear? Do I need to see if I can find my Navy Blues? She would write her questions out for me and put them in the mail. I would get the letter containing the questions and give her my response and mail my letter back to her. This process would take about two weeks and by the time she got my response she had already made the decision without my input. I suspect the wedding turned out better as a result. Except for the Navy Chaplain she arranged to conduct the ceremony. Dianne and I met with him as soon as I got back to Hawaii, three days before the wedding. He didn't like me very much... He was convinced that I was an aimless wanderer and Dianne deserved better than me. I think Dianne's mother may have selected this guy. But we went ahead with the wedding in spite of Commander Northrop's advice. Dianne had booked the Sub Base Chapel at Pearl Harbor for the ceremony and the Pearl Harbor Officer's Club for the reception. Her Maids of Honor were her roommates from the University of Hawaii and the guys standing up with me were my brother as best man and my roommates from COMHAWBACH. Obviously, Dianne had invited my parents for the occasion and they brought along four other couples, in addition to my brother and his wife. They had been to Hawaii for the first time the year before and had met Dianne at that time. I think my mother was finally feeling proud of the progress her son was making and my dad decided I wasn't quite the screw up he thought.. It is always nice to have a little acceptance. Now I had to work on Dianne's mother. She still talked to me through clenched teeth. At some point during those three days I was in Hawaii before the wedding, she informed me that she wanted to meet me at the Bank of Hawaii and transfer over the remaining balance in the account the U.S. Government had set up for Dianne when her father was killed in World War II. An automatic account was established in the amount of $25,000 for the dependents of American servicemen killed in action. When Dianne's mother told me the news, I started feeling real good about my financial future. I had never known anybody that ever had $25,000 at one time. Those three days after I arrived from Kwajalein, immediately before the wedding, were very busy. And it was all planned out before I arrived. By Dianne. I got my first real glimpse of the organization she was capable of and the kind of party she could throw. We had to get blood tests, marriage licenses, marriage counseling (Commander Northrop again), fitted for tuxes, buy a wedding ring and rehearse the whole thing. We did it all and it felt relaxed (of course, I was still drinking at the time). There may have been 30 or 40 people at the wedding and reception and I probably knew about half of them. Most of the guys I knew from the Unit were out on assignment somewhere. I was introduced to some new guys from the Unit that had arrived while I was in Kwajalein. They didn't know either the bride or the groom but that wouldn't keep them away from a party and free booze. Remember, Perk was paying for this party and he didn't go anyplace without a glass of Rum and Coke in his hand and order drinks all around for everyone else. From the pictures that we finally received a couple of years later of the wedding and reception it looked like I was having a good time. I have limited recall.. The hotel that Dianne had booked for the wedding party was right next door to the hotel where she had reserved a room for her and I. When I got up on the morning following the wedding I strolled out to the balcony of our room and looked across to the adjoining hotel and saw Connie and Perk sitting on their balcony having breakfast and looking directly at me. A little close for comfort, I thought. But Connie hollered over to me that she was leaving in 15 minutes and I should meet her at the Bank of Hawaii on the next block. We were going to transfer the funds... I was excited... I put on my uniform, since we were traveling that day on a military transport, and headed off to meet Connie at the bank. Connie had gotten there before me and was walking back to the hotel as I was heading toward the bank. We stopped on the sidewalk and she started to give me the balance that remained in Dianne's account. I knew there was a problem when she started paying me in cash. As it turns out there was a little over $300 remaining of the $25,000 deposited by the government. My imagined financial future took a bit of a hit that day. But I regained my composure and went back to the hotel to collect Dianne because we had a flight to catch and, after my recent encounter with her mother, we didn't have enough money to book another flight if we missed the Military plane. When I applied to bring Dianne to Kwajalein, the Navy informed me that I would need to extend my Navy career for a few months if they were going to spend the money for Dianne to go to the South Pacific paradise of Kwajalein. But that extension presented other problems because, in the particular part of the Navy I was in, the Navy insisted that no officer could go more than two years without additional training. Therefore, we had to spend some time in Indian Head, Maryland before we could start keeping house in the concrete-block duplex in Kwajalein. I still had a friend in Indian Head and he arranged for us to use the car of an officer, who was away on temporary assignment, while Dianne and I were in Maryland. We were assigned to the Naval Propulsion Plant in Indian Head, Maryland for 6 weeks while I was attended the latest school on Nuclear Weapons. But, when I was not in class, Dianne and I spent very little time in Indian Head. We visited all of the historic sites in Virginia and Maryland and, when we weren't on a road trip, we were in Washington. Our first Fourth of July as a couple was spent on the Mall in Washington participating in the official National celebration with the Marine Band and fireworks over the Washington Monument. We visited the Smithsonian Museums (not for very long however) and we spent time on the famous M Street bars and restaurants in Georgetown (for longer than the Smithsonian). We had a ball. A 6-week honeymoon, paid for by the United States Navy.. Pretty nice... But the officer I was replacing in Kwajalein was getting anxious and it was time to head out to our first duty station together. It took us a week to get from Maryland to Kwajalein. We first went to California where my parents had arranged a reception so the Alhambra friends could meet Dianne. They were primarily surprised that she was Caucasian. When they had heard I married someone from Hawaii they assumed she would be Oriental. Very few people had been to Hawaii in those days and they didn't know white people lived there. My Dad's friends, particularly, were very relieved. We then left for Honolulu for a couple of days to see if there had been a mistake and maybe there was some money left in that account. No mistake. The honeymoon was finally over and we boarded the MATS flight to establish the first home for Mr. & Mrs. Wade Lamming in a place that very few people had ever heard of before. Or since my life, to this point, had been pretty well blessed. But one of the greatest blessings that ever received was to spend the first year and a half of my life together with my wife in the remote atoll of Kwajalein. There wasn't a lot to do but we did it together. We learned to manufacture fun. If you didn't create your own fun, no one was going to do it for you. We learned how to give parties. And they weren't little subdued dinner parties. In the Navy people were always on the go. One time, Lieutenant Conroy and his wife were going to China for a couple weeks and they asked if we would watch their house (they lived in one of the old Concrete-block duplexes too). We decided to have a party for them when they returned at the end of October. We decided it should be a Halloween party. We removed all the furniture from their living room and kitchen and painted every wall black. You can imagine their surprise when they got home but everyone had a ball. The next day we were all at their home again, repainting and moving furniture. But we didn't have little parties. We had big parties and we went all out. And they happened every weekend. George Friend worked for General Electric and we got to talking and found a common interest in stage plays. We decided to put on a theater production. One problem presented itself right from the beginning; Kwajalein didn't have a stage. We got some guys together and built an outdoor stage with curtains, backstage areas, sets and professional lighting. No building permits were necessary and it all worked and no one got killed. We put on two plays while I was there and I don't know if it survived after Dianne and I left the island. For the Fourth of July someone came up with the idea of having an old time carnival. Some guys with welding skills built a Ferris wheel. It was about 40 feet tall with eight seats powered by a compressor. We even sent off for some professional airborne fireworks and I was given the responsibilities for handling and lighting of the fireworks. The Chief and I set them up on the beach and it was pretty spectacular. Dianne and I discovered that we all have amazing resources within ourselves if there is no one around to do it for us... We had to disassemble the Ferris wheel when the carnival was over because Island Commander thought it was a safety risk. He was probably right. One of the center pieces of the social life on Kwajalein was the slow pitch softball league. Every civilian company had a team and the Navy also had a team. Just like the Navy football team at Pearl Harbor, the Navy very seldom won because you never knew who was going to be on the island for the game. Most of the Navy Officers on Kwajalein were pilots and they were always going someplace. But we had enough mechanics and support people to field a team while I was there. And we WON... A lot of wagering took place that year because of all of the people working on Kwajalein with a lot of money and no place to spend it. And the underdog Navy team won. It doesn't seem like a big deal now about who won the Mountain Ball league on Kwajalein in 1963 but it was a very big deal to those of us trapped in the South Pacific at that time. In addition to the fun and games of Kwajalein, the Navy had sent me out there to do a job. What a bummer... My primary job was to provide emergency demolition support in the event of a missile misfiring on Kwajalein. Kwajalein had four missile silos from which we fired Nike Zeus Defense Missiles directed at Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) fired from Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Our job was to try to knock the bigger missiles out of the sky. It was one of the first missile defense systems tried by the United States and Kwajalein was where the testing took place. And it didn't work as planned very often. Sometimes the Zeus missile would misfire in the silo. Sometimes the Zeus would go up a hundred feet and come crashing back down on Kwajalein or the surrounding water and, occasionally, it would go up into space and knock down the ICBM, but that was rare. My job was to render safe all of the Zeus parts that found their way back to Kwajalein or the adjacent islands. In order to accomplish that they provided me with a pick up truck equipped with a loud speaker and a red light on top. All the children thought I was the cop of the island. But whenever there was a scheduled launch I had to maintain a command center. That happened about twice a month and the primary thing about those nights is that I didn't get much sleep. Occasionally something exciting would happen but not very often. Normally the launch was scheduled for one day and then was postponed to the next day and often to the day following that. Another part of my job was to remove dangers left over from World War II on all of the Marshall Islands, as necessary. The Japanese had occupied all of the larger islands in the Marshalls but the United States didn't invade all of the islands. MacArthur decided to invade the most important islands and starve out the rest. Some of those starved out islands still had all of the Japanese buildings but the Japanese had booby trapped many of them when they left. The natives had learned to walk around these dangers for over 15 years but now the United Nations wanted to build a school or hospital or something and they needed the area cleared. They called us. I remember one island that we were called to known as Mili Island. Mili was located about 5 hours south of Kwajalein and was larger than Kwajalein but it had not seen any WWII action. We found the airfield still intact with airplanes still sitting on the runway but it was so overgrown it was difficult to identify the airfield or the aircraft from the sky. Therefore, we landed on the water in a PBY Seaplane. We spent about a day surveying the island and found several buildings from the days when the Japanese Army occupied the island. Two buildings near the airfield appeared to be the officer's quarters and mess hall. It was at this location where the primary source of water was collected on the island. As a result of the water availability the natives had built up the area immediately surrounding the mess hall with their housing of grass huts. But they hadn't occupied the mess hall because it had been thoroughly booby trapped. As the Officer in Charge of this operation, I was faced with a choice: I could try to disarm the booby traps (we spent all of that time in Indian Head Maryland for this precise purpose) or we could blow the whole building up with all of the explosives inside. "Blowing It in Place" is the easiest and safest way to go and is what we did most of the time. But most of the time we weren't faced with destroying the entire community if we blew it in place. I had a decision to make. As you can probably guess, I decided to "blow it in place" and hope the explosives that the Japanese had left behind were not as powerful as they appeared. OPPPS... I found out that the Japanese explosives were as strong, or maybe stronger, than they appeared and my decision resulted in most of the native structures gone completely with the blast. I apologized to the local chieftain as I left Mili but, at least, he could build his school and I was sure that the United Nations (who sent us on this mission) would rebuild their homes. I sure hope so... Whenever we went to some of these outside islands, quite often we were the first white people the natives had seen since 1945. If I had been more aware of what was going on I would have been able to recover all sorts of artifacts from the Japanese occupation. But I wasn't and I didn't. Another example of how stupid I was... But we did have a good time. We would almost always dive in the areas where we landed the seaplane and it was amazing the things that are just under the waters surface when the area hasn't been scavengered by other divers before you. Divers had never visited many of these areas with SCUBA gear before. And the natives weren't interested in these underwater treasures. They were interested in catching and eating fish. And they ate pretty well. During the period I was on Kwajalein I would leave the island about once a month to go somewhere. Many times for just a day but sometimes we were gone for as much as a week. One of the more interesting trips was to Iwo Jima and Japan with Lieutenant Conroy. The hostile Japanese on Iwo Jima had been defeated during WWII. Now all of the Japanese that seemed to be hostile toward Americans seemed to be located on the mainland of Japan. It had been 15 years since the Japanese had been completely defeated by the United States. And after World War II the United States had completely rebuilt their country and they were living better than they ever had, but they still didn't like us very much. We were glad to get back to the friendly surrounds of Kwajalein. Another job to which I was assigned during my time on Kwajalein was to prepare Kwajalein as a possible landing site for the space mission of the Mercury spacecraft commanded by Wally Schirra. In those days an orbiting spacecraft would fall into the ocean and a Navy ship would pick up the spacecraft and crew. They normally landed in the Caribbean Ocean or near Hawaii. When they landed in the water some Navy divers would jump in the area of the spacecraft and attach a floatation device to the craft to make sure it didn't sink. And then the divers would help get crewmembers out of the capsule and into a rubber raft to wait for a Navy ship to show up. On the Wally Schirra mission, Kwajalein was considered an abort location, which meant if something went wrong he could land near Kwajalein. And we needed to be ready. We practiced for a month on jumping out of a PBY at stall speed (about 30mph) and securing a floatation device to a dummy spacecraft. Then our leaders in Washington said, "What if the Russians have a closer ship in the area? We will want to get our people out and sink the spacecraft to the bottom of the Pacific". The U.S. didn't want the Russians to get possession of the secrets held by the spacecraft. I suppose it was like all of our nuclear secrets that were published in Mechanics Illustrated. So we trained for the possibility of removing the floatation device and placing a charge on the craft and sinking it before the Russians arrived. It was a lot of fun preparing for this assignment and when the appointed night came for Wally Schirra to orbit the earth we were required to be in the air over the site every 90 minutes when he came over our part of the world. Therefore, for a half a day, we got airborne every hour or so and waited. He didnt land in our area so we didn't get the glory recovering an astronaut but we did participate in little part of the space program. A VERY little part.. The high point of our time on Kwajalein was on April 6th of 1963 when Dianne was rushed to the hospital in labor with our first child. Actually, I put her in the truck with the red light on top and drove the two blocks to the dispensary. A day and a half later mother and daughter finished what they came to the hospital to do. During the labor I sat with Dianne for long enough for her to repeat over and over again how she wanted to commit suicide because of what Cara and I had done to her. However, as soon as the bar across from the dispensary opened I occupied a bar stool for most of the duration. On Kwajalein they didn't have all the fancy stuff to ease the pain of childbirth and most of the time she was given some kind of gas and she never remembered she had threatened suicide and she didn't know if I was in the hospital room or on the bar stool. So I chose the barstool. Since Dianne had no brothers or sisters and boys dominated my family, I was convinced that we were going to have a bunch of boys. Dr. Temple, the attending physician, told me how hard it was to make people with inside plumbing and I should feel real proud of having a girl. I did feel proud and bought several round of drinks, as I recall, but it wasn't because of the Dr. Temple's observation on plumbing issues. I had known earlier that Dr. Temple had lost his license to practice medicine in the States and that is why he was working at the dispensary in Kwajalein. His knowledge of human plumbing was something I never took seriously. But Dianne was able to stay in the hospital for about a week and she was the only patient at the time. They brought her meals from the Officer's Club and I could bring her the snacks from Happy Hour. Isn't it amazing that in a place as remote as Kwajalein, where everyone drinks all of the time, they would have Happy Hour to encourage drinking? But for the last six months of our experiences on Kwajalein we had become a nuclear family. Dianne and me and the baby makes three... Dianne didn't get a lot of sleep because of the new baby and I didn't get much sleep because of the inefficient launch schedule for the Nike program. My tour of duty was coming to an end in October 1963 and I had orders to report to Treasure Island Naval Station in San Francisco to be released from the Navy. We were supposed to leave by the end of September but I needed to wait for my relief to arrive. He finally showed up in the third week of October and Dianne and Cara and I were on the next airplane on our way back home. We spent the first night at Fort DeRussey in Hawaii and caught the next military transport to Travis Air Force Base in northern California. Military transport planes didn't have a lot of provisions for handling infant children and Cara rode in a cardboard box on the floor in front of Dianne for the eight-hour flight to California. When we touched down at Travis we were the first off the flight and both sets of grandparents were waiting for Cara. My mother grabbed on to one of her arms and Connie took hold of the other and it looked for a moment like it was going to be the King Solomon thing of splitting the baby in two. But Cara survived. And Dianne survived. And I survived.. Now I look back and I don't understand why I used to cross the days off a calendar in my office on Kwajalein counting down the days before I could leave the island and get my discharge from the Navy because Kwajalein was the best time of my life.
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