Red, White, and Blue in the Face!

I was reminded today (The Forgotten Battle of World War II: Remembering the Aleutian Campaign) of one of my duty stations during the last half of my Navy career. For those who don’t know, I spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy as a Cryptologic Technician (Communications) from 1969 to 1989. One of my assignments was to the Aleutian island of Adak, Alaska from 1984 to 1986. Like so many military assignments, Adak was out of the way, isolated, and mostly unknown by any but the few who had been there. Until my transfer from the Atlantic Fleet Cryptologic Training Group (working out of CINCLANTFLT & the Naval Security Group Activity Northwest in Virginia) Adak was the kind of duty station I’d heard about, but hadn’t heard anyway say nice things about – it was a sort of mythical assignment – a place most of us knew about but few really knew anything about except that it sounded like a most forlorn assignment.

Now mind you – my assignment came 40 years after the U.S. first manned the island so it was significantly less forlorn than it was to the men of our Army, Navy, and Marines in 1944 but it’s reputation was, I believe, no less daunting for me than it may have been for them. In my mind’s eye I pictured Adak as a frozen rock, swept by frigid Arctic winds, locked in by cold fogs, rocked by the earthquakes ever present on the Pacific Rim – in other words lonely and forlorn. It was all that and much more I was to discover.

Unlike the men who came to Adak in 1944, we modern day sailors were able to bring our families with us. Housing had been constructed for families near the main base – the Naval Air Station Adak but in our case a house was not immediately available though, so we travelled to Syracuse where I left my wife and daughter to live with her mother and father until they could come to Adak. My memories of the trip out to Adak are vague for some reason — but I do remember flying the final leg to the island on a Reeve Aleutian Airways plane and, as I walked off the plane onto the tarmac I remember the gray sky, being amazed at how low the clouds appeared to be (not as low as they *could* get I was to discover), the cool temperature – I think it must have been in the low to mid 40’s that day (and I was to learn just about every day) in June of 1986. A slight wind was blowing – something that I recall never stopped – there was always air moving either a brisk breeze or, what we called a williwaw – a sudden storm, and everything in between. For the next two years I’d be able to count the number of sunny, “warm” days on the fingers of two hands.

[to be cont’d – come back I intend to add more to this post]