(Street fair in Misawa City, 1978)

Since the military services are, not to put too fine a point on it, a male dominated environment--- the services run from 3% female (Marines) to the %14-16 female (Air Force and Army)--- this tends to encourage a pretty frenetic social life among the junior ranks. Unattached women can generally pick and choose among prospective swains, and even once settled into a steady, more or less permanent relationship, all of his friends are asking to be fixed up with her friends because the Air Force Ball is coming up. At a base like Misawa AB in the mid-1970s, with all four services represented, it would be possible for a resident of the women’s barracks to achieve a social grand slam in attending all four service balls. Her girlfriends, who were dating members of the Navy, or the Marines, would be lining up dates from among the women’s barracks residents, for all his buddies.

On the night of a ball, the barracks would be in a fever of excitement, girls swapping dresses back and forth, putting on their bravest makeup and piling their hair into elaborate up-does, before deciding the heck with that, and combing it out loose on their shoulders. I owned a very chic long black slip dress, made of some heavy, indestructible knit fabric, which made a wide variety of body types look like Audrey Hepburn. It went to parties oftener than I did, due to its’ popularity as a loaner when what someone had planned to wear just wasn’t working out. The balls were held in the splendors of the Officer’s club… which ordinarily didn’t get that much business, since there were barely enough officers to support it in the style to which they would have liked to have become accustomed. Besides, the women were over at the NCO club anyway, so the younger officers gravitated there.

The NCO club was the every-day focus for social life of an evening for barracks residents and geographic bachelors. There was a small bar set aside for officers only, a game-room which was enlisted only, and the main bar and restaurant (which served killer Mongolian barbecue on Tuesday nights) was all-ranks. If there was anything going on at all, it was going on at the club:

“Hey, the new VP squadron is in, let’s go down to the club and check ‘em out!”

The Navy VP sub-chaser squadrons rotated in from Moffit Field, and out again every six months: they were TDY, bored out of their gourds, and wore flight suits, which has to be about the sexiest male garment ever invented. Shirl, my next-door neighbor in the barracks, had a thing about fliers, and dated flight-suited guys exclusively, before finally marrying an endlessly patient guy named Louie. Until then, she broke up with every one of his predecessors after exactly five weeks of monogamy; usually after a screaming fight in the barracks corridor. It got to the point where Marsh and I would look at the calendar and lie low. We gave her a poster that said “Before you meet the Handsome Prince, you have to kiss a lot of toads.” That led to exchanges like this
“Who’s that guy?”
“Shirls’ latest toad.”

“It’s Jen’s farewell party, she’s on the rotator tomorrow, lets go to the club!”

Jen was my first friend in the barracks, she who bequeathed me one of her boyfriends, who was a partner in an illicit delicatesson being run out of a room in the Navy barracks. His name was Nelson, and I nicked-named him “Admiral” and occasionally set off convulsions in the NCO bar among the Navy personnel by calling “Yo! Admiral!” across the room. These sort of convulstions also occured early one evening in the barracks a few months later when my date come to collect me for a genteel evening at the base movie theater. He was an older guy named Jerry, about whom I knew practically nothing except that he had been at a party at the shooting club, and had rescued me socially from a friend of Shirl’s latest toad, a really warped VP pilot who shaved his head and sported a gold earring--- not at all to my taste. Jerry was nice, and gentlemanly, and literary, and I couldn’t see why on earth a couple of the other VP guys hanging around the women’s barracks were turning several shades of pale, gulping, and making themselves scarce.

Shirl enlightened me when I made a pit stop in the bathroom.
“He’s their Exec, “She hissed.
“Their what?”
“Second in command of the squadron. Equal to a colonel.”
“Oh…” I dried my hands, “Well, he seems nice enough. Besides, WE don’t work for him.”

“Crap, nothing on FEN, let’s go over to the club.”

Since I worked in TV master control the last damned thing I wanted to do when off-duty was to watch TV. I wanted bright lights, hot music and fascinating company-- so did most everyone else. Half a dozen of us joined an impromptu party one night when there was a band, and at the end of an evening found our numbers had increased by two. A pair of Marine fliers, pilot and navigator, proprietors of a two-seater so old and decrepit that it was a dead certainty that whenever they took off it wasn’t a matter of “would something break down in flight?” but “When and what and how badly?” On this evening, which left them stranded at an air base with a toothbrush and ten dollars between them, everything but the actual engines had crapped out, leaving them to have to follow another aircraft in and communicate with it via hand signals. We took pity on them both, and took them back to the barracks and fed them chili, and turfed them out at midnight, pointing them in the general direction of the Transient Officer’s quarters--- the navigator circled back, though, and we found him asleep on the dayroom sofa the next morning.

Don, the pilot, turned out to be another English major, and every once in a while he would call when he had a mission that would bring him and his flying junkyard back to Misawa. It was then my duty to round up a date for Don’s navigator, (usually Marsh) and the four of us would have dinner at the club. Don and his rear-seater would talk shop and Marsh and I would talk shop, and everyone would have a wonderful time. It eventually turned out that Don had a wife and three children back in the states, though, so as much as he looked at me yearningly, he never did get lucky--- not with me at least. I already know about geographic bachelors.

Ah, yes, wild days of youth and singlehood in the barracks--- do I miss it? Not on your life!

(A couple of commenters have asked for more wild tales of life in the military. Your wish is my command - Sgt. Mom)