(Wintertime at Misawa AB, 1978)

A single woman in the Air Force barracks, being in a rare, precious and much pursued category needed to develop a certain amount of street smarts (or brutal realism) vis a vis the male of our species, subcategory military, sub-subcategory Air Force/Army/Navy/Marine. Boundaries have to be firmly set and defended: after all, this was a milieu in which operated a number of assumptions, one of them being that a lot of military women were assumed to be sexually free (usually not as many as hoped for), that most guys wouldn’t say no to sex if it was being given away (depends on the fastidiousness of the giver and taker, mostly), that we were looking for husbands (maybe, but not yours, lady!), and that attractiveness of a female was in proportion to proximity (true, in most cases, alas.)

My own boundaries were set by what I called the “First Date Lecture, which I made sure to bring up at some early point in the evening, and went something like this:
“We will go out together for dinner and a movie or whatever, and I will be amusing and intelligent company, and we will have a nice evening, but I am posting notice now that I have a boyfriend in the States, and I am being faithful to him. The chances of you going to bed with me stand at nil and none, so if that is what you have to have, then I understand and there are no bad feelings. I do funny and interesting, I do not do sex. If we do not go out again, I understand completely.”
At that point, most of them blushingly admitted that, really, they had a girlfriend/wife/fiancée in the States, and amusing female companionship was fine with them, as well--- certainly none of them ever took off like a scalded cat. Most of the other women dealt with the male-female imbalance, and being overseas in pretty much the same way: Thea and Marsh both married during their tours, Thea happily, Marsh rather less so. Tree went home and married her hometown boyfriend, which did not work out well, and she came back into the Air Force. Shirl married her boyfriend Louie, the last of a long series and the only one who did not break off relations with a screaming fight in the barracks corridor, Shel married her long-time beau, who managed to swing an assignment to Misawa. I am sure even Hannah the Barracks ‘Ho eventually opted for monogamy.

Marsh used to say I just radiated wholesome vibes, all the ungentlemanly sort kind of faded harmlessly away like a vampire confronted with a crucifix and a wreath of garlic, leaving me with a amiable circle of assorted male friends to pass the time until I could take leave and rejoin my tech school boyfriend--- which by strange coincidence was at the end of one of the VP squadron rotations. I had my leave form, and my packed bags and was signing up at the terminal, where Thea worked, for space on the rotator down to Yokota, from where I would try for space available on a flight to the west coast.
“If you wanna wait until tomorrow,” suggested Thea, “ VP-47’s last aircraft is leaving tomorrow, going straight across to the West Coast. Straight to Moffet Field, you can get a flight there from San Jose. You can wear fatigues all the way, too. Bet we can get you on.”

She picked up the phone, dialed, “Hi, Sgt. Lang, at TMO ... you still have room for passengers? Great… we have a WAF sergeant, heading to the West Coast, can you help out?…. Sure…..Sgt. Hayes ... that’s right. You know her? Perfect.” She hung up the phone, and grinned at me. “Go to #3 Hanger, tomorrow morning, at 9:15. It’s all squared with Commander Wiltz. Straight shot, no wasting time stuck at Yokota. They didn’t want to, at first, but said OK when I told them it was you.”

Next morning, I left my little car in the bank parking log (Thea had the extra keys, and would drive it back to the barracks) and carried my bag across the road into #3 Hanger, where a single P3 waited for me, roped off in a security area, with a good few piles of luggage and a lot of men in baggy green flight suits waiting on the fringes. I recognized Jerry and a couple of the other crewmen, and picked out Commander Wiltz. Right away, there was a small problem.

“Customs says since this is not a port-of-entry for military people, there may be a legal problem with letting you out of the country.”
“No problem--- we’ll just put you on the manifest as ‘crew member of the plane, deployed on a military movement’”.
“Right… we’ll just say you’re the stewardess.”
“Works for me,” I said. Whatever would get me to the West Coast without wasting another day. Jerry and Commander Wiltz handed me over to the flight engineer, a guy from Georgia named Calvin, and we finally got to board.

“Fly the friendly skies of Rubber Duckie Airlines” said Calvin jovially. I had seen the P3s taking off so many times, but never been inside. All the other VP-47 aircraft save this one, and Commander Wiltz and Jerry and a handful of staff who had to remain to the last had departed from Misawa’s ice-swept runway in the previous days. Calvin showed me where I would sit--- at the galley table--- during takeoff and landing, saw that I had a helmet, and life vest--- which I had to put on, an assigned parachute, showed me where to stow my bag, and gave me a quick tour. The galley consisted of a table with a bench on either side, just enough for four people, if they sat very closely, and across the aisle, a narrow counter with some cupboards and an ice chest beneath it, an coffee machine secured by a bracket and a small oven just large enough to heat a couple of TV dinners. Also in the aft section were a pair of bunks, and a little forward, a phone-booth sized head. It had a toilet, and a tiny sink, and a tall cylindrical container with an opening at about belt-level.
“If you use the toilet, you havta clean it,” Calvin advised. “During long flights, we just use the… umm…”
“Don’t worry, I’ll figure out a way.” I said, looking thoughtfully at the flight urinal. A tall paper cup should work for me, just fill it and empty it in. Calvin continued the tour.
“Coffee any time, help yourself…. Orange juice… we’ll stop at Midway to top up.” He led me up the roomy passageway towards the flight deck. The P3 was packed solid with solid walls of electronics on either side. Directly aft of the flight deck there was a desk and console for the TACCO, one on each side. A little farther aft there was the radar set-up and two more crew stations, parallel to the aisle, then a rack for the sono-buoys, and a couple of observer stations--- chairs by a bubble-window with a headset outlet. There would be twenty-one people on this aircraft, which usually carried 12 on submarine-hunting patrols, out over the Pacific Ocean. Some of them were already staking out places on the floor for their sleeping bags during the long flight. Calvin showed me how the radar tracked the sono-buoy signal and location, once they were dropped into the ocean. Just aft of the flight deck, Jerry and Commander Wiltz were chuckling over having “borrowed” a broom from Mama-sans’ cupboard in the BOQ. I couldn’t begin to guess why they were so chuffed over having swiped a broom.

We took off around noon, and the snow-covered fields and the gray runway dropped behind the P3s’ tail cone. They did a pass over the base, and I could pick out our barracks, but the station was buried in too many trees, and then we were out over the water, and before I unbuckled the seatbelt we were more than a hundred miles out, on our way home.
That flight spoiled me ever afterwards for long, trans-oceanic flights. Everyone casually inquired if I knew how to do this, or that--- put on a life-jacket, or heat up the hot-pots--- and after that, they let me wander around at will, although I did my best to stay out from underfoot. I could sit anywhere I pleased, there was heaps of room, I could fix something to eat whenever I was hungry, go forward and kibitz with the pilots, or sit in the galley and play Hearts and Domino with the guys. Jerry showed me how the computers worked, Calvin briefed me on the radar, and Commander Wiltz told me about the dollhouse he had built in the base hobby-shop for his daughter and groused about how computers had taken all the fun out of celestial navigation. Some of the guys rode in the co-pilots’ seat for a while, taking turns in flying the P3; they even asked if I wanted to take a turn. Thinking how nervous it still made me to take the wheel of a car with Dad standing over me, I declined with thanks.

We landed at Midway late in the evening, after six or seven hours, and waited in a little shack at the edge of the ramp while the P3 was refueled. We got cold soft drinks from a coin-op machine, and Calvin showed me a half-dozen gooney birds, dozing on their feet, great large birds like geese.
“Getting a drink, and looking at the gooney birds, “remarked one of the other men, “Aside from swimming around Midway, that’s just about exhausted all the options.”

On our way again, I slept sitting up on the galley bench for a while, until the sky began to lighten, and I wandered up to the flight deck to watch the sun coming up.
“We’ve got the coast on radar,” Jerry said, and showed it to me, a fuzzy and luminous green cut out and I watched it creep incrementally closer and closer until Calvin said we could probably see it from the flight deck--- and so we could, Jerry and Calvin and I, standing in the cramped area behind the pilot’s seats, and looking out of their windows. Three pale blue mountains rose out of gauzy pearlescent mist, just their edges touched with silver-gilt fire and the ocean like pale gray crepe below, the most welcome sight in all the world, after a night flying over a darkened sea. Home, there was our home, by those mountains or somewhere far beyond them were all the people we loved, and who we had missed terribly for a year, or six months--- Calvin’s fiancée, Jerry’s wife and children, Commander Wiltz’ daughter, Mom and Dad, my dear teddy-bear guy of a boyfriend--- and we were almost there, at last.

Hanging out with guys who have nice cars may be well enough---- but nothing beats hanging out with guys who have big airplanes.