SR71 On Okinawa and Diving

We arrived on Okinawa around Christmas 1985 the AIL crew consisted of Ron Badamo, John Giannese, George Adamo and myself.  Ron Badamo had made reservations for Jan and I for the first month at the Moon Beach Hotel a very nice place to stay.  The majority of the residents were Japanese, and we enjoyed the stay.  There was a buffet every Sunday morning with a choice of either Japanese or American foods.  It began our love affair with Japanese food and lifestyle.
I rented car and for the first week, spent time getting IDs, opening bank accounts and other paperwork that needed to be done.  I also practiced driving on the left side of the road.  After the first week it became easy for me, however Jan did not want any part of the driving.  I did take her out for lessons several times, but she was not comfortable driving for the first month.
Jan an I spent a few weeks looking for an apartment and found one just outside Kadena base gate #5 and up the hill about ½ mile. The Apartment house had 6 units and had just been completed; we were the first tenants and got our pick.  All the units were 2-bedroom unfurnished, 576 sq. ft with only stove and refrigerator, and one air conditioner high on the wall in one bedroom.  The entire apartment was 3 rooms, 2 of which were bedrooms, a living/dining/everythingelseroom plus a bathroom.  When our 1500 lbs shipment of our belongings came we took inventory and started shopping for furniture to furnish the apartment.  In addition, we bought 2 cars and Jan cautiously began to drive, mostly to the base to shop for kitchen stuff.  This became our home for the next 4+ years.
Work became rather routine.  With the Viet Nam conflict over the mission load was not very great.  The tech reps would usually go in about 8am, check everything out and if there were no mission scheduled and all the processing from the previous mission was complete and shipped off to Beale, it was off to do something else.  I spent a lot of time at the gym playing racquetball and Jan spent time taking pictures with her new Nikon and developing the film and framing pictures in the hobby shop on Kadena.  She got very good at all three.
During the early days of our stay on Okinawa the personal computer became very popular and the ‘Intel 386’ was just being put into several computers.  A group of 7 tech reps got together and ordered the latest and greatest 386 from Gateway.  We wired off a great sum of money and waited anxiously for our packages to arrive.
We all got them in a couple weeks and proceeded to join the latest ‘PC Users Group’ on the base.  We all had various tales to relate every week about what we had discovered and shared little secrets on the innards of our new toys.  While fiddling around with the BIOS and playing with the settings I re-booted and the screen remained blank.  I panicked and no matter what I did it I could not get anything on the display.  I was ready to ship it back to Gateway but was saved by a member of the Users Group that told me to disconnect the battery that kept the BIOS alive and after a short while the BIOS would revert to the default settings.  The next morning, I disconnected the battery and went to work.  When I came home that afternoon, reconnected the battery and it booted up with no problems.  My first lesson on PCs was to not screw with the BIOS if you don’t know what you are doing.
These early ‘386’ computers were large and quite heavy.  Lugging them to a Users Group meeting became a chore.  The motherboards were rather large and populated with many memory chips that looked like little multi-legged bugs.  Barney Schwartz, a troop from the ELINT shop went to Taiwan for vacation and I asked him to get me some additional memory chips and parts for a ‘286’ for me to assemble.  He got the memory chips for $1.95 each and bought me 108 of them and parts for the ‘286’ which I put together and put in the field shop.  I was in PC heaven.  A couple of years later when the newer mother boards were being put into computers the manufacturing of the memory chips changed, I retired the ‘286’ and sold the memory chips. I was offered $7.95 each for then from a local Okinawan PC store.  A member of the Users Group offered to match that price, I sold them.  Best investment I had ever made.
At the time I was a Fortran programmer and very good at it but had no idea how to program my new PC. Frank Collins, a DEF-A rep, and I decided to take an Assembly Language programming class from a Marine at Camp Butler on Okinawa.  My computer had two 5 inch disc drives; on one was the program for the Assembly Language, on the other was the program I was writing. I ended up with a program similar to ‘pong’. it was a good introduction to programming on a PC.
Some time in our first spring on Okinawa Jan and I were enjoying swimming at the Kadena Marina that the Air Force recreation center managed.  It was located just off the SW end of the runway on the East China Sea side of Okinawa. We were attempting to master wind surfing.  Our attempts consisted of sailing with the wind out to the reef protecting the marina, jump into the water and swim back towing the windsurfer.  After seeing out plight an observer, Slava Joukoff, gave us an offer we couldn’t refuse.  “I’ll teach you how to windsurf, if you will take a scuba diving class from me”.  We agreed and as a result learned very little about windsurfing and completed the basic and advanced scuba classes from him.  Most of our free time together were spent scuba diving rather than windsurfing.
Slava was a Russian from Australia that worked for Voice of America. He was an interpreter.  His group on Okinawa were tasked with receiving TV broadcasts beamed down to Eastern Russia, namely Vladivostok.  Russia has 10 time zones and eastern Russia is 7 hours ahead of Moscow.  The operation on Okinawa was to record and interpret any broadcast that may have some international significance.  If necessary, the information would be on the US ambassador’s desk in Moscow with a response prior to the broadcast being seen in Moscow. An interesting side of diplomacy.
We signed up for Slava’s scuba class and went through about 2 weeks of training, both class work and water work and Jan and I became certified scuba divers.  Slava said that I was the oldest student he ever had.  He was sneaky, he tried to convince us to take the advanced course and we turned it down.  Then he invited us to go on an evening dive and we accepted, and it turned into night dive.  It was awesome since there are many more creatures out at night.  After the dive, Slava told us that we had taken one of the requirements for the advanced course, so we signed up for it.  Slava taught not only diving but how to survive in certain situations.  Later during our diving adventures, we became associated with divers taught by other instructors that were only fair-weather divers.  Jan and I really enjoyed night diving and found several dive sites we returned to on a regular basis.
Jan and I joined the ‘Reef Rovers’, the Kadena diving club that arranged weekend boat dives out of the Kadena Marina, to islands near Okinawa.  Having wetsuits, fitted and purchased on Okinawa, diving became a year-round activity.  We dove with Slava, who also organized dives from other Okinawan ports on fishing boats about once a month until we left Okinawa.  Diving became our passion.
Slava, his wife Leka, and their children lived on the base and had been there for about 10 years when we met them.  An interesting side note was that he sent his children to Japanese schools even though he was permitted to send them to the American schools on base.  They spoke Russian in the home, Japanese at school and English to everyone on base.  These kids became tri-lingual.