How was it serving with TR and going up San Juan Hill, Denny??
Anyway, the Okinawa we knew was a wonderful place to be with a family for three years. The 3-year accompanied tour was far superior to the 1-year unaccompanied tour or the 6-month UDP deployment a lot of Marines experienced in my time. We had a nice little concrete bunker of a house, got to experience a lot of the culture, spent a lot of time camping on beaches and scuba diving. Speaking of MCAS Futenma, one of our favorite family events was the Wed Night "Build Your Own Pizza Night" at the Futenma O'Club. Got to visit a lot of the Far East while we were there, too. We felt so comfortable there that our daughters (9 and 11 at the time) could ride the public transportation without us from time to time. Good memories, although friends who are there now say its changed a lot ...
so we feel no need to go back.
One draw back was living on a recent battlefield -- one didn't do a whole lot of gardening or digging around in the yard. It was not uncommon for EOD to come into the housing area to deal with unexploded ordinance left over from the Typhoon of Steel. One time, they had to deal with a whole rack of 5-inch rockets that had apparently been pickled from an F4U or an F6F ... everyone in the vicinity lost a few windows when they blew that one ...
