Living in Hawai’i, part 1 – West Loch

Satellite image of O'ahu, with all the print and arrows supplied by yours truly. This image was taken from an angle, so the island is a bit skewed compared to a direct overhead view. Click on the map to see a larger version, or right click and select "open link in a new tab" to open in a separate tab, for easy reference whilst reading the blog entry below.

Something I did not anticipate, as a Russian linguist in training at Monterey, California, was receiving orders for Hawai’i. Sure, I had put it on my “wish list” of duty stations, but the truth is that linguists had very few options for duty stations, and even less freedom in choosing, especially their first one. All I ever really heard about was Russian linguists getting stationed in Misawa, Japan, and how cold and snowy it was there most of the time. I was so convinced that I was going to Japan (although not very enthusiastic about it) that I bought a very nice flannel sheet set and a wool blanket to use in my barracks room in Monterey, because I figured it was a good long-term investment.

Perhaps this was all the prompting the puckish cosmos needed, because not long after, I found out I had orders for NSGA Kunia, Hawai’i. I didn’t end up getting my money’s worth out of the flannel sheet set and wool blanket, and I’m happy to say I didn’t care, then or now. I was ecstatic; visions of tropical beauty, white sandy beaches, and palm trees danced in my head. And this was back in the pre-internet, primitive early 1990s, so I didn’t have much to go on regarding what to anticipate in Hawaii. I expected what little I had seen in advertisements and on Magnum, P.I. – green, lush, and eternally pleasant.

Imagine my shock, then, upon arriving on O’ahu (the Hawai’ian island where Honolulu, and most of the people and military bases are located), and being assigned to live in barracks at Naval Magazine Lualualei at West Loch. (The barracks and part of the naval magazine were located at West Loch, near Ewa Beach, and the other part of the naval magazine was located at Lualualei, way up the Waianae coast.) Check out the map above – see how most of the western half of the island is brown? Many parts of the leeward side of the Hawai’ian islands, it turns out, are hot and dry enough to keep cacti happy, and conditions that keep cacti happy are apparently also pretty good for munitions. As you can imagine, a munitions storage and handling area is a very sensitive, highly secure facility – we were not only required to show our military ID upon entering the base, but also when exiting. My duty station was about a 20 minute drive north, located just southwest of Schofield Barracks.

So I found out quickly that most of the green and lush parts of the leeward side of O’ahu were usually parts that were irrigated, because there wasn’t enough rainfall to keep things green otherwise. [This was so because the Ko’olau Mountains on the windward part of the island stopped most of the rain clouds from passing over the rest of the island (prevailing winds came from the northeast most of the year). You can see this in the map above – there’s a line of clouds on the eastern side of the island, kept from going further west due to the mountain range.] The West Loch base was not irrigated – it was dry, dull and spartan; drab concrete buildings and a lot of bare red dirt or brown, beaten down grass. It did have a few palm trees, though. The air was inevitably hot and dry (daytime temps were almost always in the upper 80s or low 90s) so the barracks needed to be air-conditioned in order to be comfortable. The “conditioned” air inside the rooms was usually stale and clammy.

The charms of West Loch were not just visual, however; they were also aural. The base was located directly under one of the incoming flight paths of Honolulu International Airport and Hickam Air Force Base. Many times a day a passenger jet or fighter jet would scream in for a landing, just a few hundred feet above the barracks. Even when I was in my room with the door closed, if I was on the phone and a plane flew overhead, I couldn’t hear the other person and they couldn’t hear me. The fighter jets were much louder than the far larger passenger jets; fortunately, there were fewer fighter jets flying around than passenger jets.

The barracks were maintained by navy boatswain’s mates and cooks, fleeties on a lucky shore rotation; they certainly weren’t fond of CTIs (who weren’t even allowed to be fleeties and only rarely got deployed on any sort of mobile platform). Fortunately, my boot camp company commander’s frequently expressed contempt for spooks prepared me for that. Their contempt for CTIs mainly manifested itself in a peculiar talent for needing to knock on CTIs doors on mornings when CTIs were sleeping in, recovering from night shifts (and we all worked various shifts, so that was a peculiar talent, indeed). Also, while their mail got delivered to them at their workshops in Lualualei, our mail got dumped in a volunteer CTI’s room, and we had to just drop by every once in a while and sort through the pile to get our mail. That probably violated some postal regulations, but I guess naval magazine barracks are exempt from those regulations.

There wasn’t even a chow hall at West Loch! So if us poor sailors were hungry and off work, we had to go to a military base to get fed for free (Kunia or Pearl Harbor were the nearest ones), or make a food run to Ewa Beach and use our own money to pay for our food, because we weren’t entitled to comrats since we were living in barracks. There was a Taco Bell and a few other fast food places in Ewa Beach, so you can guess where I went most of the time, and I’m sure most of the other sailors did the same. There was a shuttle that ran between Kunia and West Loch, and I think to Pearl Harbor too, for those sailors that didn’t have cars, but I think it would have taken less time to walk to Ewa Beach, eat some fast food, and walk back, than take those shuttles back and forth; West Loch was pretty far from everywhere. Fortunately I had a nice little used Honda Accord that I had purchased in San Angelo with most of the proceeds of the $5,000 bonus that I had received upon graduating from C school. [I didn’t actually receive a check for $5,000; it was about 72% of that, because the military would always withhold 28% for taxes on bonuses, even though no one was in that tax bracket! So I didn’t get to see the rest of the bonus that I was entitled to until after I filed my taxes the next year.]

The best thing about West Loch was leaving it. When I did so on foot, I walked through Iroquois Point, a pleasant military family housing area at the mouth of Pearl Harbor, right next door to West Loch. The housing was all single family or duplex houses, single story, made of the usual concrete block material. They weren’t much to look at, but the area certainly was – some of those houses were right on the beach!

It was on a walk through Iroquois Point not long after arriving on O’ahu that my nose detected an intoxicating perfume, which I quickly discovered belonged to a gorgeous, simple five-petaled white and yellow flower that I’d never seen before, growing on a small tree with big glossy leaves. I later found out that flower is called plumeria. It comes in a few different colors, but I think the white flowers are the most beautiful, and they are certainly the most fragrant. They are often used in leis, which they are ideal for due to their color, scent, and velvety soft texture. There’s nothing quite like the feel of soft plumeria flower petals against the sensitive bare skin of your neck, especially when combined with their perfume, treating your nose to a gentle whiff of heaven. I decided right there that plumeria was my new favorite flower.

I was on another walk sometime later through Iroquois Point when out of the corner of my eye I casually caught a glance of a squirrel darting along a tree branch. My Midwestern brain circuitry ignored this perfectly normal event, until a few steps later, when I remembered – there are no squirrels in Hawai’i. Well, there are large rats and mongooses, but I didn’t catch enough of a glimpse to tell which one. I lived on O’ahu for ten years, and I think I saw a mongoose scurry across the road maybe two or three times total. I’m reasonably certain I never saw a rat. (I did have a rat in the attic of an apartment I lived in later, but I never actually saw it.)

My one other significant memory of encountering something interesting and nature-like was when I walked to Pu’uloa lagoon at the far end of Iroquois Point. There wasn’t much there but a small pier for a shuttle boat. I glanced down in the water and saw something smooth and translucent that my eyes and brain couldn’t quite process at first – a piece of tissue paper? A plastic baggie? I finally figured it out – it was a jellyfish. There is something about a jellyfish that always seems to invite poking it with a stick, but I didn’t do it. It was minding its own business, so I let it be. Maybe that created some good karma for me; I never once got stung by a jellyfish while swimming in Hawaii (or anywhere else, for that matter).

the jellyfish I saw looked a lot like this

So, yeah, living at West Loch was disappointing compared to what I had anticipated prior to my arrival on O’ahu, in July 1994. As an E-3 (seaman) I was required to live in the barracks, and I didn’t have a choice of barracks either. Fortunately, I made E-4 (petty officer third class) during the spring promotion cycle in 1995, less than a year after I had arrived, and as an E-4 I received permission to move off-base and receive comrats and BAH to pay for my food and housing. I couldn’t afford to live on my own though, so I had to find a roommate, and quickly, because rumor had it that if you didn’t move off-base within 30 days, they withdrew permission. That rule made so little sense that I was sure it was true, and I didn’t try to find out if it wasn’t.

next post – Living in Hawai’i, Part 2 – Mililani, featuring Dan the roommate, eucalyptus trees, and moving from concrete block barracks to a poured concrete apartment building.

Divine Mind

musings by Angel