Quonset hangar

We decided our digs were splendid, not the same as regular on-base housing and not at all like usual nearby off-base rentals either. We already did both of those. Momote was a gated community, seriously gated, and seriously armed, and heavily fenced, a residential compound, miniature incomplete base for housing without all the customary martial accoutrements, none of the tediously white painted stones lining walkways, no triple flagpoles, U.S., Japan, U.N.. No military insignias except at the gate. The place still had the double perimeter razor wire topped fences, a tiny BX for incidentals like comic books, a small military police station and a fire station, a barber shop, a radio tower as well but that is it. All housing for military personnel and their dependents. No theater no commissary, no dining facilities, no bowling, no swimming, none of the usual clubs for officers, NCO or airmen. Not even a school. Just housing. Those things are all at nearby Grant Heights and also at Camp Drake, the real business done elsewhere.

At the Southernmost edge behind its own fence, this Quonset hangar, WWII Japanese type, with a large concrete slab in front of it in a state of neglect and disrepair. An unsightly patch not yet completely cleaned out. The concrete slabs are broken and damaged. Grass growing in the cracks. Chunks all around. Not a tarmac but very large broken slabs. It had been bombed. U.S. forces bombed it. Then took it. All their bases are belong to us and I lived for a while at one of them.

We found that large carefully fenced areas have weakness. The larger, the weaker. To find them, reconnoiter the perimeter. The fences must follow the terrain. Fence engineers are clever at managing interruptions, we thought, water drainages, ravines, ditches and such, there are effective ways of handling all that, the hills, and bumps, and valleys, and ridges, geologic unsteady situations and geographic disruptions to mathematic straight lines that fences by nature adhere to all handled with impressive skills.  But fences can never quite stay put. It rains, things shift, the terrain actually moves, every year it does, and the fences are maintained but nothing is perfect. Keep looking the weaknesses are sometimes surprisingly glaring you have only to find a gap. And of course people cut them.

As children we'd pass through military fences, double fences with split tops containing wound razor wire, go right through them, over them, under them, as if those exclusionary efforts and clear warnings are all mere suggestion.

The hangar was used to store window screen frames for all the houses in the whole area. Piled up to a mountain inside. A stack of piled up not quite discarded screen windows. They do not imagine those locks are going to hold back children. A whole hangar to ourselves and nobody there to chase us off. And a big fat rope hanging right there from the exact center of the hangar, from the tippy top all the way to the floor. Like a gift.

!

Too perfect. 

A trap! 

As if used to lift engines from Mitsubishi Zeros, or perhaps previous American boys had their own secret playground and we found it.  Whatever. It is completely ace! Given all that, what are boys to do? 

This would be the pinnacle of my secret place unearthing, monkey-climbing and Tarzan swinging achievements to date. A hangar! To myself.

Here is what is left of Camp Drake. Michael Jon Grist went back, sneaked in and took photos of the dilapidated state of this section of Camp Drake still left undeveloped. Quite an adventure he tells.

Interior of what I think is commissary (because of COMM on the wall, yes- please correct me if wrong).

(You're wrong. COMM = communication.) Commissary at Grant Heights.

Here are two brothers, Tom and Ken Cozine climbing the radio tower at South Camp Drake looking down at what is left of Momote Village. A bit of the business at Camp Drake had to do with a radio station they ran for the services. Dad took us through the place but that portion shown us was the light-hearted civilian-like version of a radio station that played a variety of music and anodyne news. Drake was about communications and the public radio station was like candy coating. 

Barry and I climbed a tower off-base outside Tachikawa within two days of moving there. It was irresistible. And I also wandered off by myself into a small bamboo copse nearby the houses, fascinated by how the bamboo was growing, I found two big fat ones next to each other, grabbed both and climbed right up like a monkey-ladder.