My Experience In The Marine Corps

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It was the winter of 1984 the month of January when I was flown to Japan to start my tour of duty in the Marine Corps. We landed in Tokyo and stayed in a hotel named Bora Bora for the night, due to the long flight. This was my first trip outside of the United States. The next morning we boarded the bullet train called the Shinkansen, which was the fastest train in the world at that time, and headed to a city called Hiroshima. Approximately 39 years earlier, the USA dropped a nuclear weapon (“Little Boy”) on this city killing nearly 90,000 people. Once we arrived in Hiroshima, we rode a bus to our duty station located in the city of Okinawa. The first few weeks in Japan were rough. Learning how to get around the city as well as learning the culture and language was a very big challenge, but I was willing to learn everything I could to make my stay in this country as comfortable as possible. My initial duty while on base was motor transport. This job was unavailable at the time so I was reassigned to a different job that was considered to be top secret. This top secret job was only available to corporals and above. Although I was a lance corporal, I was granted security clearance because they really needed someone to complete these so-called top secret missions – some would say I was a gopher. The job involved flying in to different locations to deliver top secret documents. We flew to places such as Korea, Japan (mainland), the Philippines, and Alaska. The planes we used were C131s and C140s which only held 5 passengers. I would be handcuffed to a briefcase that held the secret documents and would be uncuffed upon arrival to our destination. After I was uncuffed from the briefcase, I was at liberty to do what I wanted until we returned to our base in Okinawa, Japan. This gave me an opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing. One

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