Civil Engineers in the Air Force have an interesting job. During peacetime (at home station), they are responsible for maintaining the infrastructure and new construction (among other things). During wartime though, the mission is entirely different. It’s to bed down forces in a new (possibly austere) location and set up the base for air operations.
Since that wartime mission is so different from the peacetime one, we go out to a remote site and train just for that mission. In our case at Andersen AFB, we went to Okinawa, Japan for about a week to train.
This was the plane we flew over to Japan in. The kids loved it….
Once we got to the site, we set up camp:
And began the specialized training. Everyone there had a particular job to do. For me, that was Command and Control (directing information from and to the field).
For everyone who’d ever wondered, here’s what a latrine for the field looks like. Nice, huh?
As a side trip, we went to some tunnels that had been built by the Japanese military in WWII. Rather extensive network.
Inside we found the most unusual creatures:
We also visited one of the shrines at Kadena AB.
And found a guardian vigilantly watching over it:
After a week of intense training, it’s nice to return to the comfort of home. It’s not a “true” deployment out to Afghanistan or Iraq, but it’s certainly good preparation if I do have to go again.
Jim
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