Mosquito Junction: Memoirs

By Robert S. Saito

This is my memoir of the many people I have met and places I have been. The people are ordinary, hardworking, devoted-to-duty military men and women and people from all walks of life from the many countries I have visited.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648039911

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Copyright © 2021 by Robert S. Saito.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Mosquito Junction

Pearl City And Waipahu

San Diego Naval Station

Sailor Aid Needy Children

North Island

MCB 133

First Trip To Japan 1967

Second Tour To Viet Nam

Moffett Field

USS Camden (AOE-2)

Mom And Apollo 17

Retirement

Mexico

Oaxaca

The Big City Again

Guanajuato

Patzcuaro

Art School

Working As A Living

Second Retirement

European Tours

Idle Years

China Trip

Age 80s

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank everyone at Author House for their assistance in publishing my first book, My Life in Camps During the War and More. That publication made it possible for me to have this book published. I also thank my siblings, their families and my friends who enjoyed my first book. My siblings are a great part of my life even though we are separated in California by some 500 miles.

Brother Julian who passed on at the early age of 52 is the person who kick started me into having my short stories published. Sterling Warner, a professor at Evergreen Community College, encouraged me in writing short stories as well as poems and haiku. I had a great life with my shipmates while on active naval service for twenty years, my fellow workers in civilian life (bowling allies and City of San Diego Equipment Division), my classmates at the Coronado School of Fine Arts and my good traveling friends while touring the world with my wife.

I thank my wife and life companion for over 51 years, Naida, for being tolerant and affording me time to write without complaining.

My parents now long gone have had an enormous influence on my life and the way I have lived it. Below is a poem I wrote what my father may have said in part to my mother just before passing on.

Live your life

Take our time and enjoy your life.

You are a wonderful wife.

Remember our wonderful times,

Just like a poem that rhymes.

We have lived a life of loving,

now love the life of living.

Take each moment and enjoy it,

While the oil lamp is still lit.

When the bright flames starts to flicker,

Time to add oil and taper.

It is the moment of living,

Keep you flames of life burning.

Only when it dies, come to me,

Then together we will be.

The past is gone forever never to return except in our memories which is slowly eroding away. These short stories are written to preserve my memory for just a while longer. I have no children therefore no grandchildren to tell stories to. The book is for my nephews and nieces and grandnephews and grandnieces to read and enjoy. Also for my siblings and their spouses my friends. I can read these stories myself and say, Did it really happen that way?

MOSQUITO JUNCTION

Memoirs

1955 - 1957

My experience in Hawaii as a sailor

Mosquito Junction is a loving nickname given to a small naval facility that is located in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii. Mosquitoes here has never bothered me. It may be because of my body odor. I will discuss personal hygiene practices in the Navy later. The humidity and warm dense cane field across the road less than two hundred yards from the pier is a perfect breeding ground for them. The brackish water in the marsh nearby is another ideal home for these critters. To get rid of them, drain the swamp. Huge toads over six inches wide all warty and ugly has a field day feeding on these mosquitoes. Many remains of dried toads lay on the road after losing a race against vehicle tires. That is frog jerky.

CANE TOADS

Toads in the cane fields

Catching all the mosquitoes

They are huge well fed.

Situated in West Loch of Pearl Harbor between Waipahu and Pearl City, it is isolated as they come except for the Degaussing Station less than two klicks down the road in the boondocks. Mosquito Junction’s actual name is Inactive Service Craft Facility, Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii which was once named Inactive Floating Dry Dock Group. They are both long titles for a small facility. There are floating dry docks and other moth ball type crafts to be chipped, sanded of old paint, primed with red lead paint and painted over that with battleship gray paint. This is an everlasting task because of rusting effects of the salty sea water, salt air, time and weather. It has been ten years since the end of the Second World War and still these crafts are being maintained for emergencies. The government could have sold the crafts for scrap metal (razor blades) closed down the facility and transferred the sailors and by time all will be discharged or retired. A great savings and no need to recruit any more sailors.

These dry docks at one time was used to lift small ships and crafts out of the water so maintenance of the hulls can be done. The dock is filled with water thus sinking the dock into the harbor and a small ship or boat is moved between the two wing walls. Slowly the water is pumped out of the dry dock and lifting the small ship out of the water. Wood braces are built around the small ship to hold it rigidly in place. After all the water is drained from the dry dock and the small ship secured in place, work begins on the small ship.

Prior to arriving Mosquito Junction, I spent several months at an electronics school on Treasure Island, San Francisco, California. Failing because of my nightly and weekend trips off base and not studying to become a technician, the school transfers me to this overseas facility way out in the boondocks in December 1955. I was dropped from school just like in college where I have failed by not studying to become a graduate in liberal arts to be an artist, an easy major. The Draft Board was hot after my heels.

How did I ever graduate high school? Studying or following through with a project was and still not in my nature. The attention span is as short as my nose. I have been known to fall asleep in class and often woke up with a little snort, my alarm clock. Bob, my best friend from junior high school days since 1945, drives me back to the base at San Francisco on Sunday nights so I could be in classes on Mondays but that doesn’t stop me from failing.

While awaiting orders to Mosquito Junction, I am assigned to escort prisoners around Treasure Island on various functions that the prisoners must do. Carrying a shot gun fully loaded as my enforcer, I escort them. Short in stature but I do carry a big gun with a big bang. This is better than swinging a night stick (billy club) that some prison guards do. Officials never did ask me of my qualifications with fire arms. Growing up in a farming community, young boys often went hunting for small games and I was no exception. Did I bring home any game that I have shot? No, because I have never killed any. San Jose, California was a farming community until the electronic businesses bought most of the rich farm lands for buildings and offices for manufacturing electronic equipment thus became known as Silicon Valley.

A night stick for a sailor is a belaying pin or some would call it a billy club. During the sailing days, ships had belaying pins in holes along the guard rails. It was used to secure lines for the sails. These pins were also used as weapons in hand to hand combat with sailors of another ship alongside. A sailor may have a favorite belaying pin that he drilled a hole at the base and fitted a lead weight in it then plug the end with a wooden dowel. This becomes a very dangerous weapon, a practice frowned upon. Just frowned upon. Because of the weight and balance, these particular belaying pins are easy to wield with deadly outcome.

A teenage prisoner is being released today and he needs to check out his handgun from the armory. The weapon was confiscated when he became a prisoner and now he can have possession of it because he has served his time in the brig and being discharged. He signs for the weapon but I would not let him handle it. I put the small hand gun in my waist band and escort him to the main gate where he can leave it until he leaves the base. He can’t understand why he cannot have the weapon. His weapon has no ammo while my shot gun I’m holding is fully loaded ready to fire at any time. I have permission to carry a weapon on the base and he does not. This criminal who will be discharged today will be allowed to carry his hand gun off the base. Hope he will not use the weapon foolishly. Guns are made for killing. Why do the authorities allow ex-convicts to have weapons of any sort? This is 1955.

Finally I’m transferred. Although this is not the first time I have flown on an airplane, this is the first time I have flown outside of California and outside of the Continental United States to the Territory of Hawaii. This oceanic flight is long, cold and boring especially on a military transport airplane. The steady drone of the engines is deafening. Our meals comes in a brown paper bag with one simple sandwich, apple and a small container of milk. The milk, I cannot consume because of lactose intolerance.

Landing at Barbers Point on the island of Oahu, the weather is warm and humid on this December month with lots of green vegetation and hibiscus plants with bright red flowers and puffy white clouds in the blue sky. This could be paradise if it was not for my military service. The weather is a shock because in Northern California, December weather is wet and cold often with frost and ice on the ground and car windows early in the morning.

HIBISCUS JUICE

Of all the flowers

Hibiscus juice is tasty

If you like flowers

Our skipper is a Commander in the Civil Engineer Corps. He is a Sea Bee who would normally be in charge of a Naval Mobile Construction Battalion. The emblem for the Sea Bee is a bee holding tools and a weapon. Our activity emblem should be a mosquito holding a chipping hammer, paint scraper, paint brush etc. plus a machine gun but we have no logo. This is Mosquito Junction a very small installation way out in the boondocks.

The Degaussing Station down the road removes magnetic field that a steel ship builds up while traveling the ocean. When a ship has magnetic field, mines can find the ship and disable it, often killing many men on board and sinking the ship. There are a handful of men attached to this station and they eat all their meals at our mess hall. Now, I call that a very small naval facility. They have a large wooden pen in the water that house a huge shark. At least this small command can boast of having a mascot that is quite different from any other command or activity in the Navy. I always wondered what the men feed the large shark. Was it mosquitoes or toads? We have plenty of both.

The living quarters at ISCF is a large battleship gray floating barrack ship APL-17, Auxiliary Personnel Large, not the American President Line cruise ship but a ship permanently tied to a small pier. On shore is a large basketball court fully fenced in with a high chain link fence and one gate to enter or exit. Next to the court is a gray Quonset hut that has been converted into a bar for the men to drink and socialize. Beer is cheap here. There are two outdoor toilets (heads) facing away from the loch but empties into it. One for men and the other for women. Female guests are few except on pay days because there is nothing to do except drink at this club. The women who do visit have the appearance of harden ladies who have tasted the bitterness of the world. It is a tough world and they find that sailors are easy mark to make life a little more bearable for them. I have spent some boring hours here sipping on bitter suds and forgetting the bitter world but not sharing the hardship with these women. I get my exercise lifting a can of beer and walking from the stool to the head and back.

Movies are shown top-side for the crew who are on board. I forgot whether they show the movies nightly or once a week. With the cool nightly breeze, watching the movie is rather comfortable. Since the television has been in existence for less than ten years, the barrack ship had none however, the club has one. I’m not much into watching the television nor movies. My interests are in bowling and drinking beer to practice the lift.

Bunk beds hang from two stanchions (poles) on one side and chains with hooks hanging on the other side. There are seven bunks from the overhead to the deck. There is enough clearance to crawl onto the bunk bed and when we turn around, our shoulders often do make contact with the bunk bed above. The stanchions are about three inches in diameter and that is the amount of space we have between the bunk bed next to us.

We sleep head to head or toe to toe to keep from smelling the other person’s feet. Personal hygiene is stressed. This is where a sailor must shower before going to bed every night and where everyone is tightly packed in the compartment. There will be no passing of gas please. I cannot understand why they serve Navy bean soup almost daily. When the food is not appetizing, a bowl or two of Navy bean soup is sufficient for me. I love the stuff although my shipmates don’t.

T. J. who was in boot camp with me is sleeping next to me. Once in a while in the middle of the night he will turn around and his arm will land on my back or chest scaring the daylights out of me causing a near heart attack. This is close living. T. J. is black and I am an Asian living in the same quarters with Samoans and Caucasians. We are one big hard working family of sailors. Don’t go into town to drink with two Irish shipmates. I made that mistake on our first liberty into Honolulu, more precise, Hotel Street that has many tattoo parlors. We were drunk but not falling down drunk and the two shipmates wanted to get shamrocks tattooed on their arms. Not me, but they insisted and they will pay for it. Not on my arm so it was my left breast and I needed to balance that out, so I got a butterfly on the right breast. The butterfly is from my mother’s family crest of a circle with three butterflies and the inner most with three commas.

The bunk bed is a rectangular shaped pipe with rounded corners and a canvas with grommets all around. It is strung tightly with a line to the pipe. This line is pulled tight so the canvas bed won’t sag away from the rectangular pipe. A sack with a thin mattress is placed on top of the canvas with a wool blanket placed on top of that and tucked in at the corners. The sack is lovingly called a fart sack. Obviously not for old men who sleep on them. This is our regulation bunk bed. Most sailors are teenagers or in their early twenties.

This same type of sack was used at Santa Anita Race Track Assembly Center, California in 1942 where I filled my sack with straw instead of a thin mattress. An assembly center is a glorified name for a concentration camp for Japanese Americans during the Second World War. I love the smell of new fresh straw, not the thin musty sweat smelling Navy mattress. Some internees at Santa Anita camp lived in horse stables. Our family was fortunate enough to live in a black tar papered barracks which sat on top of asphalt black top that radiated unforgiving heat in the July and August 1942. Tar paper was nailed with slats to the roof and four outer walls. Keeping the doors wide open at night did help. Moving the cot out into the open would have been better but then the patrolling squads of soldiers kept us all indoors at night. I wrote and published in 2006 this account in My Life in Camps During the War and More. The camps were hastily made in three to four month time for Japanese-Americans to live in during the Second World War to keep us away from the rest of the Americans, they did not trust us even though we were born in United States. My mother is a second generation Japanese American. Strangely, the War Department did not evacuate Italian Americans nor German Americans. 6 million Jews were murdered in concentration (extermination) camps in Europe during the same time we were in camp in United States but we were treated well as far as I was concerned.

Every week we have air bedding day. The blankets, sacks and the thin mattresses are draped over the railing to air them out. It is to freshen the musty bedding. Few believe it is to kill the bed bugs and other vermin in the hot Hawaiian sun rays. It is impossible to air all the bedding at one time so every living compartment has an assigned day of the week and section of the railing to hang their bedding. No matter how often people bathe, body odors hangs in the berthing quarters not to mention bad breath and feet odor so we all learn to tolerate the closeness of human living.

Immediately the First Division Chief assigns me to clean the latrine after the morning breakfast routine is over and again after the noon meal. The wash basins are brass and need to be polished every time during the cleaning process. The shower stall has several shower heads to accommodate four to five men at one time in a small space.

The toilet itself is a metal trough with sea water running constantly draining into West Lock in Pearl Harbor and wooden slats are put across that for seats. Rolls of toilet paper are put on a long metal rod extending from the start of but behind and above the trough to the end. It has been told that sailors would stuff toilet paper loosely in the center of a roll and light it up. When the fire is going strong, the burning roll is sent down the rushing water of the trough making the sailors stand up to avoid being singed. Bad form of a practical joke.

A section of the restroom is roped off so the sailors won’t use it after the noon meal. After the restroom is cleaned, the chief inspect and if satisfied, he hands me my liberty card so I can go on liberty. Liberty call for me is early in afternoon about 1:30 PM but the others work from 8 to 4 PM Mondays through Fridays. Saturdays, we have inspections of all sorts and cannot leave the ship until about 11:00 AM when the noon meal starts. I am really proud of the cleanliness of the latrine and pass inspection all the time.

With all my failed education, they assign me latrine duty. It has been ten years since the end of the war with Japan so I don’t really believe they are trying to get even through me or even punishing me for another nation’s actions. There is racial hatred in the military but we still sleep crowded side by side, strip naked sharing showers and even eat at the same table rubbing elbows.

At the last boot camp sea bag inspection where all my clothing that is supposed to be in the sea bag is inspected, a mustang lieutenant (an officer who came through the enlisted rank) first he gave me praise for my layout. He then asked me if I’m going to steward school, a school for officers’ valets and officers’ wardroom steward, a servant for the officers. I told him I’m going to a guaranteed electronic electrician school and my rate is electronic field seaman recruit. This must have infuriated him because quickly he found that I had a wet sock rolled up. I really doubt that any of my clothes were damp. He ordered all my clothes be thrown out the window and our recruit company march over all my clothing and sea bag. I was mad. I had to wash all my clothes and hang them to dry. Many naval personnel at that time believes all non-white be servants of some sort or hold menial tasks. It is 1955 and Navy life is evolving to the better.

This job as a head cleaner didn’t last long, the Chief Yeoman reads my service record and finds that I have typing skills plus several years of junior college and college education. He gives me a typing test. I am no longer the first division head cleaner but a clerk in the personnel office. All my gear is moved to another berthing area where there is more room and quiet at night. As if I’m on the ship every night. Back to the old bad habit again, after all I’m an active young twenty-two year old seaman.

On Saturdays, inspection day for our spaces and uniform including haircuts is on. Haircuts are free on board the ship. The personnel office is swept clean and the deck is scrubbed with water and lemonade powder. The lemonade is really citric acid with sugar added for drinking purpose but we use it on decks without the sugar. It removes all of the stains or dirt and foot traffic marks quickly. The place smells of lemon. After a while one avoids lemonade even during the hottest days.

Every fourth day is duty day for a twenty-four hour period. At the quarter deck which is at the foot of the pier for this activity, there is a flag pole and a guard shack. The flag is hoisted daily at 8 AM and lowered at sunset. A record that has bugle calls for colors, meals, taps etc. are played at the appropriate times. We have no bugler so a record is played.

We tell time by bugle calls and ship’s bells. A bell is rung every half hour denoting the time. Even numbers of bells are full hour and odd numbers are half hours. For example, at 1:30 PM, two sharp rings a pause and one ring is sounded. Starting at one bell at 12:30 PM on to eight bells at four o’clock then one bell at 4:30 PM and so on. Naturally bells are not sounded during sleeping hours. The quarter deck watch strikes the bell then yell out the number of bells and says all is well. There is no need to own a watch. Here, the quarter deck watch inspects each person’s identification card and liberty card upon departure and picks up the liberty card upon return. No one departs the ship without a liberty card except officers and chiefs. I wish I was a chief. I eventually became a chief petty officer after serving two tours in country Viet Nam with the Mobile Construction Battalion 133. I actually spent ten years as a