Miscellany

Military bases are toxic, right? There must be pollution, right? Open "canals" - ditches - carry irrigation runoff back to the sea. Aircraft take off day and night. Gleaming water pipes run overground everywhere. And this base is surrounded by enormous chemical plants. Groves of candy-striped smokestacks belch white smoke day and night. But the worst pollution on base is the music -- I have Tony Curtis's "That's amore" running through my head. Why? I wonder. Then I return to the exchange (sort of a military Walmart). The one record plays over and over, day after day. I hear it again: "That's amore." The next time: "That's amore." I marvel that the people who work there don't go stark raving bazoo with the repetition. At the club it's far worse. I'm still eating most of my meals there since I'm still in temporary quarters. The music is always the same -- some sort of pop rap. I have a bad reputation there now with the morning waitresses, because I once complained about the music and asked that it be turned down. They turn it off when they see me. They're afraid I'll throw another temper tantrum. It's horrible music -- not the first time nor the fifth, but by the hundredth, it's torture. The night I returned from Tsuwano, there was semi-classical piano music on for once, and how lovely it sounded. Don't you mind the music? I ask the waitresses. Oh, we don't hear it. !!!! One asks me, don't you like Britney Spears? The waitresses are Japanese and Philipino, with a rare American. I think they just regard it as American music, it's not their music, and so they don't hear it.

The one eatery on base that's not standard American is the soba shop. It's a real hole in the wall. It's out in the middle of nowhere, ensconced between a motor pool and other military buildings. A stark little box of a place. Run by Japanese. Plastic food out front. But it's authentic, noodle dishes and rice dishes - double fried soba is one of my favorites - or katsu curry rice - katsu stands for breaded sliced pork - and its cheap. Instead of music, there's a TV showing grainy Japanese variety shows - very silly but at least there's no music. Today I ran into another teacher, a friend of mine, there and we talked politics - evolution - Marxism - he teaches social studies.

You can also eat at the Food Court - which has mini- Subway, Frank's (furters), Taco Bell, KFC, and Burger King. I eat one thing there - No 6 - two chalupas and a taco, supreme, steak. Off the Food Court is the bookstore slash coffee shop which serves Seattle coffee and ice cream. The bookstore is tiny. The base library is somewhat better. I can give you a feeling for what it has when I tell you it has all the Harry Potter's but no Aristophanes. But it does have Sophocles, Homer, Euripides.

One of the offbase eateries is famous, although the story may be apocryphal. It supposed to serve the best BLT in the world. Supposedly Playboy magazine made this claim. How did they find that out? I've yet to try it. The place is another hole in the wall, on the strip just outside the gate, run by an aging Japanese couple.

Several teachers went to an Indian restaurant named Ganesh. Did they know that the elephant god was Ganesh? No, they didn't know that. See the men with elephant trunk all over the walls? Oh, interesting!

The base is a miniature world - it has one of everything - to duplicate life in America, to take care of us so we can support the "mission". We're encouraged to get off base and enjoy Japan. When we do so, we must realize that we are American ambassadors. We don't want to be making American foreign policy by our stupidity. Even civilians must abide by the dress code. We are not to draw attention to ourselves. So I bought a few clothes in drab colors. Then I realized I looked very military - those drab colors. I'm not even in the military! So I bought a yellow sun hat.

I immediately felt at home on base upon arriving here. I grew up on or near Army bases. On Okinawa as a teenage I had a job as livesaver for a marine swimming pool. The marines here don't swagger. They are the nicest boys. There are girls too and it seems normal to have both men and women in uniform. Lots of times you'd think there wasn't a soul living on base -- where is everybody? Then rush hour hits - and downtown Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni - that one god-awful intersection where five roads converge - is chock-a-block with cars. Or in the mornings, all those cars lined up at the front gate trying to get to work - and they check every ID. The pilots themselves are generally seen at lunch wearing those camel-colored flightsuit overalls which are apparently the marine pilot's garb. They sit in long tables, five, ten, twenty of them, all men, one woman.

One of the social studies teachers Friday says to me it takes four years for a teacher to learn all the social science curriculums - much harder than math. Much harder than math? What's he mean? There are just as many different math courses. Nah, he says, there's only nine numbers, how hard can math be?