Naval Station Adak, AK

In December 1969 I left the rattlesnakes and prickly pear of South Texas and traded them in for the williwas, whiteouts, and tundra of the Aleutian Islands. (This post is over a month late - December 19th should have marked the 40th anniversary of my arrival in Adak. But this is a fairly slack ship I'm running these days. Sorry 'bout that.)

 

Since I had to leave the Inferno and our wild weekends on Padre Island, I took 30 days leave and visited friends in Coral Gables, FL, Asheville, NC, and Mundelein, IL on my way north. As usual, the family back in Austin got short shrift when it came to my deciding where I was going to spend my leaves. ACCM Kuhn had offered to let me finish my enlistment in Kingsville, but I was young, ready to try something different (and possibly ungrateful). The result of such recklessness was a set of orders to Adak.

When I arrived and checked into the division, the section leader decided to see right off the bat whether I knew how to run a GCA. I also think he wanted to show me that things were going to be a little bit different in the far north. Probably the biggest difference was the amount of traffic. In Kingsville we had had three oversized training squadrons of F-9 Cougars, but in Adak we had a single Patrol Squadron (about 6 or 8) P-3 Orions. They spent such long hours patrolling the North Pacific that our average traffic was only one or two airplanes a day. But I was to find out on that first GCA  run that even one plane a day could be interesting.

So, when that day's P-3 returned to land, Trip (AC1 TJ Triplett) and I hastened to the GCA trailer, grabbed headsets, and sat down to work it in. With little or no difficulty I got the Orion established on course and on glide path for what was essentially a 15 mile straight-in. Piece of cake! Trip had few comments for the first 11 1/2 miles, then said, "Get ready." As my "blip" passed the 3 mile range mark and just before the Orion it represented crossed Zeto Point (a peninsula that crossed the final approach course at 90°), trip told me, "turn him starboard 30°." I had just enough time to say "What?" before I was astonished to see the P-3's echo suddenly veer left, off course by about - let's see - 30°. Trip keyed his microphone, and turned the plane back to the right in time to salvage the approach, then let me finish it up. The point of the exercise was to impress on me that no matter what else was going on, there was a windshear at 3 miles - always - every time - that I could "take to the bank." It worked. I never had a problem with that the rest of the time I was there.

I found these last three pictures (below) online and probably shouldn't post them since they're not mine, but they illustrate my year on the island so well I'll chance it.

 

This first one shows the Reeves Aleutian Airways terminal at the Adak Airport with the DC-6 parked on the ramp. After being on the island for a few months I started working for Reeves in my off time, loading and unloading freight, and reconfiguring the airplanes as the occasion demanded to carry cargo or passengers. On one such occasion I reconfigured the plane for cargo while enroute to Shemya AFB at the end of the Aleutian chain. It occurred to me after a brief stop at Amchitka Island - where the AEC conducted underground nuclear testing - that I had not gotten Navy permission to leave Adak, which made this the only time in my Navy career that I was AWOL. We picked up our cargo at Shemya and I made it back to Adak that afternoon without being found out.

This picture shows the civilian crab boats at Finger Bay. Trip was on his third or fourth Adak tour while I was there, so he was the closest thing to a native there was. He'd been around so long that he'd actually become the agent for the crab fishermen, offering work on the processing boats to wives of sailors stationed on the island. Extra cash for the families of the sailors made converts of many. A serendipitous aspect of Trip's moonlighting was that we often had King Crab on hand for feasts at the GCA unit.

This last picture, shot from the window of an aircraft on approach over Sweeper Cove, shows the ATC Division's party cabin overlooking the Cove (lower right-hand corner on the cliff below the small peninsula). When we partied, we'd spend much of a day drinking Oly (Olympia Beer) and/or Jack Daniels while watching sea otters playing below the cabin's picture window.

The base eventually closed; the Navy moved out and turned over all its assets on the island to some commission hoping to establish an economy that could support commercial enterprises. I check back online occasionally to see if there's still life on Adak and, though I have no desire to return for a visit, look back on my year there with a certain amount of fondness.