![]() ![]() In mid-winter the the WAS fences were useless. ![]() All bases are surrounded with at least eight-foot high chain link fences, usually topped with three strands of barbed wire. The snow began falling in late November and stayed on the ground until late March or early April. Do the math.that's a tick shy of 23 feet of snow. The one thing people always remember about Wakkanai is the snow: we had an average annual snow fall of 275 inches. WAS was an "isolated" tour, dependents were authorized, but the tour length was short: 15 months unaccompanied and two years, accompanied. I was there twice, from 1968 - 1970, and again in 1971. Wakkanai opened in the mid-1950s as an Aircraft Control and Warning (AC&W) radar site, it ceased operations in late 1971 and closed in 1972. Wakkanai was a surveillance site, with a (then) state of the art system known as a FLR-12. The unit had various designations over its lifetime, but it was mostly the 6986th Security Group, a unit of the late, great, USAF Security Service. Wakkanai AS (WAS), Japan is on the northern tip of Hokkaido, as far north as you can go in Japan without getting your feet wet. The rest of my career was spent on Air Force Stations, literally on mountain tops (or the highest ground around) in the case of my Air Defense Command radar assignments, and isolated overseas locations during my tours on surveillance and monitoring (read as: spook) sites. You can add Keesler AFB, MS if you like - I was in a school squadron there in '63 -'64. In 22 years I was "permanent party" on only two Air Force bases: Yokota AB, Japan ('75 - '77) and Tinker AFB, OK ('83 - '85). Most USAF people spend their careers going from AF base to AF base. Guys in my cohort got sent all over the world the travel opportunities today, compared to what I experienced, are very limited. ![]() Tangent: All military careers could arguably be called "different," especially for my generation. Indulge me for a moment before I tell you about Wakkanai I'm gonna go off on a tangent. But there's the web! I googled "Wakkanai Air Station" to begin my trip down the memory hole and hit pay dirt. So, no joy there! I have to rely on my diminishing supply of brain cells, nothing else. Pennington, the rest I boxed up and sent to Number Two Son for safe keeping when I downsized life to fit into the RV. Most of the photos from my AF days are in the custody of The First Mrs. Unlike a lot of folks my age I don't have a treasure-trove of memory-jogging photos, documents, pins, ball caps, and all that other good stuff one accumulates over the years. And then there's the other problem: memory. And I do want to keep this blog rated PG-13, at the very most. Or, to put a finer point on it, most of my war stories aren't suitable for publishing in a family-rated blog. After all, I spent 22 years in the Air Force, so I should have some pretty good stories to tell, right? Not really. I got to thinking today (a dangerous pursuit, for me) that what this blog needs is a few war stories to spice things up a bit.
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