The Gun Counter

Woe to you, oh, Earth and Sea...

1982? I was living up in Leadville, skiing and hiking my butt off. I got laid off from the mine shortly before it closed and things went south in town and the surrounding counties. I was listening to old Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Psychedelic Furs, and Neil Young. Early U2 as well. Doo dah. Dang, I was purty back then too. Oh fer the good ol' days.

March 1982; I had just arrived at Naval Security Group Activity, Adak, Alaska as a new ET1.
Adak had been my goal ever since reluctantly leaving Kodiak in 1971 and I finally made it after
a tour at Boardman bombing Range in Oregon.

I loved Adak. You only had to wander fifty yards off the road to find a howling wilderness
full of interesting WW2 relics. The north half of the island was littered with collapsing Quonset
Huts, abandoned vehicles, fallen wire antennas(bronze hardware!), old aircraft hangars, and miles
of Marsten-Mat. The old fighter-strip power-station was just as it was when the soldiers dropped their tools
and scrambled for home after the war. All of the old stock-piles were abandoned in place and allowed to
rot away. There was even a small mountain of coal, slowly being depleted by the tiny stoves in recreation
cabins.

It was a great place to save money; I was receiving pro-pay even though I never worked in my specialty
and I received an extra paycheck each year for leave I didn't take.

Now, the NSGA complex has been abandoned for twenty years. All of the WW2 stuff has been salvaged
for scrap or bulldozed into a landfill. The Naval Air Station is a civilian airport and the Naval Station buildings
are either abandoned or being leased to a fishing-canning company.

You can see it all on Google-Earth and it looks sad.

March '82 I was a month away from wrapping up my A&P and had just enlisted in delayed entry progrma 6 years in the Navy. Christmas '82 I was holding in P-days at San Diego RTC.

I was in the second grade.

March

1982

I was, erm, you guys probably don't want to know.

Dinochrome wrote:March 1982; I had just arrived at Naval Security Group Activity, Adak, Alaska as a new ET1.
Adak had been my goal ever since reluctantly leaving Kodiak in 1971 and I finally made it after
a tour at Boardman bombing Range in Oregon.

I loved Adak. You only had to wander fifty yards off the road to find a howling wilderness
full of interesting WW2 relics. The north half of the island was littered with collapsing Quonset
Huts, abandoned vehicles, fallen wire antennas(bronze hardware!), old aircraft hangars, and miles
if Marsten-Mat. The old fighter-strip power-station was just as it was when the soldiers dropped their tools
and scrambled for home after the war. All of the old stock-piles were abandoned in place and allowed to
rot away. There was even a small mountain of coal, slowly being depleted by the tiny stoves in recreation
cabins.

It was a great place to save money; I was receiving pro-pay even though I never worked in my specialty
and I received an extra paycheck each year for leave I didn't take.

Now, the NSGA complex has been abandoned for twenty years. All of the WW2 stuff has been salvaged
for scrap or bulldozed into a landfill. The Naval Air Station is a civilian airport and the Naval Station buildings
are either abandoned or being leased to a fishing-canning company.

You can see it all on Google-Earth and it looks sad.

In 1982 I was 12 years old, awkward and bespectacled. Hmm. I still am...

There was an episode of Bone Collector on Outdoor Channel recently where they went to Adak to hunt caribou. They showed the town with all of it's empty streets and houses that are falling apart. When they weren't camping close to the caribou they stayed in one of the old military houses. They showed what was left of the radar station and said that during the Cold War the island's population was usually just over 6,000 people. Now there are only a few hundred permanent residents, mostly fishermen. I thought they said that some of the old radar was still used but I must have mis-remembered.

Frankingun wrote:
In 1982 I was 12 years old, awkward and bespectacled. Hmm. I still am...

There was an episode of Bone Collector on Outdoor Channel recently where they went to Adak to hunt caribou. They showed the town with all of it's empty streets and houses that are falling apart. When they weren't camping close to the caribou they stayed in one of the old military houses. They showed what was left of the radar station and said that during the Cold War the island's population was usually just over 6,000 people. Now there are only a few hundred permanent residents, mostly fishermen. I thought they said that some of the old radar was still used but I must have mis-remembered.

About the military housing; the Navy had just built all of those two-story multicolored houses at a cost of many millions in 1987 and used them for just three years. All of the other housing areas were razed because of asbestos content. The radar still in use is probably the air-search unit at the "airport". There is an occasional visit from a floating X-band radar that tracks satellites. It's on a big barge and has a huge white radome.

It's really too bad that the military facilities on the island have been allowed to deteriorate. They might be needed in the near future.

March 1982. I was broke and unemployed from the PATCO strike and had re-enlisted in the Navy as a CPO. I was at RTC/NTC San Diego undergoing NAVET training and awaiting orders. Our home was in San Jose, CA and I commuted, one way or another, just about every weekend from San Diego.

An acquaintance of mine from 1969 was the NTC Command Master Chief. He was one of my instructors in Glynco Georgia and had been selected for Chief at the time (69). He was the first Air Controlman that I knew that wore hearing aids, and was allowed to stay in the rate. He did arrange front row seats for my wife, mother-in-law, and myself for a boot camp graduation ceremony.

March, 1982 I was a freshman in college.