James F. Bond Sr. Interview, 26 February 2005
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| TT: | And you were in Okinawa in July of '65? | |
| JB: | Yeah. | |
| TT: | And you were you up in Alaska in '56 too? | |
| JB: | Yeah we had a temporary duty deployment up there too—Kodiak Island. | |
| TT: | Training for recovery or whatever it was called? | |
| JB: | No. What happened at that time, I was with a security unit and we just, well our aircraft were doing that, but I was not with that unit anymore doing that. I had been grounded long before. We were just temporary duty. Kodiak at that time there was a Naval Air Station and they were flying P2B Neptune submarine killers out of there. So we spent about seven months there, let's see from Kodiak we went to, I believe I came back to Sewart, I had two tours of duty at Wurtsmith. In fact, Wurtsmith was where I was when I retired. | |
| TT: | Two tours, how many years would that be? | |
| JB: | The first time was maybe two and a half years or so. The second tour was when I came back to Clark Air Force Base from the Philippines. I stayed at Wurtsmith for about a year, maybe a little over a year, and that's when I retired. | |
| TT: | OK. And you retired as Staff Sergeant? | |
| JB: | Yeah. I had some problems with some of my supervisors, couldn't even get along with—anytime you're in a position of authority and you have to deal with people that deal with other people—and they're trying to make a name for themselves, or they're trying to get you to, you know, "this is a buddy of mine, don't do this, don't do that" and I was never the one for looking the other way. | |
| TT: | Yeah, some of the other guys talked about problems they had and reasons thy left the service. | |
| TT: | Did you serve 20 years? | |
| JB: | Yeah I did 20 years, 21 days. | |
| TT: | Yeah, you did mention in your form that you had seen something in Alaska and in Okinawa in '66 and '65. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? | |
| JB: | That's a real fuzzy area. I do remember seeing something. I wasn't the only one, there were other people that saw it and in Okinawa we had, I worked base police and security there, and one of our security functions was to escort missiles, we had missiles in Okinawa... | |
| TT: | Air to ground? | |
| JB: | They were, yeah. I don't recall what the name of them was at the time. They were tactical, and there were some Army missiles there at the same time, and about the only connection we had with them was to escort them if we moved one, escort them back and forth, and we were pretty much told that during an escort if a vehicle gets in front of you, or won't give you the right of way put them off the road. | |
| TT: | You call them a National Security Zone. | |
| JB: | Yeah, even though we are not in the United States. We made a few Okinawans not happy. |
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