Standards and Grudges

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Since I had my scanner and photo albums out, I’ll share more pictures from my time in Japan.

This is Maeda Point, which in on the west coast of Okinawa. It has wonderful scuba diving, including an underwater cave that takes you under the cliff and into a hidden cavern.

You need to plan your dive well though. My roommate Ryan and me went on a dive one weekend and forgot to take the tide into consideration. When the tide rolls out at Maeda Point, a flat plain of several hundred feet of dead coral is partially exposed. When you try to make it back to shore, the waves smash against you and if you fall, you get dragged across the coral. It was exhausting getting onto shore.

Here I am trying to squeeze into a diving suit just a little too small during my PADI certification class.

Here’s a glimpse into the barracks life of Marines in Okinawa.

We had a tradition that once a week we’d hang out in Ryan Wruck’s room, drink beers, sip Sake, play cards, or just cause mayhem. Part of the tradition was to wear our BDU hats backwards, wrap a metal coat hanger around our head and dangle an empty beer can from the hanger. I have no idea how that tradition started, but it was fun.

Here are wonderful portraits of a couple of my buddies. This is my roommate Ryan Jahnke.

And this is Robert Cardillo. His nickname was Dillywop since he’s Italian.

Here’s a couple pictures from a trip to one of the malls in Okinawa.

Coricino and me were having some fun with hair extensions.

And here I am posing with some Pokemon statues. They love Pokemon in Japan. You’ll see it everywhere.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. We had to work too and sometimes that meant going to the field. Here’s Milton posing with the most important piece of equipment in the field, the coffee maker. Milton was our resident coffee expert and he’s also a nationally ranked chess player.

And every good NCO makes sure his troops are happy, so I was feeding Skittles to Milton.