By William Zack, July 5, 2017 — I was serving in Japan on MP (Marine Police) duty on a wharf from the 4 to 11 shift and I had SP (Shore Patrol) with me. We were walking in a bad area (due to drugs) Around midnight and we walk into a bar. People were playing cards, and this one guy came in and he said, “Ship’s coming in,” so they all scattered and took off down to the dock. We knew that they were going down there to pick up some drugs, so we went down there and sure enough there they were, picking up their drugs. So we called Shore Patrol and about eight Shore Patrol men came and arrested all of the men that were involved in it. We got up about 20 pounds of drugs. It was pretty scary walking around midnight.
May 1st is their celebration holiday and we had to fortify our bases with guns and everything because they would cross over and get into our tents and steal things. Later on that night, we had a typhoon. We had to go and take care of our warehouses, we had the doors open because if the doors were closed, the typhoon going 150 miles an hour would tear that building down. I was standing in the doorway when a strike of lightning hit the building, did we take off! We got into Jeeps and left. When we came back, four corrugated steel and concrete buildings were flattened. People were stealing everything they could get their hands on. Then for the next two weeks, we were there with torches cutting the corrugation away from the steel, there were piles of steel.
Then there was a typhoon at sea, and the waves were so high that it took down an aircraft carrier. The waves were 50-60 feet high. I had pictures, but I lost them all when my apartment burned down.