Both times I flew out to Shemya, my plane always landed at Adak on our way out. In 1990, Adak was a fairly large Navy base that operated P-3 Orion antisubmarine aircraft. There were thousands of people living on Adak. They were allowed to bring their families there and even had schools through elementary and perhaps middle school. They had restaurants like McDonald's and other things to help people feel at home. Adak still had the lousy Aleutian weather but in most other ways was a nice place. For that reason, they never let any of us Air Force types out of the passenger terminal.

I was stationed on Shemya, about 350 miles further out on the Aleutian chain. Shemya is about 2 miles wide and 4 miles long. At one end of the island, someone had posted a Golden Arches sign that read, "McDonald's, Next Stop, 350 Miles." This is what the Air Force means when it talks about a "remote assignment".

When I was on Shemya, there were a few hundred of us there full time. During what passed for the Summer months, there were construction people on the island hurriedly doing their jobs before the weather became to miserable for them to work anymore.

None of us could bring our families to Shemya, so I spent the year on the island thousand of miles from my family (with the exception of a month leave at mid-tour). The food was only as fresh as the most recent resupply flight. The flights normally came out several times a week but frequently couldn't land due to the severe weather. Let me tell you, if Reeves Aleutian Airlines can't land, then the weather is truly severe. Those were some of the best pilots I ever saw. You knew when you walked into the chow hall if the plane had made it in or not. If you saw salad, then the plane had arrived. If you saw fruit salad, you knew they were using the canned goods. After a couple days of missed flights, we were down to powdered eggs and whatever the chow hall cooks could scrounge.

Our lives there consisted primarily of working rotating shiftwork, exercising, sleeping, and drinking. In retrospect, it's amazing how much of our recreation involved alcohol. We had some good times and laughs, but we were usually drunk when they happened. I wonder why more people didn't become full fledged alcoholics. Some did. The assignment was tough on marriages. Two of my friends' wives divorced them while they were there. Three others were divorced within a year or so of returning home. Fact is, of my friends up there, I'm the only one still married to the same woman.

As miserable as Shemya was, the Coast Guardsmen on Attu had it even worse. Attu is much larger than Shemya and a big battle was fought there in WWII. However, in 1990, Attu was home to about 30 Coast Guardsmen whose job was to keep a LORAN station running. These poor guys used to come to Shemya for R&R (rest & relaxation), a fact that truly saddens me.

Attu was perhaps 20 miles away from Shemya. I had been on the island for over a month before we had weather clear enough to see the other island. It surprised the hell out of me to see what looked like the Rocky Mountain Front Range across the water. It was the most beautiful thing I'd seen since arriving. Unfortunately, the bad weather up there only allowed me to see Attu a handful of times during the entire year. You see, not all Aleutian duty was created equal.

To give you an idea of how we felt about Shemya, there was a little tradition that most of us followed. On the day we left, we drove up to the northern most point on the island and picked up two rocks. We took one rock home with us. The other rock was thrown into the ocean on the southernmost part of the island. The plan was that sooner or later, Shemya would be moved down to Hawaii or perhaps disappear altogether. Unfortunately, the year I was there, a construction barge arrived with several million pounds of gravel for a big project. That one barge undid years of work by departing Shemya personnel.