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Atoll Living

The story of my grandfather at the missile defense site in the Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands may be a tiny part of the world, but they played a huge part in my destiny. My grandfather was an electrical engineer, working for RCA on a radar site on the island of Roi Namur for the Star Wars missile testing from 1975 to 1980. They launched missiles from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California into Kwajalein Lagoon. My grandfather was taking part in the Space Wars on nuclear weapons that had originally started right after World War II. He was on a top secret mission to develop a defense mechanism to track and shoot down nuclear weapons launched by enemies at the US.

My grandmother explains:

Kwajalein has the largest lagoon of any atoll in the world — 900 square miles. Roi Namor was the island where my grandfather worked. He flew to it every day on a Lockheed Electra 4-engine turboprop (30 minute flight).

Kwajalein is three miles long and one-half mile wide at its widest section. There were between 3,000 and 5,000 people living on the island depending on what contractors were there. In World War II, the Battle of Kwajalein took place there. When the family visited that island, my father and his brother would find live ammunition from World War II and take it to the police station. It had a Japanese Command House from the Second World War. When the police would get enough ammo, they would take it out into the lagoon and detonate it. At that point, it was 30 plus years old and much had been in salt water during that time.

Life on the island was very laid back. On a real low tide, the family could walk over to Ebeye, but had to move quickly as it was two miles with two small uninhabited islands on the way. They would take a boat back to Kwajalein. At night, they would go out with a bucket, flashlight, and net and catch beautiful tropical fish. They had a 65-gallon fish tank on their back porch which they ran a trickle of ocean water in (went out through the overflow) and they did not have to heat the tank or feed the fish. They could change out the fish as they wanted by putting them back in the lagoon and catching new ones.

My grandmother says: “Life on Kwaj was very laid back. We would get up and eat, Jack [my grandfather] would ride his bike to the airport and catch a plane to Roi. Steve [my dad] and Bruce [his brother] would ride bikes to school.” They had grades one through twelve and could also take courses for college from the University of Hawaii. There were no cars on the island. If they were dressed and wanted to go to the Yuk We Yuk Club (the nice restaurant on the island), they would call a cab. The “cab” was a panel truck with a couple of steps into it and a bench running the length on each side. They would pick up the family and other folks and take them to where we they were going. There was a library, pottery shop, a six-lane bowling alley, outdoor movie theater, ball fields, and a chapel, which was open on the sides about three feet up.

There were two saltwater pools, one for families and one for bachelors. My dad explains, “We used to find small crabs, tiny shrimp, and more in the pools…they pumped water from the open ocean to fill them (pools).” There are many stories that he can recount about his years on the Marshall Islands, and I plan to explore them along with hearing more about what life was like back then from my grandmother. Even though my grandfather passed away in 2013, my grandmother and father can help me to understand more about the man who brought them to what turned out to be an idyllic place to live.

A conversation with my dad and grandmother.

On the day of the interview I woke up, after what was basically a long nap, ate some pizza, and got ready to go to the activity that was planned for all the fathers and sons. My dad showed up thirty minutes later and we went to Stolz Hall for breakfast. I got an omelet with “all meat, onions, tomatoes, jalapeños, and both cheeses” while my dad got a few different toppings on his as well as some of the other food that was available. We ate and by the time we were done it was time to head over to the football field for the activity. I won’t go into much detail about the activities but at the end we were told that if we could correctly guess the total number of all the cards that were out that we could get a free book and of course I got it. After the activity we went back to my room to put some things away and went back to Stolz to get lunch. After lunch we went out into the woods so I could show my dad some cool jumps and things on a bike. After we got back to my room I got my things and we went to my grandmother’s house to conduct the interview.

Patricia Ann Hayes Galpin Allaire.

Stephen Merritt Galpin.

Told I was a tease. I was a tom boy, second of 6 children with only ten years between the youngest and the oldest … a tight bunch.

I don’t know what my favorite toy was, but there is a picture of me with a stuffed Scottie dog that she would carry around by the tail. I liked to go out and play stick ball with the boys, collect bugs in jars, I was not a girly girl, not a student, I was shy.

Not any big trouble. I was in the living room with brothers and sisters making a clicking noise that aggravated everyone else and they told my mom, who was fixing supper, and she had me come out in the kitchen and sit there for fifteen minutes and go make the same noise while my siblings all, instead of playing in the living room, were hiding behind the corner laughing at me.

Fairly quiet always enjoyed water fishing, surfing from a very young age. At 2 he won a sub-co rod and reel by being the only 2 year old in a fishing contest to catch a fish, and all he had was a bamboo pole with a string tied to it and a hook on it, and he caught a little puffer fish that got him started in his fishing.

Yeah a few times… we had a thing called mischief night it was the night before Halloween was it Halloween or night before I think it was the night before (Oma) Halloween (Dad) out on Kwajalein and there was a kid that used to bully me a lot and he was spraying shaving cream in my eyes and I hit him with a dive mag full of shaving cream cans and cut his head open. I got in trouble for that um… another time in seventh grade I was with some older kids that were vandalizing things and got caught by the police and the police brought me home so basically I got caught and everyone else got in trouble for it I managed not to get into trouble for it but… favorite toy no but I had a favorite blanket that o had for a long time this green blanket …probably blue (Oma) yeah that would probably be my favorite color too.

19. He was at my girlfriend’s house and when I went in he and her boyfriend who were Jack and Jim were roommates but Jack went ahead and stood up (strong muscularly like a weightlifter) and I thought boy doesn’t he thinks he’s something. We dated for almost two years, but a year and a half of that he was gone he was up in Thule Greenland during that time I was in the well first of all I was in Rocks Bury Massachusetts on Parker Hill which is pretty large hill, there are a couple of hospitals on it.

Was only boy with four sisters who idolized him. He grew up out in the country in Missouri in Galantine, Missouri, and I know the family moved around quite a lot. They rented places and they moved. He played football in high school and went into the navy right out of high school and then went to college right after he got out of the navy. He was in WWII he was on a LSM out in the pacific and went through seven typhoons while he was on the ship there was at least one time when everybody on ship had their life jackets on and the ship was really listing into the storm and they were prepared to abandon ship because of the storm being so bad. He was in Nagasaki about a month after we had dropped the atomic bomb.

(Oma) My favorite part was that it was very laid back you didn’t have to be overly concerned about the kids and what they were doing because if anyone got in trouble everybody kind of oversaw things and no you didn’t have cars everyone rode bicycles. We didn’t have TV you just did a lot of living outside and yeah it was kinda like you were way out there and the rest of the world was way off somewhere else so you didn’t have all the day to day problems that you have with stuff back here.

(Oma) The temperature was similar. It was 78 to 88 year round because you were fairly close to the equator, the sun set within a half hour between the summer and winter. Winter is not like ours here. We had a drier season and a rainy season and They collected fresh water on the runway during the rainy season. They had collecting basins all down the center of the runway which would be pumped into storage tanks. When the water got low during the dry season everybody were to use paper plates and you were to, of course, be cautious with showers and things like that. If the water got too low they also had a desalinization plant which makes fresh water from salt water.

(Dad) Probably kinda just being able to run around and do whatever and the ocean, snorkeling, shell collecting, fishing, and going the other islands to spend the day.

(Dad) Smaller than Kwajalein, uninhabited with coconut palms and other foliage. (Oma) Coconut crabs. (Dad) Would we see them up there? (Oma) Coconut crabs? Oh yeah. (Dad) When we were on Bigej and other places? (Oma) Yeah they’d start off as really small crabs that would just take an empty shell and back into it. That would be their home, and as they outgrew something they would go to something bigger, all the way up till where they’d be inside of a coconut. You’d see a coconut laying there and maybe go to pick it up and this crab’s front parts would pop out.

(Dad) Yeah anyway the islands were cool, we’d walk through them from the lagoon side to the ocean side. (Oma) There were passes in the reef were the water was much deeper, and we would have to cross over them if we went up to Bigej. Besides that, between the islands was the reef so you didn’t get as many waves from the ocean side on the lagoon side. You defiantly had to wear good shoes if you were walking the reef because the corral would tear you up.

We had the different contractors that were out on Kwaj like RCA, MIT, Lincoln Labs. They would have parties and get-togethers and so forth and on Kwajalein the dress for these events was like Hawaiian dress. The women would wear the long, Hawaiian dress and the men would just wear a pair of slacks and a bright Hawaiian print shirt. That was island formal as they called it and we would ride our bicycles to the events wearing flip flops. Those were the shoe of the time out there.

He was an electric engineer. He worked on radar and the particular radar that he was on, was for tracking missiles that were shot off form the Vandenbergh Air Force Base in southern California. The missiles would have war heads in them, some of them dummies and some of them that could be armed, and the radars would track them coming in to determine which ones were the dummies and which ones could be a problem. They had other engineering companies out there with missiles that would shoot down the ones that were potentially hazardous. All of this was part of the cold war and being able to track things coming from Russia ,and so forth, toward the US during that time.

Well, most of them were normal people. The ones he worked with were engineers and sometimes engineers can have a few quirks. But no, for the most part it was good. He flew to work on a different island went they were off work they were off work, there wasn’t a lot of work talk or anything else. When they were not at work we did things like square dancing. There was a square dance club there. We would square dance a couple nights a week. They had schools from first through the twelfth grade. The University of Hawaii offered courses out there as well.

They had a ceramic shop, a six lane bowling alley, an indoor movie theater for the families, as well as an outdoor movie theater. The bachelors had kind of an A-frame that was open on the side and their own movie theater were they went. There were two swimming pools, there was a bachelors pool and there was the family pool. There were two beaches, one for the bachelor status folks and one for the families. The bachelor status were not supposed to go into the housing area for the families unless they were invited by somebody to be there. That’s the way it was, they just kept them separate.

First of all it was an army base. There were probably no more than twenty-seven army families that were there at any time, but the whole island was under the army umbrella. The engineers were kind of the elite people out there because they could bring their families with them and had housing provided and so forth. We had different contractors, there was MIT, Lincoln Labs, and RCA. They had different contractors out there, the house keeping or maintenance contract, and other contracts but the maintenance would be the school teachers, the chaplains, the doctors, and nurses at the hospital, all of the Yuk We Yuk Club (which was our restaurant there as well as a snack bar the thing were you could go in and eat), the mess hall for the bachelor status (all the ones that took care of the dorms for the bachelors), the maintenance people for all the vehicles on island.

We didn’t have private cars, but there were vans and you’d step up two or three steps — there’d just be a bench on either side. We lived at 485c and all the houses were kind of numbered like that, and our unit had four units in it and that’s why we were we were one of the middle units but you’d just call up and say I need a taxi from 485c to the Yuk Club for six people and you’d just wait and the taxi would come to your door—there may already be people on it or maybe not but you’d get on and then they go and stop somewhere else where somebody had called in, and they just drove around and they’d pick people up and they took them where they were going. We didn’t have private cars, it was bicycles, and then the taxis approximately 3–5000 at any time depending on what contracts were going on yeah, so it would be between 3–5. They used a lot of people the Marshallese people from a neighboring island that would come over on a ship. The ship would pick up the people and bring them over in the morning and then take them back at night who worked in the chow hall and did a lot of what you would consider the more menial tasks on island.

No, even though really at the time that we lived there you didn’t have cell phones. There weren’t computers. You couldn’t just send an email to somebody you couldn’t just pick up the phone and call someone out there you sent letters. That’s how you communicated with family back home and you were a long way out because this is halfway well a bit further than between Hawaii and Australia it was 5 and a half hours by C141s it was 5 and a half hours from Hawaii to Kwajalein on a C141 so we were pretty remote but it was pretty nice because you had contact with people all the time. You saw them when you were out walking bike riding in the stores and everything so you kinda it was neat.

Being an engineer with RCA, they flew us to Hawaii every six months for a week. That was paid for. Our hotel and the flights back and forth. Then once a year we got to go all the way back to the east coast of the united states because that was our higher on place. That trip was taken care of, now they didn’t pay for the hotel and all the rest of it for that but our transportation there and the travel days that we had were covered.

It would have been very nice. I totally enjoyed Kwajalein, it was a wonderful place and it was a good place to raise the kids, he loved it. (Dad) Oh yeah, I loved it out there. I didn’t want to leave.

I left the island because I was getting a divorce. That’s why I left the island. We probably still would have been there for more years had I not, but with me getting a divorce I wasn’t a dependent, and I couldn’t stay on island.

It’s the simple things that are most important. It’s people. It’s spending time with people and that was one thing that we did get to do on Kwaj. You didn’t have the TV, you didn’t have these gadgets the way you kids have now. And while you can in a sense be in touch with a lot of people at a time and they’re good for certain things, its something that you really need to try to cut back on because in the long run if that’s all you had and you didn’t have the people, you wouldn’t have much so that would be one thing and another would be as you at the stage in your life where you are and you’re going to be making decisions as far as career, wife, family.

Seek the Lord. Man’s wisdom leaves us short. What we feel is right. A relationship with the Lord and following his lead will keep you out of a lot of trouble and make you happy.

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