Chapter 3 - Matt’s first day of work
Yokwe. The first of the month is here and time for your next chapter of my novel “Roi-Namur”
Ron flies up every work day to perform his work on Roi. He showed me around the 4 radar buildings. The largest of the radar antennas was Altair and stands on its own. Further down the road are the three other buildings. There is another that stands alone called MMW. The last two, Tradex and Alcor are connected. Tradex is the oldest of the four antennas and its building houses the main office area for the managers and engineers who work on the island. It is connected via an exposed hall way to Alcor where my new office was located. The office was fairly large and housed a green metal desk that must have been built in the 50s and a workbench with test equipment and parts used by previous workers. There was also a bookcase housing a number of books dealing with radar and some parts catalogs. Ron showed me around the various buildings and introduced me to the workers there. Down the hall from my office worked an extremely energetic engineer named Jimmy Hires. He was thin with matching thin black hair that he fashioned into a comb over. He was quite friendly and always willing to help but never seemed to have an abundance of time to perform such service. He was always chasing after some problem or calibrating the radar. His dedication and professionalism were hard to match. Ron took me over to the office of one of the radar technicians named Gary Christman. He hailed from the same mid-west city as I did so we could discuss some shared experiences. Ron told me later that Gary’s father had been a submarine captain in World War II and by a strange coincicdence had visited the Marshall Islands back then. Gary was about 6 foot 2 and weighed well over 200 lbs but was a friendly sort. Gary invited me to go diving and explained what I would need to do to get my certification to dive there. I already had an SSI advanced open water certification but the Army required the folks there to jump through a few hoops to make sure they would be safe. He agreed to take me on a verification dive after work the next day and then I should be able to dive the following weekend.