Marines are the best gate guards.
Guard duty is serious basic Marine stuff. Officer candidates or recruits start as firewatch. Someone is always going to come and try to trip you up.
I lived in Yokosuka for a few years. Incredibly interesting as a dependent. My favorite story was when I was or nine years old. I didn’t have an ID card yet, so I couldn’t go off base by myself. But there was an old battleship, the Mikasa (a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War Battle of Tsushima) set up in concrete as as memorial. It was right on the water’s edge on the northern(I think) edge of the base.
Right where the fence came up, you could lift the fence and crawl under it, which is what I would do. Then, I would wander around off base, looking at all the strange things...plastic food...pachinco ball parlors...and the smell. It was the mixed smell of human waste, fish and car exhaust. Everything to me was completely alien, as if I had been dropped off on another planet.
To get back on the base, I would just walk in. The Marines guarding the gate would never ask you, because you were a kid and if you got off base, then you must have a card.
One afternoon (around 5:30 PM) when I was going back on base, they stopped me. They took me inside the guard shack and sat me in a metal chair. There were five of them, wearing the blue trousers with the red stripe, khaki shirt on top and the white cover. As I sat in the chair, they hovered menacingly around me, arms crossed. “How do we know you aren’t a spy”? they asked me. I said I wasn’t, and one of them said “Okay...who won the 1967 World Series?” My favorite player happened to be Lou Brock at the time, so I knew it was the Cardinals. It is funny to look back on now.
I wasn’t a spy, and I didn’t think at all that they thought so either...but they were awfully serious, and I thought they might simply be messing with me while waiting for the Shore Patrol and the Master at Arms to come down and pick me up...just having some fun. Now, I realize they fully knew who I was, because my dad was the head of security on the base at the time...:)
True, and really good one.
-fJRoberts-