My recent adventures have been about the vacation that my family and I took to the island of Guam immediately after I had relinquished my position as the Commander of the 305th Supply and Services Company. After I had passed the guidon to the new company commander in a change of command ceremony, I decided to cool my jets for a few days and catch up on some much needed rest and relaxation. My family also needed a break. As luck would have it, my First Sergeant At 305th Supply and Services Company was also planning to cool his jets and catch up on some rest and relaxation. So, we set off on a vacation to the sunny island of Guam. Just to clarify things, when I say we, I mean that my family and I as well as my First Sergeant all set off on this vacation adventure. We decided to use the low-budget method of transportation to get to Guam, which meant that we were all going to catch a Space-A (space available) hop aboard an Air Force cargo plane out of Osan Air Force Base to fly to Guam. Of course, when you use low-budget anything, there is that old adage, “let the buyer beware,” that comes into play. And naturally, it came into play for us in a huge way on the flight from Yokota Air Force Base, Japan, to Anderson Air Force Base, Guam. If you’ve been keeping up, perhaps you know exactly what I am referring to. That low-budget air transportation kicked us right square in the ass just to let us know exactly what the score was. So, all I can say is, you get what you pay for. Anyway, I also talked about the long wait that we spent at Anderson Air Force Base waiting to check in at the officer guest quarters. Once I had accomplished those things, I needed to secure some transportation to get around the island. I talked about the car that I was able to rent for a mere ninety-four dollars ($94) for the entire duration of our vacation. On the morning of the second day that we were on the island, I talked about visiting one of the local beaches. Which included our encounter with wild pigs that came out of nowhere and thought we were food. And even read the giant coconut crabs that scared the shit out of us but didn’t really bother us. I later learned that those giant coconut crabs didn’t really bother us because we weren’t really part of their diet and we didn’t have anything shiny to steal like baubles, trinkets, and jewelry. We had secured all of that stuff in our rental car before we went down to the beach. Little did we know that those conniving coconut crabs were actually thieves. We even encountered the flying foxes that managed to scare the living shit out of my wife and daughter the first couple of times that we went out picking fruit. No. They were not actually flying foxes. Oh, come on. Have you ever actually seen a flying fox? I didn’t think so. These critters were actually fruit bats. No. Not dingbats. Cuz a dingbat is a stupid or eccentric person. You know, a simpleton, a maroon, or an imbecile. What’s that? What is a maroon? You know. I’ve made reference to my favorite cartoon character before, Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny liked to use the word maroon instead of the word moron. I guess he thought it sounded better. Maybe to an idiot or dolt or a dummy maroon does sound better. Anyway, a dingbat is simply someone who’s elevator never goes to the top floor. However, fruit bats are real bats. Not the kind of bats that you get when you have bats in your belfry. Well, now that we have that clarified, I need to actually talk about the subject of today’s story. Yes. There is a subject. The fruits that we were picking off of the fruit trees in Guam. Many of the fruits that we instantly recognized were available and relatively ripe for picking while we were there. Guam had an assortment of all types of melons such as the honeydew melon, the cantaloupe, some watermelon varieties, and a mini melon that we later learned was called the pipinu. We also found a variety of citrus fruits as well. We found green lemons, limes, tangerines, and pomelos. There were others, such as the lemonchina and the calamansi but we didn’t know what they were or what they looked like. My First Sergeant gave us a guided tour of the various fruit trees and explained what they were on the fourth day that we were there. I made a videotape of that guided tour. He showed us some of the more unique fruits such as the lychee fruit, star apples, star fruits, santol, sineguelas, atis, soursop, and jackfruit. We did recognize other fruits such as mountain apples, mangoes, papaya, avocados, bananas, guavas and breadfruit. But we stuck to picking fruits that we liked to eat such as some of the melons, some of the citrus, the mangoes, the avocados, and the gooseberries. We also went to a local fruit and vegetable stand and picked up some apples and grapes and carrots. However, we didn’t buy a whole lot of food while we were visiting Guam because my First Sergeant was related to a lot of people on the island. And those people treated us like we were family. We were always getting invited to family luaus and get-togethers where food was always served. But we had fun picking the fruit of Guam to eat while we were there and we did so without any significant exercises in futility.
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