KWAJALEIN ATOLL -- Brand X
We usually were not the only observers during a mission. We could generally count on at least one Russian spy ship, appropriately nicknamed Brand-X, cruising just off ocean side. It was always a source of interest to me how that ship would appear off-shore only during a mission. It was even more of a mystery how the people on that ship always knew long before we did that a mission had been scrubbed (cancelled) and would turn away and head for open sea.
I remember interviewing a lady in Los Angeles a couple of years ago who said how hard it was for her kids to understand about the mission after they moved to Kwajalein. Her grammer-school-age children, educated in California, were convinced the Franciscan friars had built another California-type mission someplace on island. Upon hearing about the mission from their school chums, the kids thought they were going to see another Spanish mission. As the kids grew up it was almost like the trauma of learning about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. The mission eventually became a sort of family joke.
In the old days, all life on Kwaj revolved around the mission. The husband's, and sometimes the wife's work schedules were predicated in the time and place of the mission. Dad normally went to work in the morning, but sometimes he would go to the terminal to catch an airplane or helicopter at the oddest hours. When the kids would ask, "Where's Dad?" she would reply, "Oh, he is on the mission." One teacher at the George Seitz school told me she had her class of second graders draw pictures of what they like to do most on Kwajalein. One little girl drew a picture of a great big ship coming into Echo Pier. In the picture was her family waiting on the dock. You guessed it -- she had named the ship Mission.
In our house, the word mission got to be a big excuse for any kind of an out-of-the-way event. My son tried to use the term at school as an excuse for not turning in his homework -- the delay, you see, was due to the mission. I got a note from the teacher on that one.
Then there was the time we received a rash of early morning call-ins from employees who said they overslept because of the mission. Some of these absences were excusable, but when the cooks and bakers at the PDR and the buildings and grounds crews started to use this story, we knew things had gone too far!