The Great Wall looking fairly Biblical.

One China

“the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position.”

It’s been a couple of weeks and I had promised to provide a China bookend to our SSG adventures in Russia. So, given a long holiday weekend in the Imperial City and Vic’s call for reinforcements a la Socotras, I dug in a little on a rainy-snowy holiday weekend and got down to the business of creative writing. So, here it is. Let there be no doubt that Point Loma will ever fail to deliver.
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There were three communiqués issued between Nixon’s visit to China and the follow-ups with Henry Kissinger, with the last one in 1982. They mean different things to different people. With the rise of China as a peer competitor, it’s time to reprise what we learned in 1995, and how our early concerns and misgivings fell on semi-deaf ears.

These days, it’s all things China and I have been attuned to the warnings that Kimo has been issuing periodically both before and after he retired. I think he singlehandedly averted a Chinese strike on the Japanese Navy over the Senkakus; it’s only a matter of time before they choose to take us on.

We could see it coming, even back then, and the examples of how the mainland absorbed Macao and Hong Kong, the pressure points they are exerting on Taiwan, and their exercise of “hard power” against other countries in the South China Sea are telling – they were and are building an incredibly society over there, of Biblical proportions, and it was apparent then that they were going to be a force to be reckoned with down the line. Hello, it’s here.

It was the fall of 1995. We were enjoying the change of seasons in tawny Newport, RI, and assessing the aftermath of our just completed visit to Russia; among the goods being the healthy interchange with the Russian Navy, and the others being the thinly disguised attack on us engineered by our FSB pal Vlad Putin. The latter led to a lot of interest in the Pentagon at the JCS level for what it meant, or what it didn’t. Twenty years later, we know.

The next stop on our fact-gathering journey was China, with visits planned to Beijing and Qingdao. I tried to get Shanghai and Hong Kong on the agenda, but I was not the central planner for this event as the OPNAV and JCS staffs were really in control. More than five years since the events surrounding the uprising in Tiananmen Square, there had been no high-level military exchanges with the Chinese – we were going to be the first, so it was understandable that the anal staff types in the “building”[1] were going to be involved. And remember, this was 23 years ago…

We got our agenda and flight data. We were now using VR-48 out of Andrews AFB, another Gulfstream-4 unit. Since there was a lot of high-level interest in our visit, we traveled via commercial air down to DC and enjoyed a day’s worth of meetings in the Pentagon, spent the night in the Andrews AFB BOQ, and were then driven by bus early the next morning out to mount our swift G-4 steed for the long flight westward.

Our first stop was for refueling at Offcut AFB, where we had lunch with the STRATCOM commander (a submariner), and then to Monterey, CA, where we picked up ADM Hogg and Dr. John who had been out there briefing the Naval Post-graduate School on our future plans – that will be the topic of another Socotra, later, so stay tuned. It was a fine afternoon and I was delighted to discover that the airport manager was Vince, a former (several times removed) squadron mate/retired 0-6 who I had met in San Diego at the Aye Bar in the North Island BOQ when he was CO of North Island, and I was an Ensign doing a “little boxing” in SERE school at FASOTRAGRUPAC. After topping off and loading up on box lunches, we launched and chased the hazy sun towards Honolulu.

After a long flight fighting headwinds and woozy late night/early morning of checking in and out of the BOQ at Hickam, we continued West – our plan was to meet with the CINCPAC staffs after our visits, and they had been involved in the Pentagon briefings leading up to our departure, so no need for last minute admonitions.

Once the G-4 crew was rested, we took off again for Guam, refueled, and then arrived at our first destination – Japan. Even then, it was to send a strong signal to the Chinese that they were second, not first on our agenda.

For the first two days of the trip, we were based out of NAS Atsugi, where both Vic and I had labored in the service of CVW-5 and the MIDWAY Maru, still the greatest aircraft carrier in history. I had only been gone for two years, and still had some friends in what we called the “CAG Det” who were caretakers of the base when the ship (in this instance the USS INDEPENDENCE) was deployed.

Before I left, I had to design a new hangar to replace the old Quonset hut which homed the CAG Staff. I had some down time and was able to tour and inspect the spaces that I had scratched out on drafting paper for the Army Corps of Engineers two years before – pretty cool.

We met with the COMNAVFORJAPAN commander and had a visit to the USS BLUE RIDGE and meeting with COMSEVENTHFLT, and later had dinner at his house on top of the rocky hill overlooking the base, hosted by him and his charming wife (a true babe from Georgia).

The next day, we took a helo up to Tokyo to the US Embassy. It was a spectacular flight, Tokyo for once being freed of overcast and the size and scope of the city was staggering to see from above in its entirety. We were treated to an aerial view of the Emperor’s Palace, the mock Eifel Tower, and the sheer scope of the downtown building complex.

I remember one day back in CAG-5 when our Deputy, Uncle Miltie returned from a hop during a similar day and his marveling remark was “God this is a big city; where do all of the turds go?” We were going to China next, where they have 10X the number of people; turd disposal, indeed.

During our talks with the Japanese, we were treated to the truly amazing gifts of Japan Gazer – his ability to translate the emotions and colloquialisms of the Japanese language and his interlocutors was nothing short of phenomenal (then – I can’t imagine what his talent is like now). He will be one of those guys that go down in history as a national treasure in both countries.

We returned to Atsugi and I had an afternoon to go out and visit my former neighbors in Sagamihara – bittersweet. That night, I led members of our group to one of our favorite sushi bars just outside the gate at Atsugi. We had one of the bar specialties, Horse Mackerel (Aji), which were silver sparkly fish that swam live in a tank on the outside wall of the bar.

The trick was how the sushi chef prepared the Aji – he would net the fish, fillet and spit him, and lay the sashimi pieces on the spitted carcass, which was still gulping for air. The trick was to eat him before he died…

Aji on the spit. Bon appetit des.

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