Chinen Gun Club

     Without a doubt, the least known, and one of the shortest lived clubs or organizations on Okinawa was the Chinen Gun Club which existed for about a three month period during the summer of 1957.  It had one of the smallest memberships, most of the time only four, plus the club manager!  It was unusual in more ways than one.  Its four "permanent" members were teenagers, only the so-called manager, the man who supervised the activities, was a bona fide adult.  The guns that were used in that gun club were all military, the standard U.S. military arms plus some exotic foreign arms thrown in.  I don't believe there was another gun club on the island that was like that!  Usually, a gun club will involve target shooting and competition using various "civilian" shotguns, rifles, and pistols.  In cases where the club was made up of teenagers, .22 rifle competition along with shotgunning (trap and skeet) were the popular activities.  But at the Chinen Gun Club, there was not a .22 to be seen nor were there any trap and skeet shotguns.  There were shotguns, but they were all combat shotguns!
     At this point I will skip forward a half a dozen years or so, from Camp Chinen, Okinawa to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  In the summer of 1963 I was undergoing training with the Special Forces Training Group on Smoke Bomb Hill in Fort Bragg.  I was going through Special Forces Weapons Course at the time.  The course was designed to train and familiarize Special Forces personnel with all infantry weapons, including the more common foreign weaponry from Soviet Union, PRC, UK, Germany, etc.  In case of U.S. infantry weapons, they were the weapons of the day, the M-1 Garand rifle, M-1/M-2 Carbine, the M-3 submachinegun (greasegun), the BAR, on down to the .45 auto pistol and the .38 revolver.  We were also trained and familiarized with some of the older weapons like the 1903 Springfield, and the 1928A1 Thompson submachinegun (tommygun).  We trained with the British Sten, the Soviet PPSH, the Danish Madsen, the Finnish Soumi, and the German MP38 and 40 submachineguns.  In otherwords, we were familiarized with all of the infantry weapons in use around the world at the time.
     For most trainees, except for those who came into Special Forces from other units, all of the weapons except for the M-1 Garand which they were exposed to in Basic Training, were unfamiliar.  Those who were veterans and came from other units naturally were familiar with all of the U.S. weaponry.  But for the younger crop of soldiers, except for the M-1, all the other stuff was new and strange.  However, in my case, because of my experience at Camp Chinen Gun Club, I was not only quite familiar with the U.S. weapons but had familiarity with some of the more exotic foreign weaponry.  This caused a bit of a problem with my Training NCO.  He asked me where, what unit I had served with before and I told him that I was not "prior service."  He didn't believe me and couldn't understand why I was denying that I had prior service!  He was certain that I was a "ringer" and trying to pull "something."  People can be very suspicious!  I explained to him that I had been exposed to all those weapons as a teenager at a gun club and he refused to believe me, saying that no gun club had such weaponry!  I insisted that the club I belonged to on Okinawa, Chinen Gun Club, did indeed have all these weapons.  Fortunately for me, another Training NCO stepped in and said that he was familiar with Camp Chinen on Okinawa since he had just been with the 1st Special Forces Group on the island.  He said that Chinen did indeed have all sorts of exotic weapons that he and his team members had received both language and weapons training at Camp Chinen!  So, I was saved!
     Now, back in the summer of 1957, it was decided that a gun club would be organized to keep teenagers occupied and out of trouble during the summer months.  I had arrived in Chinen in the Spring of 1957 and had completed the 8th grade at the old Kubasaki (the old Quonset huts!).  There was no teen club to speak of in Camp Chinen, so there was precious little for teenagers to do except to go to Club Hotei and play ping pong or pool, if the pool tables were not being used by adults.  There was the swimming pool and the tennis courts, and the gym, but that was about it. The golf course had not yet been built. The teenage population was not very large in Chinen that summer, less than a dozen. 
     A volunteer was sought to organize and supervise the gun club and a young man, that I will call "Bill" offered his services.  Bill was married to a very pretty woman that some of the teenagers had a secret crush on.  Bill was in his mid 30s and he and his wife were childless.  So, a notice went out for teenagers interested in joining the gun club to show up at the shooting range in the morning.  The range was located at the bottom of the hill as you came down the road from the upper base housing area.  As you reached the bottom of the road, the motor pool was on the left and the paved road turned left to go past the motor pool and on to the tennis courts and Club Hotei and other places in the lower base.  However, if you turned right, rather than following the paved road, you would find yourself on a small dirt road that led through a thick stand of elephant grass to the shooting range.  The range was about a hundred yards from the road completely hidden by tall elephant grass.  The range itself was very basic.  There were no buildings or any sort of cover that you could use if it rained.  It was about a hundred yard range set up against the backdrop of a hill.
     Bill had knack for "relating" with teenagers.  Unlike some of the other adults, he didn't seem to be bothered at all by the strange quirks and "cultural" differences that teenagers tend to exhibit.  We in turn, liked Bill very much, thought he was very "cool" not only because of his attitude and his personal experience and knowledge of weapons, but because he was married to a very pretty woman as well!  Sometimes during breaks between shooting sessions he would tell us about his experiences during World War Two.  Bill was a young, 18 year old paratrooper with the 503rd Airborne Regimental Combat Team in New Guinea.  He saw some tough combat duty and even made a combat jump before he changed units.  He had volunteered for a new, "hush-hush" unit that was seeking volunteers from all branches of service in the Pacific Theater.  After some very intense and hard training at another place in New Guinea, he was assigned to his new unit, the Alamo Scouts.  The Alamo Scouts were the predecessors of the Vietnam era MACV-SOG units.  They conducted clandestine scouting missions deep into Japanese held territories.
     We fired all sorts of weapons, and Bill seemed to enjoy dragging out exotic weapons from the warehouses for us to fire.  Our "club" did not participate in any competition.  As I said earlier, it was mostly just four teenagers and Bill.  So we just shot for fun, all sorts of weapons.  Bill was an excellent instructor.  At one time he noticed that I was having some difficulty holding the .45 auto steady for a period of time.  The pistol weighs almost 3 pounds fully loaded (39 ounces empty), and for a skinny 8th grader, it was a bit of a chore to hold it steady for a long time.  In those days we fired handguns one handed, it wasn't until I was in the Special Forces in the 1960s that I was taught to shoot two handed!  Anyway, seeing my difficulty with the heavy gun, Bill suggested that I take an empty liter bottle of Coke (in those days they were made of glass, therefore, very heavy!) and hold it up like a pistol for as long as I could.  He said to practice doing that every evening and that would strengthen my arm to hold the gun.  He was right, after a couple of weeks of holding up the large Coke bottle, I didn't have nearly as much problem with the heavy .45 as I did before!
     All in all, the summer of 1957 was a very interesting summer before I started my 9th grade year at Kubasaki at the "new" campus in Naha Wheel Area!  The Camp Chinen Gun Club (actually, we never had any "official" name!) lasted from mid June through mid August of 1957.  When the school started, the club was no more.  I have never forgotten that experience and it still brings back some very fond memories of those early days in Camp Chinen.