Okinawa - Normal School?

I remember getting on the school bus when I was in the second grade. I wasn't quite six years old. It was the first time I'd ridden a school bus with other children. It seemed so strange, and yet, for the time and circumstances, it really was quite normal.

In the first grade I had ridden with my Mother to a small country schoolhouse twenty miles east of where we lived. She was a teacher in that school. The only teacher. It was a small one-room school with 12 grades and about the same number of students. She taught them all. They were the children of farmers and cattle ranchers. Children who lived far apart and only came together for a few hours each day to attend school.

I started school at 5 so I could go with my Mother while my Grandmother took care of my younger brother. You see, my Father was stationed overseas for a year - in Japan - and we were staying with my grandparents for that year.

Now here I was, almost six years old and starting 2nd grade, riding a school bus for the first time on a military base in Okinawa to an American Military School. On the front of the bus was a military policeman (MP) and on the back of the bus was a second one - both with rifles (loaded I assume!)

You see, my Father was stationed in Okinawa soon after the end of WWII. There were still frightened young Japanese soldiers (who didn't know the war was over) hiding in caves in the hills. MP's were always around. Always armed. It was just a natural daily occurrence to see them everywhere that families went.

My 2nd grade school year were spent in a school with guns. Guns to protect us. Protect us from young men who were probably as frightened as our parents were. Young men who didn't know that peace had been declared. Young men who were still willing to fight to defend their country.

I now look back and wonder which of my first two years in elementary school was normal. The one room schoolhouse on the flat eastern plains of Colorado with one teacher and twelve students in twelve grades? Or the military school on the Ryukyu Islands in the East China Sea?

Both of them helped shape my future.