Photo: Mount Fujiama, Japan....on Flicker
Before my tour in the beautiful tropical paradise known as Viet-Nam, I was stationed for a year at a hospital in Yokohama, Japan. The 106th General Hospital was a secondary evacuation facility for wounded GI's whe were not able to be treated "in country" and returned to duty. Most of the patients we saw were eventually headed back to hospitals in the U.S. for extended treatment and further surgeries as needed.
When I first arrived in Japan I had no idea that it was the site of many an earthquake. Ranging in size from a .5 on the Richter scale, on up.
My first experience with one was when I was walking down a hallway one day and I thought I felt the floor move under my feet. I asked the nurse in charge if he noticed anything funny, and he said, "Yeah, that was an earthquake, don't worry you'll get used to them, they happen all the time."
Ok, happen all the time, Hmmm. Here I was, this farm boy from Georgia, and this guy was telling me to get used to earthquakes. It took me about six months of occasional shaking to get used to them, but I eventually did.
Except for this one time.
This time I was sitting in the bathroom of my barracks on the third floor, reading, to put in a nice way.
All of a sudden the toilet I was sitting on began to sway to and fro.
The window was open next to me and I had a nice view of the surrounding area. "OK," I said to myself, "earthquake, no problem." Except that the swaying became more pronounced and I started to hear wall lockers outside the bathroom begin to move around.
It was about this time I realized this was not your garden variety quake, and might just get nasty.
I began to wonder just what the hell I was going to do if it got worse, and started looking out the window, with my pants down, considering a fatal jump. As I sat there pondering my fate, the quake subsided, the wall lockers stopped moving, and my seat quit shaking.
However, the event scared me so badly that I didn't need to read anymore. It was just then that I realized that I was right where I needed to be at that particular place in time.
Funny how that works out sometimes, ain't it?
Walt
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