The day that changed my life, part one...

August 6th, 1997.

Almost ten years later, I still remember it like it was yesterday.

I was a military beat reporter back then.


Assigned to Tokyo, my job was to cover Army, Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, and Navy news in Eastpac.


It was a name the seven of us had cooked up in one of the early newscast planning sessions for my area of responsibility.

It made up a sizable part of the Pacific stretching from the West Coast of California to Japan.


We were only a few months old as a team, and so far the bases I was accountable for were still a collection of mysteries to me.

I’d mapped them out on maps and globes, and familiarized myself with the major units at each of the locations.


Back then, I hadn’t met many contacts, and didn’t know the great restaurants and party-spots at each place at the time. (Today, if you’re planning a vacation anywhere in Asia and want a good restaurant, hotel, party, or nightlife suggestion, I’m your huckleberry.)

It was about 6:25 AM Tokyo time when I heard the first radio reports in the car en route to work. At the time, details were scarce and sandwiched between other stories.

A Korean Air Lines jet had gone down on the tiny island of Guam. No early word on casualties. And in sports ...

Work was a blur as I made arrangements to get to Micronesia as quickly as possible.

Some other day I'll tell you about Pacific Report, and what a challenge and reward it was to belong to that early team.


For now, suffice it to say it was a young newscast that had been designed to fail, but wasn't hitting that mark.

Without a proper budget, staffed primarily by inexperienced DINFOS-trained "killers," and largely unknown in the community it purported to cover, we had too little experience to realize that we weren't supposed to make it work.


So we were turning it into a recognizable name by working our asses off, and having a lot more fun than we were supposed to. Our instructions were to get the job done, worry about the rules later on.

Everything was by the book that morning.

If you’ve never tried to book a flight onto an island the same day that a major air disaster has happened, forego the experience and allow yourself to live vicariously through me.

There are no commercial flights. And the military flights are emergency personnel only. After putting myself on a dozen standby lists, and narrowing down my equipment to as little gear as possible, I worked the phones. Details were starting to trickle in.

I still have the notebook I was using that morning. The first section of scribblings from this story says:

–serious crash, early morning local time
–Won G. Pat International airport, Guam
–KAL Flight 800 (Seoul to Guam)
–330 souls on board
–very few survivors
–military response teams on scene
–Yokota medical evacuations ongoing
–All flights suspended
–Infrastructure damage unknown
–Cause under investigation
–early indications point to wx as a potential factor

It was my first call to the Andersen Air Force Base Public Affairs office. I spoke to a Tech Sergeant there.


He’d cross-trained into the career field when the airframe he maintained had been retired. It was his first week on the island. It was his first day on the job. He was a rookie, too.

Dan was assigned as my partner for the assignment. We hated each other, stemming from an awful trip to Okinawa we’d shared.


I was a little bit nervous about taking him along. In my view, he was an arrogant know-it-all, who didn’t know the job very well.


I think if he were writing this account, he would say I’ve grown a lot since then.


Since I’m writing it, I’ll say he has too.


I consider him a friend, a statement that grew out of a hundred subsequent assignments.


Today, I’d work with him any day, anywhere. But on August 6th, 1997 I didn’t know any better. I also didn’t know that my whole perspective on things was about to be radically transformed, shifted, twisted, and rewritten.

I was about to meet God, and death, and humanity, and fate, and fear, and grief, and tragedy, and heroism, and adulthood.


None of them lived up to my expectations. I was destined to learn that none of them were as good, or as bad, or as powerful as I imagined.


None of them were as strong, or as important, or as eternal as I’d convinced myself they were.


None of them.