Elvis & Waikiki

It was in a letter to my mother, dated April 10, 1962 that I told her I was spending an extended liberty weekend at Waikik with my buddy Lory Miller from the Battalion Aid Station at Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station. We rented an apartment just off Waikiki beach for the weekend and spent our first day walking the 10 miles or so to Pearl Harbor to "check out the ships". We spent Saturday on the beach at Waikiki where the co-eds were going crazy with the filming of "Girls, Girls, Girls" starring Elvis Presley. We were streached out on the beach with our surf boards that we checked out from special services for the weekend, had our sun faded tropical print cotton swim suits on, and were greased-up with coconut oil from head to toe, but the co-eds were more interested in Elvis that weekend than a couple of guys trying to fake being civilians. Sometimes we even wore tattered and sleevless University of Hawaii sweat shirts to put a spin on being college students, but that generally didn't work either. We were probably just to obvious, too much white skin in the wrong places.
There were many other stories in those letters: like the Johnson Island Atomic Blast of July 8, 1962, the lone ship at Pearl Harbor during the Cuban Missle Crisis, the purchase of my 54 Ford convertible from a fellow Corpsman who was being discharged, the entrapment inside an LVT that wouldn't start some 500 yards from shore, and the Marine who was making a rocket out of an M1 cartridge that exploded penetrating shrapnel into his femeral arterythat I field dressed and air evacuated to Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu.
The memoir is coming along rather nicely, the research that is. I have bits and pieces of the big story, but I feel like I am just beginning. As I read the letters home, so much starts to come back to me, the memories that the letters seem to bring forth. I find myself filling in the details that the letters didn't expand upon, and kind of relive the moment. I start thinking about the petty officer 2nd class with 16 years in the Navy who was escorted into the laboratory at the Navy Dispensary at Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Station that was suffering from prolonged syphilis , and I had to draw blood on him. There just seems to be so many stories, stories that I want to relive, stories that I want to tell. I feel somewhat impatient, trying to get to the end of a memoir that is miles away.