Steve received several awards for his service in the Army. After returning home, Steve completed several college degrees and eventually became the Vocational Director at Vidalia Comprehensive High School. Hometown Livin g At Its Best 125 there was anything he could do. “I figured this was my chance to find a way to keep from going back to Vietnam.” A Major from Georgia just so happened to be in the Personnel office. “He asked me what school I went to and if I was in a fraternity.” They talked a bit, and the Major reassigned him to Personnel. After a few months as a Personnel Clerk, Steve was promoted to Administration Specialist and assigned to Lieutenant General Lambert, a three-star General, and the US High Commissioner or Civil Governor of Okinawa. Steve was his personal aide and given top security clearance. “Okinawa was just getting over WWII,” said Steve. “They had lost about 250,000 people in the war, about a third of their entire population. It was a very poor place. A third world country back then. People used the bathroom on the side of the road. It was 110 degrees, and the stench was terrible. I saw children literally starving to death in the ditches.” When the General was there, Steve never left his side. When he was away, he coached the local high school baseball and basketball teams, and taught the GED program at night to the Ryukyuan people. “They were good, hard-working people,” said Steve. “They went to school seven days a week and worked from sun up to sun down. All they wanted was to raise their children in a safe place, just like us.” Even though Steve did not serve in combat, he has a scar from a wound he received during a protest while serving as point man in an envoy carrying nerve gas from the Northside of the Island that had been left there from WWII. “The local people didn’t want that nerve gas moved across their island, and I didn’t blame them. If it spilled, it would have killed a lot of people. Thousands of protestors came out. It was a big deal back in America with a lot of news coverage,” said Steve. Nicholas Even Sarantakes writes about the protests in his book, Keystone: The American Occupation of Okinawa and U.S.-Japanese Relations. Due to the high level of media attention in America about the nerve gas, Sarantakes writes, “Lambert reported briefing eighty-one journalists from news agencies such as BBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, UPI, and Reuters.” One weekend while General
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