Exorcisms on American Military Bases
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Welcome to the smoke pit. In the military, the smoke pit is simply any odd place that service members will gather to have a smoke, a drink with their buddies, or just hang around to swap stories. And sometimes these stories are about experiences that the individual sharing

doesn't really expect anyone to believe, possibly because even they themselves have a hard time believing it or making sense of it, or otherwise because nobody likes to be laughed at or thought to be crazy. But since they feel the need to get it off their chest, the smoke pit is where these kinds of stories often circulate. In this episode, we are going to cover a number of encounters and other ghostly stories as told by the men and women who experienced them,

some of them being service members, others being from their spouses. As I've noticed from my reading of many similar types of ghostly stories, one of the most common themes with regard to haunted buildings and other places is that these often seem to be places where something terrible happened, an unnatural taking of life, whether by the person's own hand or by murder.

As such, if you are sensitive to that kind of thing, be aware that some of these stories may be difficult to listen to, especially as one of the final accounts is believed to be connected to the tragic murder of two young children. These are stories of hauntings where, with no one else to turn to, these men and women had to call the base chaplain. I'm Luke LaManna, and this is Wartime Stories, 29 Palms.

The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, more commonly known as 29 Palms, sometimes called 29 Sticks, is often cited by Marines as being just about the worst duty station you could ever be stationed at. Not only is it very isolated, but it is in the middle of the Southern California desert, and therefore the weather is as miserably hot as you can imagine.

If only to make things worse, 29 Palms has produced no small amount of reports from Marines and others regarding ghosts, unidentified creatures, and other terrifying stories from the base itself and the endless desert wasteland it occupies. This first story is from a Marine Corps spouse who found herself living in base housing and would quickly discover that the house she and her family had just been assigned to

has something of a morbid history. Back in 1996, my husband was stationed at 29 Palms with 3rd Tanks. We were now moving into the old Marine Palms, one of the housing areas on the base. This strange occurrence happened three weeks after we had just moved into our new house with our two sons and my two young nieces, and I was pregnant with our third child. It was around 3:00 AM, and I woke up to use the bathroom.

And while I was in there, I heard a man's voice tell me to get out. It was very clear. Again, I heard the voice say something, and this time it sounded much more aggressive. And so I immediately went to the bedroom where my husband was staying with the two boys, telling him to quit scaring me. But he was fast asleep.

I assumed I had just been imagining things, being tired and all, so I went back to bed. But about 15 minutes later, with my nieces lying next to the side of my bed, one of the girls suddenly screamed, and she was saying that her hair was moving. I looked down, and her pigtail was floating up in the air. I didn't really think about it. I just grabbed the girls, and I ran to my neighbor's house across the street.

After calming down, I suppose I figured the boys would be okay staying with their dad, but I guess I panicked and I later just thought that if I tried going back and waking my husband up to tell him what had happened, he probably wouldn't believe me. But then later that evening, my neighbor woke me up and what she wanted to show me was that the lights were now flickering on and off in our house.

So the next day, after my husband went to work, I went and told the base chaplain about what was happening, and he came and blessed the house. I felt kind of foolish, but a week later, the chaplain called me to tell me he had found out through research that a soldier who had returned home from Vietnam 20 years earlier, he had murdered himself in that house. Joint Base Lewis McCord.

Are you a soldier who loves being cold and wet? Do you hate the sun? Are you perhaps a vampire? If so, you will love Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Previously called Fort Lewis before it merged with the McCord Air Force Base in 2010, the northern section of the base, now called JBLM North, became a hub for activity in the 1940s, when the fort was a training and transition point for soldiers serving in World War II.

In the early 2000s, after 50 years of insufficient funding and other setbacks, the base finally started to demolish many of the older World War II era buildings and barracks to make way for new construction. Despite the overhaul of the base's infrastructure, some of the older, more iconic buildings had survived being torn down. And over the previous decades, these buildings had avoided demolition by being remodeled and repurposed many times over.

A former army officer, Jefferson Davis, who had served on the base and developed an interest in the paranormal, he explained in his 2005 book, Ghosts, Critters, and Sacred Places, that there is one building on the base that has garnered more ghostly attention than most, and that is the building now known as the JBLM Army Museum, which is one of, if not the oldest building on the installation.

Originally a massive recreation facility for soldiers called Green Park that was built over a century ago, just after World War I when the base was still called Camp Lewis, over the years the building was repurposed several times. In 1919 it began as a popular rec center filled with concession stands, theaters, eating places, a skee-ball arcade, shooting gallery, barbershop, a hotel, all of which the base commander, who it was named after, Major General Green,

had built in hopes of keeping his soldiers away from the more unscrupulous, what he called "dens of vice" that had sprung up just outside of the base. However, after a short period of success, the building quickly became unused after the war's end and the majority of soldiers started leaving active service. By 1938, much of the now unused building had been torn down and all that was left was the hotel.

Before that happened, though, Green Park had once served to house the extras and film crew workers during the production of a 1927 patriotic silent film called The Patent Leather Kid. And that's where things started to get weird.

With the film crew and cast staying in the Green Park building and the attached 150-room hotel, which was called the Red Shield Inn, the story goes that a worker on the film was murdered in a room on the second floor during production. And later, maids and hotel staff would swear they had seen the ghost of a man dressed as a cowboy wandering the halls.

He always seemed to be sad or angry, or so the story goes. Now, because it goes so far back, none of the available sources for this story can tell us when the hotel staff had these encounters, whether it was in the 1930s, the 40s, 50s, 60s, or so on.

But considering the film was a World War I reenactment, and that most ghosts people report seeing appear to be wearing clothing that pertains to what they were wearing when they died, it begs the question why these women described seeing a cowboy. I watched the entire film, and there wasn't a single cowboy anywhere in it. But perhaps the women who saw what they thought was a cowboy, particularly because of the hat he was wearing,

We can perhaps reason that unfamiliar with older military uniforms, they were simply doing their best to describe something that does appear in the film. An American soldier wearing a World War I campaign hat, which has a similar shape to a cowboy hat.

whatever it was others staying and working in the hotel over the following decades would continue to report strange sounds malfunctioning alarms and the feeling of a heavy mysterious chill

The hotel was used as a guesthouse up until 1972 for soldiers and their families who were transitioning to and from the base. But by 1973, the new fire and safety protocols deemed the building to be uninhabitable because of the heavy amount of asbestos used in construction, and contractors then gutted it and converted it to the Fort Lewis Military Museum.

According to an article published in the Post newspaper, then known as the Fort Lewis Ranger, in 1987, the hauntings continued even after the building stopped being a hotel. Eventually, this article says, things got so out of hand that three priests were enlisted to perform an exorcism. One of them stood in the weapons park and prayed before entering the building, Barbara Bauer, the museum director at the time, said in the original article.

Then all three of them went up to the second floor where the man had been killed and said prayers and performed rituals. Afterwards they came down and told me what happened. They said the man's spirit appeared to them. He told them that he was angry at himself because he had done something to cause his own death. They told him he was forgiven and free to go.

The story ends with the man fading away in the doorway, stopping for a moment to cry before disappearing entirely.

However, whether this exorcism took place or not is up for speculation. Miles Grant, the museum director who was interviewed by Marissa Petrick of the Northwest Guardian in 2011, he did say that even then, strange sounds and equipment malfunctions continued to occur, and most often on the second floor, where the supposed murder had happened.

The Catholic Church evidently keeps diligent records of exorcisms, and the Seattle Archdiocese has no record that any of its priests ever carried out such a ritual. It is then possible that the event was carried out by army chaplains and remained undocumented, perhaps being done informally to avoid unwanted publicity.

But the museum's director otherwise could find no record of either the murder in the 1920s or the exorcism in the 1980s. Whatever the case, the hauntings clearly didn't stop. In 1999, two military policemen, a man named John and his desk sergeant, were working the night shift on Fort Lewis when they received a report that the burglar alarms at the museum were going off. So they raced over to stop the break-in.

but they found the museum locked up tight with no signs of forced entry. Then returning to the MP station, again the alarms went off. So they returned and again they found nothing unusual at the museum, and this apparently continued to happen throughout the night. Hardly strange, and quite possibly something very practical like the result of mice chewing on the alarm system's wiring,

But with the possibility of an intruder still on the table, a couple nights later, John was on shift again and he and his partner were instructed to patrol the museum's perimeter to discourage any thieves from returning. But while passing one of the building's outer gates, John said that he suddenly felt a sense of heaviness and physical chills. His sergeant later told him he was not the first person to report something like that.

Other MPs would report seeing the building's lights flickering on and off when they found the museum was empty, and none of the alarms had sounded to indicate an intruder had entered the building. Looking for a thrill after hearing about John's encounter, his girlfriend, June, who had relayed all of these accounts to Jefferson Davis for his book, she admits that maybe she had just mentally tricked herself into believing this,

But she said she did experience something strange when she and John went back to the museum one night so that June could try to relive his paranormal experience. She said that after getting out of the car and approaching the same gate that John had walked by,

She too started to feel an overwhelming sense of coldness and dread, which filled her to the point where she became terrified and immediately ran back to the car. And as the two started to drive off, June said she could have sworn that she saw the outline of a figure standing in the top window of the museum.

Unless I am much mistaken, this haunting and these reports of strange things in the building have continued even until today.

Yokota Air Base is a joint military installation in Japan, located on the western outskirts of Tokyo. I myself spent several days training on this base in 2012, and they put us up in a tower apartment building near the flight line, possibly one of the tower buildings mentioned in this story, for all I know.

This was during the winter and we had just finished a week of reconnaissance field training up at Camp Fuji, a Marine Corps base located about 40 miles to the west from Yokota at the foot of the massive volcano that the base is named after.

And after we finished training at Fuji, they shuttled us back down to Yokota to spend several days completing our various parachute jumps on the base, both during the day and night, and from both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircrafts to qualify for our golden jump wings. And the whole operation really just went to hell because of the high winds, and some of the guys were pretty badly hurt.

But little did I know, while sleeping several nights in that two-bedroom tower apartment, that the base is apparently rife with haunted buildings and with horrible stories attached to some of these hauntings. The military is often both a career and a work environment that places a high amount of stress on not only the service member, but their spouses and children. This can become overwhelming,

And although the military's combined efforts to minimize this can fall short at times, and they are often criticized as being insufficient, the military as a whole, in my experience, does openly encourage their service members to always keep an eye on one another, to look out for warning signs of self-harm, and that anyone who is having these thoughts should immediately seek medical help and counseling.

Still, the tragedy of a person ending their own life is sadly not an uncommon occurrence in the military and no less so at the Yokota Air Base even in recent years, let alone decades ago. This first account is just about as bad as it gets. Honey, I'm home. Honey?

In the late 1970s, Air Force Tech Sergeant John Jarnibro returned home from work to his tower apartment and encountered one of the most horrible sights imaginable. The lifeless bodies of his four-year-old son John and another little girl, three-year-old Kimiko Russo, lay in the apartment, along with his 27-year-old wife Lucy, whose wrists were slashed.

The little girl, Kimiko, was the daughter of Staff Sergeant and Mrs. Russo, who lived in the same housing unit. It would seem that young Kimiko was spending the day being supervised by John's wife, Lucy. Despite her severe loss of blood after John called for help, Lucy was hospitalized, and the partial news article I found states that she was stabilized at the time.

Whatever the causes for this incident, those who lived on Yokota Air Base at the time, whether service members or their families, they certainly remember hearing about the deaths of these two children when it happened. The news of course spread like wildfire around the base. Some recall hearing that the children had died from multiple knife wounds, but the news article indicates they had been drowned in the bathtub.

In any available news records, I could find nothing about the events that followed, the court hearings, or anything that would clarify Lucy's motives. But those who recalled the event and discussed it in online forums, those who lived on the base at the time, they have additionally stated that they remember that not only were the children's deaths intentional, but that Lucy claimed she had been possessed and that she didn't remember anything that took place.

Combined with other tragic events that have taken place in these tower apartments, predominantly people throwing themselves off of the building or the balconies, these events are often considered the reason for the many apparitions and other ghostly encounters in the buildings themselves and around the base.

Although there are too many stories to include in this episode and they will be covered in future, many of these encounters describe dark figures, shadowy shapes or silhouettes of a person or perhaps even a child, described by residents of the buildings, whether in their apartments or perhaps in the elevators, the hearing of voices sometimes calling for help,

or knocking noises heard by children as they're sleeping, who then wake up and see an apparition standing near the bathroom. One tower is said to possibly be haunted by a teenage boy who jumped off of the building in the 1980s. It is said that the rooftops were then secured to prevent anyone else from accessing them. But residents have said they sometimes hear what sounds like a young man's voice, yelling,

but they cannot see who or what is making the sound. The following is a separate account from a woman named Alicia, the spouse of an airman stationed in Japan at the time her story takes place. She was interviewed in 2021 by Erica Earl of the Stars and Stripes military newspaper. She says that, "My husband and I PCS'd to Yokota Air Base in 2012 and moved into a house on base, a garden unit on the west side.

Immediately, we started noticing strange things happening. Sometimes the bed in the spare bedroom would be inexplicably stripped of its sheets and blankets, or there would be a loud crashing sound in the kitchen in the middle of the night, but the kitchen was empty and there was nothing broken or misplaced. Sometimes we'd wake up in the morning to find all the kitchen cabinets wide open when they were shut the night before.

At first, I just brushed it off, figuring my then-husband might be the one doing all of it. But when he was deployed, and I was then left with no one else in the house to blame for what was going on, that's when I realized it couldn't have been him. I worried people might think I was crazy, but I started asking other service members and spouses about it to see if anyone else had similar experiences in their homes. And sure enough, a bunch of people have shared stories like mine.

After hearing about these shared experiences, Alicia started a community on the base, which has continued until today as a private Facebook group for Yokota residents called the Yokota Ghost Hunter Club. Before this interview with Alicia the previous year in October of 2020, Erica Earl also interviewed Staff Sergeant Brianna Adams of the 374th Civil Engineer Squadron about her experiences with strange happenings on the base.

She explained that she and her husband often heard clear, persistent knocking noises in their old Eastside Tower unit. Security camera footage apparently showed televisions and bedroom lights turning on and off when no one was home.

In the follow-up interview on the story in March of the following year, Erica also spoke with Chaplain Lance Brown, an Air Force captain assigned to Yokota's 374th Wing Staff Agency, as well as his wife, Karen Brown. Chaplain Brown and his wife have evidently been performing home cleanses or anointings for nearly a decade in homes on the base where odd things occur.

Chaplin Brown stated that the cleansings are sometimes more about helping someone cope with anxiety, heartbreak, or a troubled past than about literal evil spirits. But of course, he said, I wouldn't suggest that the presence of spirits is all in the person's head. Whether we all believe in them or not, ghosts or demonic activity, these things of an evil or spiritual nature, only God can combat that, he said.

As home cleanses are not officially sanctioned by the Air Force, we otherwise have the ability to be that beacon of hope as people invite us into their homes to deal with whatever has been troubling them. In March of 2021, Lori Pope, who also lived in one of Yakota's garden units, said she too started to feel uncomfortable in her home the previous year.

My three-year-old daughter has been experiencing sleep regression the past year, she explained. There have been several times when I would be watching her video monitor and I would see orbs of light in her room. And there have been a few instances where I'd be in my bedroom and I would see a white streak of light run past the foot of my bed. And more recently, my daughter has been saying she's seeing monsters and that she's scared.

Lori and her husband, Master Sergeant Austin Pope of the 374th Maintenance Squadron, decided that since Lori was six months pregnant at the time, they needed to do something to help their daughter feel less afraid and sleep through the night before bringing a new baby home. The family happened to meet Chaplain Brown and his wife, and despite not identifying with any religion, they decided to invite the Browns over to give the house cleansing a try.

"I know it won't happen overnight, but I'm hoping we can all learn to live more comfortably in our home, regardless of whether there is a spirit existing here," Laurie said. The popes, who had their home cleansed on March 1, 2021, were hopeful that the process seemed to have helped. "My daughter still isn't sleeping through the night," Laurie later said, "but I do feel a much greater sense of peace being home alone, especially at night."

The Browns do the cleanses free of cost, judgment, or disclosure, they said. People need not be religious to have a home cleansing, and the Browns said their objective is not to convert anyone's belief systems.

During the same interview, the couple said that they received more calls at Yokota over the past year than they did in the entirety of their previous assignment in Fort McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas. The Browns weren't certain exactly how many calls they have received on Yokota, but explained that they receive a steady flow of requests and even had a cleansing arranged for right after their interview with Stars and Stripes.

The Browns declined to share the details of specific cleansings, but said that they have both experienced fear and emotional responses themselves during some of the visits. "It's not anything of Hollywood, but evil is a very real thing," Chaplin Brown said. "You just sense an absolute darkness, and your skin tingles, and the hair on the back of your neck raises, and you get a sense of, 'I don't want to be here.'"

I'm not certain if Chaplain Brown has been reassigned since this interview took place, but in any case, Yokota Air Base, and certainly many more bases throughout Japan and the rest of the world, continue to be no stranger to hauntings.

As I mentioned in the episode, I did spend some time on Yokota myself, and since in previous episodes I've always tried to, when I can, share a little bit of my own military experience, where applicable, and some people seem to like having more of an uplifting story, here is the story of my time on Yokota where a bunch of us almost died. And we, of course, laughed about it later, but it was a serious issue at the time.

So the whole purpose of us being on Yokota again was for us to get our jump wings, which required a certain amount of parachute jumps under certain conditions and two different types of aerial platforms. So both daytime and nighttime jumps, both with our gear, you know, our rifles, rucksacks and all that, and without gear. And then from two different platforms, fixed wing and rotary wing. So fixed wing being the C-130s, rotary wing back then being the CH-46s.

the C-Nights, the dual rotor helicopters that they retired and then replaced with the Ospreys a few years later. So we got the day jumps done without too much of a hitch. The only maybe exciting thing that happened during the day was the pilot was flying kind of crazy. I get motion sickness under those conditions, and I was actually kind of embarrassed about how sick I was getting. I was like, man, I must have a weak stomach. But it turns out everybody was sick from the way this pilot was flying. So

You're sitting there, you feel horribly uncomfortable wearing this harness, you know, this parachute rig. You just want to jump out of the airplane into the fresh air and you're completely cured of your nausea. But right as they open the door, right when we got the green light to jump and we're standing up to walk out, somebody just starts puking. And the sight and smell of it kind of wafting around, it just starts this chain reaction of now everybody's puking. And it was just this miserably kind of funny scene as we're walking out where

where you have guys that just before they're about to exit the plane, they turn their head to the side and just vomit on the deck. And it's just like, you couldn't have waited five seconds, but I get it. So we couldn't wait to get out of the plane. Pretty sure they had to hose it down once they landed. Anyway, the day jumps were pulled off without too many problems. But at nighttime, for those of you that live in Japan around Yokota, you can back me up. It gets very windy being that close to the ocean. So the winds are really picking up.

They knew that, but what they're trying to do is time it. So the C-130 that we're sitting in, I was in the first stick of guys that was supposed to jump. So the C-130 is circling the runway. We're going to jump out over the runway and just try to hopefully land on the grassy portion in the middle. I say hopefully, right? You don't want to land on that hard pavement because that would hurt. Side note, if you're not familiar with military parachutes,

The static line, low altitude jump parachutes that I'm talking about, they are not the same as the free fall skydiving parachutes that you see, the rectangular canopy shapes.

They have steering capabilities and they can break and they can just land on a dime. These military static line chutes are just the most rudimentary jellyfish type canopy that just you jump out, you pray that it opens. And if it does, you're still going to hit the ground at like 18 to 22 feet per second or something, depending on how much you weigh and how much gear you're carrying. It's a hard landing. So they teach you how to it's called a parachute landing fall to avoid completely devastating your spine.

and your legs, which still seems to happen anyways. But anyway, you have very little control over the parachutes. The one exception is these newer models that we were using have air vents built into them. So once the chute opens, it's more of a square shaped canopy rather than like circular. And there's these little wooden toggles you can pull on to adjust your direction. And what you want, best case scenario, is you're facing into the wind when you hit the ground.

because you want to land going straight down. You don't want to land being pulled forward because then you're going to face plant and you don't want to land going backwards because that just increases the velocity at which your head hits the ground. You want a controlled, smooth landing going straight down. So hypothetically, if the wind, the parachute is rated up to 20 kilometers per hour for wind speed. Anything more than that, you're getting pushed.

So best case scenario, the wind speed is no more than 20 kilometers per hour. You open those vents all the way, you face into the wind and the wind goes right through the parachute canopy rather than pushing it and you land in a vertical line. Well, this evening when we were jumping, the wind speeds were greater than 20 kilometers per hour, but they still wanted to try and get us out of the plane to jump. So what they were doing as this plane is circling the runway is trying to time it where, okay, here comes the plane on another lap.

Okay, the wind speed's down to 15 knots. Go. Or 15 kilometers, whatever. Go. And we jump out. Well, they miscalculated the wind speed and also the marker on the ground was facing the wrong direction. So they had a, like, chemlight arrow, an arrow made of chemlights, which was telling us which direction the wind was blowing on the ground. So we knew which way to face our parachutes. Well, somebody messed that up or maybe the winds changed directions at some point.

But when we hit the ground, it was absolute chaos. We were all getting blown. Nobody landed straight down. And I was fortunate enough to land on the grass, but as soon as I landed, that wind was already dragging me. Like I had half a second to react, and the wind started dragging my parachute before I had a chance to let it collapse. So I'm getting dragged across the grass. I reach up and I pop my little release. It's a little release device on your shoulder that releases this strap that connects you to the parachute, which allows...

The parachute to then collapse. Well, some of the guys, for some reason, because they were stuck or something, they couldn't pull that little release lever and they were just getting dragged. Well, some of these guys got pulled up onto the tarmac and this tarmac is pretty rough because for wheel traction or something, it's like sandpaper. These guys were getting shredded

Some guys came back. I mean, their camis are just completely shredded, but their skin, it would be like a motorcycle accident or something. They're getting pulled at high speeds across this ground. It's just tearing their skin off. One guy, I remember he had a full sleeve tattoo on his right arm and his whole upper portion of his uniform was just shredded off, but his skin was gone and it was just bleeding profusely. He was in a lot of pain. I don't remember ever seeing him after that, like, you know, how he healed from that injury, but it's like...

I'm pretty sure he lost the tattoo because it went that deep. Another guy came back and he had been on his back initially while he was being dragged. And because it was so painful, he had popped himself over. He couldn't get his strap off. He popped himself over onto his stomach. And when he came back, when you jump with these chutes, because you're a reserve chute, you know, you jump with two parachutes, your reserve chute is sitting on your stomach. And it's this little rectangular pillow-shaped thing.

package that sits right in front of you, that was gone.

I mean, that whole thing was just shredded right off of him. And all that was left was like the little square patch of canvas at the back of that. So these guys were absolutely torn up. Now, they had a second stick of guys already circling, getting ready to jump. But because of how horribly our jump went, you know, there's some confusion about, hey, are we going to land this plane and call it a night? Well, the plane's already up there. Just, you know, hopefully the wind will die down like they thought it would for us.

and these guys can jump and get their jumps in and then we can call it a night kind of thing. So we all go back to the shed, one of these hangar bays off of the side of the runway, and we're watching the plane just circle, make laps, the wind is still blowing really hard, and my buddy, a few of my buddies are up there, half of my team was on that plane, and my buddy Sean is up there, and he's the one who kind of relayed most of the story afterwards, but...

So I'm looking down towards the end of the runway where the planes are approaching from and I see the C-130 kind of making its lap. Well, somebody had a radio connected to the pilot. They were kind of keeping in touch with the pilot or something. And the next thing we know as this C-130 is coming around to make another pass, we hear, "Dive, dive, dive!" Pretty sure it was something like that. So we look down towards the end of the runway and sure enough, the C-130 is doing kind of a dropping maneuver to a lower elevation. We had no idea what had happened.

Okay. But anyway, they ended up just canceling the whole thing. The C-130 came around, it landed, and they just unloaded everybody. Everybody's pissed off because they just wanted to jump out of the airplane after all that time spent circling. My buddy, Sean, who was on that airplane, tells me the whole story about what actually happened inside the aircraft from his perspective.

So they spent, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 minutes, however long they were up in the air, circling, waiting for the wind to die down. And they got bored, as you would imagine, guys sitting there, uncomfortable, strapped to these tight parachutes and stuff. And they started playing like patty cake and rock, paper, scissors and stuff like that to kill the time. And all of a sudden, the plane drops. And I think they heard something over the intercom that the pilot was screaming about, but

The way my buddy described the look on everybody's faces was just what made it a bit comical because guys were like in the midst of rock, paper, scissor or whatever they were doing and they was like, this is the last thing we're going to do before we die. This plane is going down.

And what had actually happened was the C-130, when it was coming around making a left-hand turn to pass back over the runway, another plane was coming in for a landing. And because of, I don't know what, a lack of communication, a lack of observation, only at the last moment did the pilot of the C-130 see that they were on a collision course for this other aircraft. And so he immediately dropped his aircraft underneath the other plane.

and they both avoided the collision. So all my buddies on the plane were just like, wow, so the last thing I would have done before I died was play patty cake. And they just, so it was like a roller coaster feeling. It would drop so suddenly that they just were like, what the hell? And then of course, once we wrapped everything up, where did we go? Back to our apparently very haunted tower building for Christmas.

what was probably a restful night's sleep not knowing that at the time. So that is the story of how a bunch of guys almost died doing parachute ops at Yokota.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Whit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan. Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone. Production coordination by Avery Siegel. Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden. Artwork by Jessica Clarkson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picotta. If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com. Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.