The Colonel's Crusade

Outraged was the word last week for the ladies of Washington Heights--the Little America in the heart of Tokyo where the families of 2,350 U.S. Air Force men live and never had it so good. A sergeant had been posted at the door of the commissary, and every woman who showed up wearing a bathing suit, shorts, slacks, blue jeans, pedal pushers or halter was politely but firmly turned away. "Tyranny!" cried one offender. "Aren't we free Americans?" demanded another. Asked practically everybody: "Who does Colonel Johnstone think he is?"

Colonel Charles Johnstone, 43, commanding officer of the 6000th Support Wing, which keeps house for bases stretching all the way to Iwo Jima, is normally a genial and patient man, but ever since he took over his command in 1957 he has been disgusted by the way the wives and children of his officers and airmen were behaving in Japan. He fired his first salvo last fall, when he bluntly declared that "a large number of our military dependent children have for all practical purposes been deserted by their par ents." He blamed "cheap entertainment in the clubs and cheap domestic help in the home." Japanese maids, says Colonel Johnstone, "are expected by some Americans to cook, clean, launder, answer the telephone and be governess, all for $25 a month. And where are the parents in such cases? Out visiting their neighbors and getting tanked up."

So far this year, there have been only two scandals involving teenagers: five boys were sent back to the U.S. after an 18-year-old Japanese girl accused them of rape, and one American girl was packed home after allegedly spending 4 1/2 days in a hotel with a Japanese man. But each week brings its share of lesser incidents. The children rip up school buses, delight in throwing things out of the windows. "One day," says Johnstone, "a school bus passed me belching smoke from every window. All the kids were smoking. And as I watched bug-eyed at the sight, a shower of peach pits descended on me."

Last May Colonel Johnstone slapped a 10 o'clock weekday curfew on teenagers. At the same time he also went after their mothers. Again and again, he heard complaints that someone had made a lewd remark to a G.I. wife in a PX or pinched her bottom. The trouble was, said the colonel, that too often such women came in two categories--either "provocatively clad" or, if "less young and shapely, disgustingly clad." Last week the colonel clamped down in earnest. From now on, any serviceman's wife who tries to enter a public building on base will have her identity card "checked for appropriate follow-up action."

Amid the storm last week, he found one consolation. It was a letter from a large U.S. firm that is helping dredge the Suez Canal. The company had already heard of the colonel's crusade and wanted to know all the details, because it was interested in starting a campaign of its own among the wives of its employees.

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