In 1973 I was a brand-new "butter-bar" platoon commander fresh out of Quantico and Basic Tank School at Del Mar, and assigned to 3D Plt., Bravo Co., 3D Tank Bn., 3D MarDiv, Camp Hansen, Okinawa.  "B" company was given the mission of doing an LST amphibious float and tank landing at Numazu Beach in Japan and then moving via Heavy Equipment Transporters (HETs) to the Mt. Fuji Training Area for maneuver training and firing.  According to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) if the U.S. did not use the training area periodically, which was jointly used by both the U.S. and the JSDF, we would lose our access and the entire area would revert to Japanese control, something that, in the last days of Vietnam, the leftist government of Japan devoutly wished for.  

We had to deal with hundreds of loud-speaker-van-equipped Communist demonstrators at Numazu, and when my platoon sergeant and I had our platoon tank crews put their American flags on their whip antennas prior to landing they got even more enraged.  We loaded onto the civilian-contracted HET tank transporters and made the 90-mile turnpike trip to Fuji to start our training.  

Fuji then was a ramshackle collection of leaky ex-WWII Quonset huts, a tiny one-room P.X. and a shower house, all sitting precariously on concrete slabs in the sloping volcanic sand of Fuji-San.  When it rained we opened the doors at either end of the huts and let the rain flow through.  We slept on the bottom rack of our bunks and draped our ponchos over the top bunks in a futile attempt to keep dry.  We roped up and climbed atop the huts and tried to plug the many leaks in the roof using GAA grease spread into the holes with the wooden tent pegs from our GP Mediums.  We were only supposed to be there for 30 days, but politics intervened.  The government refused to issue the necessary road permits for us to travel the highways back down to Numazu to reload on the LST's for the trip back to Okinawa, the issue evidently being that if they made our using the Training Area difficult enough the U.S. would stop sending units and the Area would revert to sole Japanese control.  

The company had been augmented with a small mess section and a maintenance section, and had brought supplies for 6 weeks.  We were there for more than 3 months.  The first week all but one of the cooks' field stoves broke down, and they were feeding us oatmeal and coffee for breakfast, "C's" for lunch, and stew for dinner, every day.  We mostly subsisted on candy bars, plus Ramen noodles and canned Vienna sausages from the tiny P.X., heated up on the kerosene heaters in the hooches.  

Our biggest problem was no cash for the P.X. or local liberty for our Marines.  Battalion had made arrangements to fly a Pay Officer up to us for a cash pay at the end of our first 30 days.  We were supposed to be back to Camp Hansen by the following payday.  That obviously didn't happen, and the aircraft resources to send a Pay Officer up and back, especially since no one knew when we would be returning, just weren't available.  They mailed us paychecks instead, but there was no place to cash them.  No one had any money, either dollars or yen, and our peerless company commander---recently reassigned from two years of White House Aide duty back to the Fleet---was more interested in going to Tokyo every weekend for liberty (On weekends the four lieutenants were pulling "Acting C.O." and rotating Officer of the Day...) to overly concern himself with the cashless plight of the troops.  

As a "Mustang" and former sergeant I was more conversant with how the Navy and Marine Corps really worked than most second lieutenants.  I got reluctant  permission from the C.O. to try and fix the pay problem, so long as he was not involved, and I took the long 105 mile drive by jeep to Atsugi Naval Air Station, where there was a small Navy Disbursing Office run by a Master Chief.  The Chief, who was a good head, understood the problem and he and I worked out a very unorthodox way to solve it.  Every two weeks on Friday afternoon my jeep driver and I would make the drive to Atsugi NAS, arriving just after 1700 when the Disbursing Office closed. The Chief would give me about $100,000 in U.S. paper money and coins from his safe on a simple hand receipt, and I would lock it in my briefcase, head back up the road to Fuji, both my driver and I carrying totally unauthorized, loaded, Colt M-1911A1 pistols in tanker shoulder holsters.  Friday night I slept with the .45 under my pillow and the briefcase full of money and the pay roster locked into my wooden footlocker, which was under the bunk and handcuffed to the steel rail of my rack.  Saturday morning was pay call.  Saturday night and Sunday night I, as the company's self-appointed "Unauthorized Pay Officer", guarded the remaining money, the signed checks, and the pay roster.  

Monday morning at "zero dark 30" my driver, the jeep, the loaded .45's and I headed back to Atsugi so that the Chief and I could reconcile the remaining money, the checks and the roster prior to his 0800 opening time and his Monday morning requirement to ship his cash receipts from the previous week from his local safe to Yakuska Naval Base Disbursing.  Bravo Company's Marines got paid, candy bars, "Fuji noodles" and Vienna sausages were purchased, enlisted liberty was pulled, the Chief and I didn't end up in Portsmouth, and the Company Commander still got to go to Tokyo every weekend.  Problem solved.