From coming to Kauai as a young United States Navy sailor in 1957 to help open the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island’s Westside, to being picked up by a gorgeous Hawaiian woman who later became his wife, to
From coming to Kauai as a young United States Navy sailor in 1957 to help open the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island’s Westside, to being picked up by a gorgeous Hawaiian woman who later became his wife, to having a long, tremendously exciting career at PMRF, living on Kauai has been action-packed for Stu Burley.
Recently retired after 46 years working at PMRF, Stu still says “we” when referring to activities on the military base, and he’s still full of the mischievous humor he had as a young sailor assigned to a very remote outpost.
When he arrived on Kauai, the barracks at PMRF hadn’t been occupied for a long time. He and the six or seven other sailors who encompassed the Navy’s entire crew on the base in those days, immediately set to work cleaning out centipedes, cockroaches and termites. “It was pretty exciting to open it up and start living there,” he says.
There were certain benefits to working in such a remote location. “You never had to wear a uniform,” Stu says. “We always drank beer. At one time there was more beer sold at PMRF than Barber’s Point Naval Air Station on Oahu.” They had no kitchen, so the Navy flew food into them daily from Oahu — good food. “We ate well,” he says with a broad smile.
Hey sailor,
I’ll buy you a beer
In those years in Kekaha, there was a bar named Spotlight with a small dirt parking lot. One night, after playing pool and having a few beers at Spotlight, Stu stepped outside and got into his car to go home.
“As I’m driving out, this huge black Mafia-type Buick zooms in front of me. A beautiful Hawaiian girl gets out, walks over and leans into my window and says, ‘Hey sailor, I’ll buy you a beer and a hamburger,’” he recalls. “No sailor in his right mind would ever say no. So I said, ‘Sure, where we going?’ ”
They went to dinner – and got married about seven months later. Stu and Kuuipo Gail Kaiwa Burley were married 51 years, until she passed on in 2012.
RIMPAC
After serving in the Navy for six years, Stu began working as a supply stockman for $50 a week for a PMRF civilian contractor. One day he learned that the operations coordinator was moving off the island. He said, “I can do that.” The following Monday he was hired, becoming the missile range’s operations coordinator/scheduler.
PMRF is the largest range in the world where ships, submarines and aircraft are tracked during training maneuvers via more than 1,100 square miles of instrumentation on the ocean floor and more than 42,000 square miles of controlled airspace. Through telemetry, a signal that comes from a satellite, flying objects can be tracked all the way to the moon. Countries all over the world send their submarines, ships and airplanes to test themselves and their equipment at PMRF.
As operations coordinator, and later a Navy civilian program manager, Stu was in charge of every operation on the range. He made sure everything ran smoothly.
“It was very exciting to control all the launchers, boosters, airspace requirements,” he says. “I had to move different clients and programs around depending upon what they were doing. If we saw whales, we had to move everything off to the side.”
He handled it all with his innate knack and confidence.
“You couldn’t be a mouse. If an admiral stood up and said, ‘How come I can’t do that right now?’ you couldn’t cower in the corner,” Stu says. “You’d have to stand up and say confidently, ‘The targets are on their way!’ I had to be in charge. You have to be positive and just walk in and do it.
“And then to watch it all! To be able to walk into a control room, sit down and look up at all the large monitors and see the big picture,” he says. “It was constant excitement!”
One day Stu’s higher-ups told him that a program named RIMPAC, which stands for Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise, was going to be held at PMRF and they wanted him to manage it.
“The main thing was to get the navies in the Pacific region to learn how to interact in times of war so we can all work together,” he explains. “Every navy has different policies and different rules of engagement so by bringing them together for a one-month exercise, they learn to communicate with one another. All the countries have representatives in the control room.”
That first year, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom took part, along with the United States. In 2012, 22 nations participated. In the year 2000, some of the countries also began including international humanitarian responses during RIMPAC.
The most wonderful experience
Now retired, Stu is still busier than most people, volunteering 50 hours per week on various Kauai boards of directors; helping schools establish and operate rocket clubs and underwater robotics teams, and was recently asked to help Kapaa High School create an engineering academy.
He also enjoys helping high school students find college scholarships and internships that can change their lives.
“I could guarantee two scholarships per graduating student, but most students don’t know what all of their options are,” Stu says. “Some scholarships are worth more than $40,000!”
Stu invites students wanting his help to call him: (808) 651-1111.
Stu coordinates the interns for the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium and the University of Hawaii for some of the civilian contractor companies that work at PMRF including General Dynamics, and also Kauai Community College. “I’m still in the loop,” he says, matter-of-factly.
“I felt lucky from the first day I joined the Navy, and to be able to live my life on Kauai while serving with and working for the Navy,” Stu says, “has been the most wonderful experience I could ever imagine.”
• Pamela Varma Brown is the publisher “Kauai Stories,” and the forthcoming “Kauai Stories 2.”
