Marlene Boucher and Rodney Boucher

[00:02] RODNEY BOUCHER: Aloha. My name is Rod Rodney Boucher, age 63. Date is June 13, 2022. We're located at the Hawaii Public radio, HPR, in Honolulu, Hawaii. My wife, Marlene, is my interview partner, and my relationship to her is. She is my wife, and I am her husband.

[00:28] MARLENE BOUCHER: And I am Marlene Boucher, age 72, and today's date is also June 13 at HPR, Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm here with my husband, Rodney Boucher, and that's about it. Ok. Did we meet? I asked you, how did we meet?

[00:53] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you for that question. How did we meet? Well, I was canoe paddling out on the north Shore with my North Shore Canoe club, and we had just finished a training session, and.

[01:09] MARLENE BOUCHER: I showed up with some of my tennis buddies, of.

[01:13] RODNEY BOUCHER: Which one of them was a canoe.

[01:15] MARLENE BOUCHER: Partner, also one of my surfing buddies.

[01:18] RODNEY BOUCHER: One of your surfing buddies.

[01:21] MARLENE BOUCHER: So we met then, originally, I saw him, an incident happened, and Rodney, true to form, stepped forward and said, what can I do to help? And it was a couple weeks later that my buddy asked me to come to the high school championship game, and she had set me up. She had brought rod out there for the two of us to meet.

[01:48] RODNEY BOUCHER: And that's where I came in, because I called up and I said, hey, I really like to meet this woman. And I was there with my brother in law or my stepbrother, I should say, and a friend of his, because we were getting ready to do the Honolulu marathon. And what happened was that not Gene.

[02:13] MARLENE BOUCHER: He was kind of cute because you sat yourself right next to me. You positioned everybody perfectly, but your cousin was sitting behind us, and it was a kind of a chilly night, and he was commenting on how cold it was. He says, actually, I think I'm seeing snowflakes now.

[02:30] RODNEY BOUCHER: They were from Peoria, Illinois, and they came out specifically in December to do the marathon and get away from the winter back in the midwest. And it worked out well that the football game was between St. Louis and Kahuku. I'm from the north shore, so I was going with the raiders, and your mom Getra, was there, and so was my sister and Debbie. And I positioned myself next to you and your mother so that I could talk more with you. And afterwards, when Jeannie was saying that it wasn't set up or anything.

[03:14] MARLENE BOUCHER: Yeah. When we were dropping Jeannie off. Excuse me, she said, marlene, I didn't set you up. I said, I know, jeannie, you wouldn't do that.

[03:23] RODNEY BOUCHER: And I'm calling Jeannie, saying, thank you for setting it up. And it worked out extremely well because I told Jeannie that I wanted to date her and go forward from there.

[03:34] MARLENE BOUCHER: You were in your final year of military service. You're actually retiring a year later.

[03:40] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah, 99, 2000, I retired. So that's how we met and started dating. And I guess now I go back to the beginning with where I started from. I have my pre military days. I was born in Peoria, Illinois, second child. I have two sisters, one older, one younger, Sharon Gale and Karen Jean. And we were born in Peoria, Illinois. Like I said, our parents had moved up from the south, Missouri and Tennessee. My father had been an air Force mechanic, aircraft mechanic, and my mom was working at a glass factory down in Alton, Illinois. So when the families migrated north to take advantage of the industrial opportunities up there, my dad moved up. After the air Force, my mom moved up. They met, and my dad was working on his getting accepted into the police academy. And while doing that, he was working construction and also bartending. My mom bartended, but she was also doing a lot of other jobs, nursing, a licensed practical nurse for hospice care. And my mom wanted me to be Josh Lee Boucher III. My father said, no. No son of his would be named junior for the rest of his life. So my mom came up with Rodney Wade.

[05:24] MARLENE BOUCHER: Wade the traveler. The wanderer.

[05:26] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah, she liked the old english versions of the stuff. So Rodney and Wade are both related to traveling and to the sea, which eventually I did become part of the sea. I was born a Virgo and a dog, both of which are very much a part of my. My personality in trying to help others. Community support, volunteering, etcetera. But I also have a type A personality. When it comes out. It does come out, and that's later on.

[06:01] MARLENE BOUCHER: Good for your history in the military, with your advancement in that.

[06:04] RODNEY BOUCHER: Advancements, and also the penalties.

[06:09] MARLENE BOUCHER: Traveled all over the United States, all the way through your high school before you started traveling the world, too.

[06:16] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yes, I did. My parents divorced, remarried, divorced again, creating quite a bit of a. It wasn't a very good ending for their relationship. So my two sisters and I, we did a lot of traveling. Before I joined the Navy, I was in five high schools, two grade schools, one middle school, and five high schools throughout the. From Illinois, twice different places. Texas. Uvalde, Texas, unfortunately, which is in the news now. And then Albuquerque, New Mexico. Two high schools in Albuquerque. So it kind of prepared me for the military.

[06:59] MARLENE BOUCHER: Both sisters were in the military, too.

[07:02] RODNEY BOUCHER: My older sister, Sharon Gale, she joined the air force. She was a surgery technician, operating room surgery technician, and my youngest sister joined the Navy as a yeoman, administrative specialist, operational admin, I guess. And later on I'll talk more about both of them.

[07:25] MARLENE BOUCHER: So how did your family take it when you told them, yeah, I'm going in the military?

[07:30] RODNEY BOUCHER: They pretty much knew from the age of twelve that I was going to join this service. At that time, prior to. Prior to high school, I was always going to be an aircraft loadmaster. I was very, I was going to follow my father's footsteps in the air force, become an aircraft load master, and then eventually become a flight engineer. But the air force changed their eye prescription requirements. And at that time I was in a navy JROTC in Albuquerque, and the master chief, McFaul, I still remember his name, he convinced me to go. I already had taken the AsVab test, the military entrance exams, and he told me to take a look at the navy and see if there was something I wanted. And I eventually wound up with the advanced electronics training, technical schools for electronic warfare. And that's how I enlisted. Swore in there at the military entrance processing center. Meps in Albuquerque at 17, signed up with permissions from my mother to join. I wasn't. I was going to be on delayed entry for about nine months before my school started up boot camp. But my detailer, my recruiter, I should say, he told me, you might want to consider joining. Getting in now before 1976 ended, because there was, the Vietnam era was changing the process, and if I joined before then, then I could be considered Vietnam error, which turned out to be extremely important when I retired for my GI Bill and other benefits. So it worked out very well.

[09:31] MARLENE BOUCHER: Your first love was for the air force, though? Yeah. I think that's why you like jumping out of so many airplanes.

[09:38] RODNEY BOUCHER: You always love jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. But eventually, through a diverse career, I wound up becoming an aircraft loadmaster for working with the SeALs as a support guy. And that, I'll get back to that one. But the follow on process was going through the electronics training as a kid with both my parents being bartenders. We all grew up around bars and I was somewhat of a child pool shark prodigy. So I took that lessons and I earned money on the side while going through different navy schools as a pool shark until people started not wanting to play with me, lose some, but gained a little bit more.

[10:32] MARLENE BOUCHER: Is there a key reason why you wanted to join the military?

[10:36] RODNEY BOUCHER: The education was number one, but right behind that was to see the world was I definitely wanted to get out and see everything I possibly could, but I also wanted to have a trade that, you know, when I did get out, whenever that was, that I would have a follow up.

[10:53] MARLENE BOUCHER: You always hear stories about what basic training was like. What was it like for you?

[10:58] RODNEY BOUCHER: For me, it was slow. I pretty much knew what I was getting into all the way through. I was physically fit, mentally capable of handling all the stress that was going to happen. And I did. And I wound up being an honor graduate, an honor graduate as far as academic. And I wound up helping a lot of people with their, getting their grades. They needed to pass boot camp physically. There was no problem being there. But I did get into a couple fights, which from you start as an e one enlisted, one pay grade, you get meritorily advanced to e two or e three. And I had been. And then I got in a fight, and I went back down to e two and then back down to e one, all in the course of boot camp. But that was a, like I said, I was. It worked out in the end, because when I got to the next school, basic electronics, same thing there was. The school pace was academically, it's set up for someone that has more challenges. And I went through it pretty quick, but I was held back to help others, and I made a lot of money playing pool.

[12:16] MARLENE BOUCHER: Were there any comedic moments during this time frame?

[12:22] RODNEY BOUCHER: One time, well, later on during radio Menaiesco, I'll talk about that. But I actually. The next phase was electronic warfare school down in Pensacola, Florida. As a young 18 year old in Pensacola, Florida, you could drink, and I took advantage of that. And I had two roommates, one of them from Pensacola being the age of 23, and the other person being from New Orleans, being 22. So they took me out and showed me the ropes, which helped and then hindered, helped me grow up somewhat, but hindered me on my academics, because when you show up lobstered, I am a redhead. I was definitely a redhead back then. And when you sit there and you're drunk and you're laying out on the beach for a few hours, lobster. You turn lobster. And that does not help academically or trying to move. And that was one moment in reference to that.

[13:25] MARLENE BOUCHER: So you said that you wanted to travel all over. What places did you go.

[13:31] RODNEY BOUCHER: Different from after high school, joining the military? The first phase is all schools but San Diego, Pensacola, Florida, and then back to San Diego for the schools. And then I got to my first ship, the Mount Whitney, which is a communications command type vessel, a large ship out of Norfolk, Virginia. And we went throughout Europe, northern Europe. Never did go to the Mediterranean but we, one of my best cruises was going up the north Atlantic. We started, I want to say we started in Hamburg, Germany, went to Copenhagen, Denmark, crossed over to Scotland, to Edinburgh, Scotland. There, one of our antennas was at the very top of the yard arm top of the ship, if you will. And we had to cut it off because we could not get underneath the bridge at low tide.

[14:42] MARLENE BOUCHER: She had no communication.

[14:43] RODNEY BOUCHER: No, it. Just one antenna out of many. But I was on the antenna crew, and I had to go up there and help de rig it. Not cut it off, but de rig it, and then put it back when we got done with it. So that was interesting. In Scotland. Then we did Dublin, Ireland, where I was at home being redheaded. And so I had, during the previous visits, I had taken a lot of cruise duties because I knew we were going into Dublin, Ireland, and we were going to pull into down in Portsmouth, England. So in Ireland, all I had to do was show up in the morning at 730, and then I was off until 730 the next morning because I had other people taking my duties, the ones I had taken before. So that worked out very exceptional time. I got to meet a lot of great families up there and actually met one of my rays on my mother's side, my maternal side was Ray. We never found out whether we were actually related, but the ray in my family, and because I was wearing navy cracker jacks, it was pretty much I didn't pay for anything throughout most of my time there and had a great family visit with their family there in Dublin. Never got out of Dublin, but that's fine. It worked out well, because the very next trip, when we pulled out of Dublin island, we went to Portsmouth, England, where I took leave. Five days of leave I had saved up. And again, many people took my duty, and I went up to visit my sister, Sharon Gale.

[16:34] MARLENE BOUCHER: Oh, yeah, doing the Olympics.

[16:36] RODNEY BOUCHER: Well, she was. At that time, she was in the air force, stationed at a place called Lakenheath, England, at the hospital, the air force hospital up about 100 miles north of London. So I took the train up to visit her and Tom, my brother in law, and he bartended, and he played guitar, and that started their. They loved to travel also, but that was their trip. They spent two years over in England. So that was a great trip. Came back down, took the trains back down Portsmouth, got on board the ship on time before it pulled out to go to Chebourg, France, and Cherbourg, France. For me, Washington, a great time because of my name. Boucher. Boucher Butcher. At this point, I will say that family reunions are excellent because you have a lot of beer fights. You have Boucher, you have Butcher and you have Boucher. Just depends on what part of the country you're from and how it works.

[17:40] MARLENE BOUCHER: How did you transition from a ship to a submarine?

[17:44] RODNEY BOUCHER: That's an excellent question.

[17:46] MARLENE BOUCHER: I'd like to know.

[17:48] RODNEY BOUCHER: The Mount Whitney. We went into a six month overhaul period at the Philadelphia shipyards. That was right at the end of my first enlistment. And I was actively trying to pursue, decide stay or go. So during that time frame, before we left Philadelphia, I went down the piers at the Navy base at Norfolk. And I was talking to different ships and submarines about what the perspective was, because at that point, I wanted more technical, challenging capabilities, I wanted more schooling, and I was willing to sign the dotted line for two more years or five more years, whatever. And plus you get a reenforcement bonus. So that helped. So I went on the submarines. I went on two submarines down in Norfolk, Virginia, at the submarine piers. And they told me, they took me down, showed me everything, and that kind of sealed the deal that I wanted to go on submarines. We get in the shipyards, I'm working on the antennas, cutting and taking them down, refurbishing and stuff. And I got my orders. They came in, they said, hey, you got your orders for subschool. So submarines, I go report down to San Diego for my submarine. I had wanted a different submarine, but it was in the shipyards up in San Francisco for a pretty extensive overhaul. And the next submarine coming up that was going deployed was the USS guardfish SSN 612 fast attack submarine that I was getting ready to go deploy to the Pacific, into the Indian Ocean and beyond. So that's where I went on five days notice. Within the first five days, I was on board, I was underwater doing trials, getting preps and stuff, and. And within eleven days, I was deployed. The next time I surfaced was about 50 some odd days later.

[20:05] MARLENE BOUCHER: That was your longest one?

[20:06] RODNEY BOUCHER: No, that was the first one. And we pulled up, surfaced, and pulled into Pearl harbor here, where my younger sister Karen was stationed down at the Naval Surface Fleet Operations Intelligence Division. She knew where I was while I was deployed, which was interesting because we're not supposed to tell anybody, but she knew when she was there on the pier to meet me. So that was pretty spectacular.

[20:41] MARLENE BOUCHER: You're telling me about if you've been in a submarine for 50 odd days and you come out, the aroma is quite unique.

[20:47] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah, aroma being one of those things that is unique and you basically burn all your clothing, get rid of it, dispose of it, because it's not going to be palatable for anybody to use afterwards. And you start fresh and go from there. Submarine duty. Submarine duty was the hardest job I have ever had in my life. I consider the Mount Whitney was my training grounds for everything related to communications, technical, electronics, etcetera, which was fantastic. The submarine that I was on, the guard, fish had already been in service for 20 years almost.

[21:31] MARLENE BOUCHER: It's an old boat.

[21:32] RODNEY BOUCHER: It was an old boat that needed a lot of. A lot of love and care and a lot and sweat and blood as well. So it was a very, very challenging tour for the next two years, eight months, and 14 days, because you're counting when you're on a small boat, submarine as it is. In our case, at one time, there was only two radiomen, myself and another person. I was the junior person at that one time. And we would work 12 hours on, 12 hours off for whatever time we were underwater, be it 50 days, be it 60 days, be it more or less, or we worked six on, six off, six, whatever it takes. I was still in the process of qualifying. Brian, the other radioman, he'd already qualified, and he had quite a substantial amount of credentials that were needed for the submarine. I was working for the. On those credentials the entire time. So if you slept for 6 hours and then you were up for 6 hours, it didn't leave a lot of time to do anything, but you had to find the time to do it. And it was by far the hardest job I had. But probably I can also say that the crew was exceptionally tight knit because of the atmosphere that you're in. You're on a submerged vessel 400 plus feet underwater, doing different operational requirements that put you in harm's way. Sometimes you're walking around in your socks. Sometimes all you have to eat is cold sandwiches because you have to be.

[23:21] MARLENE BOUCHER: As quiet as possible after you finished your longest duration underwater. You had a kind of unique way of exploring the outdoors when you bicycled.

[23:33] RODNEY BOUCHER: When I was. We had some SeAls come on board the submarine to do some certifications for how they came out on and off the submarine. It's called lock in lock outs. They lock in and lock out of the. Well, there's a system to do it in. Unfortunately, they were there because of incident that happened about a month earlier on board a different submarine where some men lost their lives. And we were. We were the first submarine to pull in at that time in the Philippines, because we had just come down from patrolling in the Sea of Japan and further north in the eastern Pacific. So we were the first submarine came in to the Subic bay, Philippines. That allowed us to upload them, get them on board and all their gear. And for the next 1516 days, we. All we did was these lock in lockout procedurals to confirm that the process does work and all the safety parameters were there.

[24:49] MARLENE BOUCHER: So the SeAls were quite impressed with the quality of what you had to offer?

[24:53] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah, I was. I liked working on small boat motors and radios and waterproofing, and I wound up helping them a lot doing that. By that time, I was qualified on submarines and I had a little extra time, and I did it by helping them with all their equipment and procedures. The SeaLs, you know, asked me what was I going to do after this, after my tour on the submarine. I told them I was probably going to get out, and they said, why don't you come work with us? And when we dropped them back off in Subic, we left to go do. My longest underwater was 63 days. And the next time we surfaced was in Japan, of which, before we left Subic Bay, I was able to call my detailer, my assignment officer, and asked for naval special warfare communication support. And he said, well, try it. You do know that it's a shore duty. You have sea duty, and you have shore duty for the navy, primarily sea duty. You're at sea on board a ship or submarine or whatever. And shore duty is where you're on shore helping everything related to having seaworthy.

[26:21] MARLENE BOUCHER: Most times during a career, you go from one to the other, primarily.

[26:25] RODNEY BOUCHER: That's not my career, though. And the last thing before the bad phone call was that he would try. We showed up in Japan, and my orders were waiting for me to go to Naval special commander, Naval Special Warfare Group one out of San Diego, working for the mobile communications teams, which is exactly what I wanted. And so that took you where then.

[26:53] MARLENE BOUCHER: Once you got in there?

[26:55] RODNEY BOUCHER: Well, yeah, that was in San Diego. That's on naval amphibious base San Diego, Coronado, I should say. That was one of my going from the hardest tour I had on the submarine to one of the best tours I ever had. Part of that was because it was out in the open. You did things outdoors. You weren't in a submerged black and under scenario anymore. So. And it allowed me a lot of freedom to expand on a lot of communications details. And I was in. I was in very good shape and I could. I could stay up with the seals and some things, but when it came to water events, I was. I was their peer. I couldn't run as fast as them, and so I didn't bother. I could walk, but I couldn't run, but I could swim. And I had. Even then, I had buoyancy. So that was a four year tour at Naval Special Warfare Group, one of which I spent easily more than two and a half years deployed. That's what the job required, was a large amount of deployment throughout Asia on this side of the world, from Canada, Adak, Alaska, Kodak, Kodiak, Alaska, all the way over to Japan, in the Koreas, down into the Philippines, Australia, Cambodia, Thailand, Dago Garcia, out in the middle of the Indian Ocean and even toward the african horn going from there. And it was a very extensive tour, and it got me to the Philippines. There's a naval special warfare unit there, and I was out there helping pull in parachutes from a parachute jump one time. And the exo executive officer for the unit, he had just come from SIl team six. He helped form SIl team six. And he was asked me same question, what do you want to do after this? I said, I'd like to stay with it. He said, okay, I'm going to set you up to do an interview so you could be a support person at SEAL team six. And true to his word, he did. And I went for the interview, of which it happened that I knew three of the guys that were interviewing me from the previous three years I'd been doing the job. So it wasn't really an interview, except for the psychologist, who said I was just too much of a type A personality to be dealing with seals, of which the Seals were laughing behind their breath, saying that we had just finished working with this guy for three years. We kind of like him. So that got me my next I left San Diego, went to SEAL team six out of Virginia, and the four years I spent in San Diego deployed out of there. Then I spent six years deployed out of Virginia with Sil team six, and then the follow on with the development groups. And that time, the six years I deployed, I paid rent three months in advance of, which was great for the renters. They never had to change out furniture. And for the six years I was in the same place. But when I did leave, they tore everything out, took everything out, and said, okay, major renovation as far as my apartment. And it worked out well for that. But the six years was spent throughout the world, in this case, extensive amount of time over in Europe, in the Mediterranean, in Africa, throughout Asia, and here in Hawaii. Actually, we came through here, and that's where I learned I wasn't ordered, but I was requested to find out if I wanted to become parachute quality.

[31:10] MARLENE BOUCHER: That's when you started doing all your parachuting.

[31:12] RODNEY BOUCHER: Because we were working on small boats, counter terrorist interdiction stuff, so that's where that all came in. So jumping around the world of which one jump was in here to Hawaii, about 60 miles off the coast, and then the small boats we had to motor in to take care of the exercises and stuff.

[31:37] MARLENE BOUCHER: How many jumps?

[31:38] RODNEY BOUCHER: 89 jumps, which is about the same amount of times I had to submerge and surface. You want those to equal out on the submarine. If you have one more surfacing than a submergence, that's okay, but if you have one more submergence, then you do surfacing.

[31:58] MARLENE BOUCHER: Your dad used to say all the time, I said, why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane and sink in a perfectly good ship boat?

[32:07] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah. Both my mother and my father were scratching their heads on my choices. They didn't. They didn't mind. My dad definitely didn't mind the air force, even though I took on his personality of getting in fights when I was younger. But, yeah, at the same time, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane didn't really match either one of their ideas.

[32:30] MARLENE BOUCHER: You got a chance to go up to the snow country that you love, that cold weather.

[32:36] RODNEY BOUCHER: After ten years working with the seals, I was pretty much given a carte blanche on where I wanted to go and how I wanted to do it. And I chose to go up to Norway to work with NATO, which was a pretty low key job in comparison to what I had been going. Go fast. This was a low and slow type job up in Norway, where I was able to experience the 1994 Olympics and enjoy winter for a solid six months of the year instead of sweating it out in swamps and jungles. For large personnel, though, I enjoyed Panama and South America and Central Americas. But after a while, you get tired of taking malaria tablets when you're at the seals.

[33:28] MARLENE BOUCHER: They pulled pranks on each other sometimes.

[33:31] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yes, they did. I used to be known as DB dancing bear. Dancing bear was because I hacky sacked a little foot bag all the time, and I was pretty good at it. But at different times they would put rocks in the hacky sacks and before you would feel it, they threw it to you to kick it. And that was one of the pranks, was to throw solid rock hacky sacks in a little leather suede bag that they'd made up quite extensive planning, but there were other jokesters going around. A lot of it had to do with live electronics at low voltage, just to give you the shock and awe of being around things.

[34:24] MARLENE BOUCHER: So tell me about your retirement.

[34:26] RODNEY BOUCHER: Oh, no, no, no. Let's go back here.

[34:29] MARLENE BOUCHER: Okay.

[34:31] RODNEY BOUCHER: After the Seals in Norway, I went to, I took an interview with the commander in chief of the northern or for the naval forces, allied NATO forces in south. He was about ready to go into Bosnia, former Yugoslavia. The UN nations had done. UN national forces, UN nation forces had started to get in trouble because of the genocide that was going on there. So Natal was taking over. I got interviewed to go in as the communicator, flag communicator for the admiral in charge, four star. But I got interviewed by, again, a guy I had used to work with in the Seals. And it was a. It was a no brainer as far as he was concerned.

[35:26] MARLENE BOUCHER: Check. Check.

[35:27] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah. And it worked out very well. And I did the same thing. I paid rent three months in advance in Naples, Italy, and spent most of my time deployed. That was a very. That was a near wartime conditioning combat. And it worked out very well for me as far as. Because I hadn't been the normal sailor. Sea rotation, shore rotation, ship shore, ship shore. This allowed me to get advanced up the pay grades as it is up to e nine master chief.

[36:04] MARLENE BOUCHER: When you put into these more stressful situations, it helps advance a career.

[36:09] RODNEY BOUCHER: It can if you're not following a typical career, if you're outside, oh, if you're outside the box, you have to figure out what else you can do. When I was in Norway, I taught swimming classes to many english speaking kids that were at the different schools, whether the UN school or the american school or the norwegian school. I taught swimming classes because when I was working with the seals, I had become certified as a water safety instructor, lifeguard instructor, and a cold water survival specialist, still are. And that helped me fill my time up there and then that led to other jobs as well, in reference to it. But the job in Bosnia, in Sarajevo, as it is, was taking care of the troops, taking care of my job communications wise, and again working with the seals who had come in to act as bodyguards, security for the admiral when they came in to do their interview, because it was going to be a decision whether to do army special forces or seals. I knew both groups from having worked with both groups. And the guy that came in for the seals used to be one of my old bosses. So it made it very easy for me to do a sales plug to get the seals to be the security guards, which worked out again for a lot of different things after that. When I got, I'm in Bosnia and I call for orders and they said, guam, Japan or Hawaii. And I had been wanting to be stationed here in Hawaii for seven, you know, 17 years prior. I had asked for it. I had asked for a submarine out of here or to go to Antarctica to do deep freeze operations down there. And they said, no, you're going to stay where you're at with naval special warfare.

[38:19] MARLENE BOUCHER: But now.

[38:20] RODNEY BOUCHER: So I kind of chuckled. I'm in the operations center in Bosnia that had been bombed out before we got there, and we had to refurbish it. There's still shrapnel, wall shrapnel, all kinds of bullet holes throughout. And so I laughed and said, I'll take the only state you're going to offer me. And lo and behold, I was able to come back to here. I went to Patrick Air Force Base for 30 day training in equal opportunity and how to identify extremists and white nationalists. A whole bunch of what you need.

[39:02] MARLENE BOUCHER: Job required.

[39:04] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah. Coming back here because I could do that. That could work well within my job at naval communications up in the middle of the island. And my job, it was very easy to do my job because it was taking care of the sailors and their families. That was my primary job because we had hundreds of technically experts, technical experts in communications, things that I had bypassed on my career path. So I wasn't going to go in and tell anybody to do their jobs when I didn't know their jobs, but I could take care of people, and that was my primary goal. That, and I lived on the north Shore at that time because it was the closest route to NC Tams up in Wahiwa. And that's how I met you.

[39:56] MARLENE BOUCHER: That's how you got into paddling?

[39:58] RODNEY BOUCHER: That's how I got into paddling. I was paddling again with the North Shore Canoe Club and one of our ladies that I was paddling with, her name was Jeannie, who was your friend, and she decided to play the matchmaker part.

[40:14] MARLENE BOUCHER: Yeah.

[40:15] RODNEY BOUCHER: And it worked out very well, as far as I'm concerned. Now ask me more questions about that.

[40:22] MARLENE BOUCHER: Process about meeting you or the.

[40:28] RODNEY BOUCHER: Wow. Or should I ask you now questions.

[40:33] MARLENE BOUCHER: Over there.

[40:34] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah. So there we were, Christmas. I invited you to a Christmas command ball.

[40:43] MARLENE BOUCHER: Yeah. I was waiting for you down at the Halekoa, and you had gone to a Wyland viewing or something like that. So you're a little bit late getting there. But anyway, we get into the ball area, ballroom area, and you love to dance. And you had me up on that dance floor so much, I was actually begging all the ladies sitting down below is to relieve me, please come. Come and take over for me.

[41:14] RODNEY BOUCHER: That seemed to work out well, I like to think. But that was a good part. We had established, I think, that we liked each other.

[41:23] MARLENE BOUCHER: You put up with me together 22 years now.

[41:28] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah. So that led into the retirement. Prior to my retirement, I went to my cousin's retirement. He was retiring. He's a navy chief. He was retiring out of Ottawa, Canada, working at the embassy up there. And while I was there, I was lonely. And I called back 4000 miles away and I proposed over the phone.

[41:56] MARLENE BOUCHER: Yeah. And I told you, no, you can't do that. You can't call me when you're 4000 miles away and then pull something like that. I says, I want it in person.

[42:09] RODNEY BOUCHER: I said, yes, ma'am. So we get back and I'm planning out my retirement. Got it all set up, and we do the retirement ceremony on board the USS Missouri, the battleship Missouri. And my cousin Nathan, who I'd gone to his retirement, he came out to ours, mine. And he saw my remarks, which included a proposal halfway through. And he said, he asked me, this is at 04:00 in the morning, said, does she know anything about this? Nope. He said, you sure you want to do this? I said, yeah. So it worked out very well. Halfway through it, I'm in my white service dress. White unify everybody is. And I said, pardon me, folks. I'm going to do something I've never done before. And I had pre staged a pad next to my aunt sitting right behind me. And I had walked up to my aunt, said, aunt Flo, can I have that pad there? And so she gave it to me and my mom sitting next to you and my sisters and your mom and I went down on bended knee and I proposed.

[43:24] MARLENE BOUCHER: Proposed. I was. It's like a moment where you don't see or hear anything. It's just like you're in a different world. I said, oh, my God. I said, yeah. But then your commander told you what were you gonna do if she said no? And he says, I jump overboard and he tells you no, you throw her overboard.

[43:49] RODNEY BOUCHER: Thankfully, we didn't have to do that.

[43:50] MARLENE BOUCHER: Yeah.

[43:51] RODNEY BOUCHER: And that worked out well. And then we got married. In between that time, I went and the trail. I went and did a portion of the appalachian trail. I had planned to try to do it for six months, but I got some shin splints and had to come off of it within about a month. But that led to the opportunity to go visit a bunch of family throughout the east coast and midwest and grow a ponytail, bearden all that good stuff.

[44:21] MARLENE BOUCHER: But since that time, we have traveled all over the world, which is a good point.

[44:27] RODNEY BOUCHER: Where have we traveled?

[44:28] MARLENE BOUCHER: Oh, wow. Been to Europe three times, I think. Been down to Australia and New Zealand, up to Alaska, all through Canada and United States, and.

[44:38] RODNEY BOUCHER: And still have a bucket list.

[44:39] MARLENE BOUCHER: Yeah, we still have a five year plan of where we want to go next.

[44:44] RODNEY BOUCHER: So after that, come back off the appalachian trail, and she gets bored with me, and she says, get a job or go back to school. At least that's what I remember you saying. So I went back to school. I didn't want to get a job, so I used my every penny of my GI bill, went back to school, got a couple degrees, couple certificates of which part of them is working with disaster preparedness and emergency management, working with the Red Cross, volunteering a lot with them, and doing a lot of that, as well as a lot of veteran service organizations, where I try to pay it forward on a lot of.

[45:32] MARLENE BOUCHER: We just spent the weekend on the halekoa, on our anniversary. On our anniversary. And it's cute because the waitress there says, well, how long have you guys been married? And before I could answer, Rod goes, not long enough.

[45:47] RODNEY BOUCHER: So we have two minutes to discuss you, huh? You. Let's talk about you and your family. I love your mother.

[45:58] MARLENE BOUCHER: Yeah.

[45:59] RODNEY BOUCHER: And I respect your brother. I'm not saying that for any kudos, but talk to me about you.

[46:06] MARLENE BOUCHER: I grew up in Canada.

[46:08] RODNEY BOUCHER: How did you wind up in Hawaii?

[46:09] MARLENE BOUCHER: Well, actually, my sister and I came to Hawaii on a vacation one year. We loved it so much that we went back to Canada, sold everything, quit our jobs, took the money, and came out here and lived on the beach for a couple of months. And I don't know.

[46:27] RODNEY BOUCHER: Well, you were a surfing.

[46:29] MARLENE BOUCHER: Oh, yeah. I lived for surfing back then and enjoyed the people, the Hawaii people. I just loved it at that time. In the summer, a lot of the families would send up little camps all the way down the beach, and the kids and us, we would surf all day. And then later on in the afternoon, the men would all go off to work, and they come back, and we would be cooking all the meals and everything for the whole group of people. And then it would just be a Kumbaya moment in the evening with all those Hawaiians. And the people and our friends still keep in touch with all of those people now.

[47:10] RODNEY BOUCHER: Yeah, you were surfing and tennis. We're wrapping up here. Okay. So I haven't been. I have not embarrassed you.

[47:22] MARLENE BOUCHER: Nope. Okay.

[47:24] RODNEY BOUCHER: You haven't embarrassed me. I feel pretty good about this. Shall we continue?

[47:30] MARLENE BOUCHER: We shall continue our next phase of our life together.

[47:35] RODNEY BOUCHER: Okay. So what's inside my ring?

[47:38] MARLENE BOUCHER: Oh, live, love, laugh and what's inside yours?

[47:43] RODNEY BOUCHER: Live life large.

[47:44] MARLENE BOUCHER: Oh, yeah. You're saying, live life large. That was our sayings. I always said, live, live, love, laugh and you always said, live life large.

[47:51] RODNEY BOUCHER: And that's where we'll finish because it's still ongoing.