Jack Tame: Great to be back in the fold

Rimpac - the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, a maritime warfare drill - is a big deal in the naval world.

Hawaii throbs with rotors.

Helicopters. Big, badass, camouflage things circle in formation, drumming like blowflies in the heat. Sometimes a fighter jet pops out of the clouds for a low pass over Waikiki before lifting a wing like a butt cheek off a cushion and passing back over Oahu's mountains. Naval ships surround the island.

The whole paradise/warzone motif, the heat and the jungle, the long boards and battleships, the coconuts and the 'copters, reminds me of that scene in Apocalypse Now.

Rimpac — the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, a maritime warfare drill — is a big deal in the naval world.

Twenty-three countries, 50-something ships and submarines, plus army and air force. In my Honolulu hotel, high-ranking officers from Canada, Japan, Mexico and the US queued for waffles and coffee precisely 90 seconds before the hotel buffet opened for action each day. Military people are morning people; infuriatingly spry.

HMNZS Canterbury's passage through Pearl Harbour's heads was anti-climactic given the three-decade hoo-ha. The Americans were more interested in the Chinese vessels parked across the bay, and the enormous aircraft carrier set to share the Kiwi's dock.

I was here in 2012 when Te Kaha and Endeavour were banished from Pearl Harbour. Although it's a diplomatic relief to have overturned the sanction and won a crib in the cool-kids' bunkhouse, I doubt many US naval folk think the ban was that unreasonable in the first place. You won't take our ships? We won't take yours either.

But times change. And maintaining the old sanction probably annoyed their own military staff a lot more than ours. At Rimpac the US calls all the shots, and it's a pain in the butt organising a pan-Pacific exercise when a simple catch-up with the Kiwis means traipsing across Honolulu.

• Jack Tame is on Newstalk ZB, Saturdays 9am-midday.