the position of all these islands, and of his homeland to the north, and which was titled—whether out of optimism or nostalgia, I couldn’t tell—“The Whole Nippon.” He pointed out those smaller islands that were close enough to see on the radar. One we spotted through binoculars, if hazily: a lone mass of green, possibly the islet of Ifalek or the three-island atoll of Lamotrek. Captain Takanaka gestured around the horizon. “Ours, once upon a time,” he said softly. “All of it. We were given them by the League of Nations. But then they were taken away.” He seemed genuinely regretful.
They had been taken away, indeed, and at a terrible price. American forces recaptured them in the spring of 1944, atoll by atoll, in a stuttering series of appallingly bloody set-piece battles that have since passed into military legend. Chuuk was one of the last outposts for the defeated Japanese: their surrender was not taken until September 1945, almost a month after the great formalized surrender ceremony staged in Tokyo Bay, aboard the USS Missouri. The islands of Micronesia—by some estimates nearly three thousand of them, a mere one thousand square miles of dry land peppered across fully three million square miles of sea—have been American, in essence, ever since. The fourth imperial occupation, some might argue.
And the native people have won precious few benefits from all the centuries of foreign attention. Critics claim, not unreasonably, that all that was brought by the years of foreign trespass in the Micronesian islands has been death, disease, and dependency; its residue remains, and it is not a pretty sight.
Particularly on the atoll known as Kwajalein.
United 154 lands there, its second stop out from Honolulu. Most people are forbidden to disembark, and must remain in the parked aircraft, trusting that its cooling system will survive the punishing afternoon heat. But I had left Honolulu that morning with a permit to land, issued by a forward outpost of the U.S. Army.
For Kwajalein is an army base. Since the 1960s it has operated as a center for mid-ocean rocketry, and it is currently the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. Few are allowed to get off the plane, fewer still to linger on the atoll, because the site is festooned with a costly array of ultrasecret high-technology apparatus, and is peopled with hundreds of high-technology staff, soldiers, and scientists, who are performing clandestine tasks with the equipment, all officially bent on helping keep America safe from whatever are deemed currently the world’s most dangerous threats.
The atoll is one of the world’s largest, with a lagoon of eight hundred square miles surrounded by almost one hundred islands, slivers of sand and coral that peek just a few feet above the surf. Inside the atoll, the sea is pale blue—the wreck of the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which turned turtle as it was being towed to haven there, a damaged war prize,3 is plainly visible. Outside the atoll, the sea is night dark, as the waters off the reef edge plunge thousands of feet down. There are the leaning palm trees, the endless rollers, the sound of seabirds, the roasting sun, the white-hot sand.
The actual Kwajalein Island is at the atoll’s southern end, and it serves as the headquarters for this cruelly isolated base. The island extends three miles or so from tip to tip, is a quarter of a mile wide, and sports the base’s aerodrome, water tower, and softball field. In other ways, it is as cheerless and institutional a place as any army base. The majority of those stationed there are civilian contractors, mostly from Alabama, many of them employed by an Alaska-based company that won the management contract from the Pentagon.
Some half dozen times a year, clients, customers, users of the Kwajalein facilities—they are called by many names—fire missiles from pads at Vandenberg in California and Kodiak in Alaska toward the atoll, to see how well they work. The rockets, of many different kinds and weights and speeds and newness, with many different kinds of warheads, all dummies of course, roar in and are tracked, measured, noted, and scored by the long-range telescopes and radars with which Kwajalein is equipped. It’s all a multimillion-dollar game of darts, the accuracy of the weapons’ splashdowns measured in inches, after a four-thousand-mile flight.
Once in a while specialist soldiers on Kwaj, as most call their unlovely home, will fire their own missiles up toward the incoming warheads, and score how well they knock them down, creating their own multimillion-dollar skeet shoot—that has implications, all are assured, for the preservation of world peace.
The rocketry on Kwajalein is impressive, beautiful even—a nighttime test in particular can be quite memorable, with streaks of what looks like orange tracer fire lighting up the sky, and enormous plumes of phosphorescent water where the missiles hit the ocean. But what is seldom seen by visitors is the other side of Kwajalein—where the islanders themselves are obliged to live.
For almost no Marshall Islanders are permitted to stay overnight on Kwajalein Island. They have to leave each evening on a U.S. Army ferryboat, and are shuttled three miles northward up the lagoon, to the island of Ebeye—twelve thousand men, women, and children compelled to live on a squalid eighty acres of slum houses, in what is one of the most densely populated places on earth.
It is a pullulating, smelly, fetid, and degrading place, in appearance more like a slum in Bombay or Calcutta than a community in a country that enjoys “free association” with the United States. There is little by way of a proper sewage system. The schools are ill-equipped; the children—and half the population is under eighteen—ill-educated. The most common disease is diabetes, type 2; the one supermarket, run by a genial Irishman on contract to a company in Guam, sells improbably vast tonnages of sodas and Spam.
Melancholy sights are everywhere. Since there is no Laundromat on Ebeye, those wishing to wash their clothes must come on the ferryboat to Kwajalein and use machines set up in a wire-enclosed compound outside the security fence, while the workers who have permission, and the uniformed Americans who live on the base, cycle past just feet away. There is no mortuary on Ebeye, either; the dead must be brought to Kwajalein, placed in a freezer outside the chain-link fence, and stored there beyond America proper, awaiting burial.
Seldom are the realities of the first and third worlds placed so tantalizingly close to one another—even the realities of Mexican poverty are largely out of sight to most passersby beyond the iron fences in Arizona. But on Ebeye, the separation of the two cultures is cruelly and harshly visible, just inches apart—and with the shame of it made all the more damning because the islands—the entire atoll, the neighboring islands, the entire republic—make up the country that is the birthright of the very people who are now being denied access to it.
This is the Marshall Islands, and these are the Marshall Islanders. Yet international agreements signed in U.S. government offices thousands of miles away have decreed that these men and women and their thousands of children are now forbidden to inhabit large parts of their own island homeland. They must perforce wash their clothes and attend to their dead and be otherwise separated behind chain-link fences, while Alabamans and other strangers on the far side of the same fences come and go on the Marshall Islands quite as they please.
Moreover, there is also the matter of the Money. The U.S. government has a long-term agreement with the government of the Marshall Islands to lease eleven of the islets that rise around the Kwajalein lagoon. Kwajalein Island itself is the biggest and most important of these; but at the north end of the atoll, the outcrop of Roi-Namur has a large airfield also; and many gigantic radar installations and telescopes; and impossibly large long-range-missile-spotting cameras, too—and a small, dignified cemetery for the Japanese war dead (with bones still being found, often frustratingly indistinguishable from the bones of dead American marines). Nine other islands also have launch pads and sensor arrays and target crosses painted on thick concrete pads, which some of the Vandenberg birds, as they are called, are supposed to hit.
For all this, the Marshall Islands government receives many millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars each year—$18 million under the current agreement,
