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, on a lease that expires in 2066, with a twenty-year extension. There is a meta-agreement, too: a much more substantial sum is paid by Washington based on what is known as the Compact of Free Association, which essentially gives all the component island groups of Micronesia (of which the Marshalls are one) a guarantee of additional financial aid in exchange for the United States’ being able to make use of the islands more or less as Washington wishes (the “more or less” being somewhat open to negotiation).
But the $18 million annual payment for the use of the Kwajalein islands is earmarked specifically for Kwajalein, which leads any visitor to the pressing question: where does all the money go and why are places such as Ebeye Island such sinks of squalor and poverty? It is a mystery, and it hints at much that is wrong, and has been wrong for generations. Every islander to whom I spoke about it tended to look at the ground and try to change the subject. I got only vague answers that usually mentioned something about the peculiar tribal arrangements of the Marshall Islanders, the traditional structures of power and authority, and the behaviors of the local kings and tribal chiefs, men who are widely respected and deferred to and who often hold elected positions of power.
There are mutterings, too, about the cost of maintaining large houses in Hawaii, which many of the senior figures in the Marshall Islands are said to own. But little is said or written directly about the dispiriting situation of so much poverty in a place where such an abundance of American government money has been so liberally sprinkled about. One University of Hawaii academic who wrote a book purporting to expose this very evident corruption was delayed for years, awash in threatened lawsuits. And though the book was eventually offered for sale, the publisher insisted it be heavily bowdlerized so as not to offend any of the local chieftains.
To add to the general wretchedness of the Marshalls, there is also the nagging matter of Bikini, a lonely but infamous atoll two hundred fifty miles farther north, but also part of the republic. In its pre-atomic existence Bikini was so typically Pacific that it could well have been on a National Geographic cover or a cafeteria poster or the jacket of an old South Seas novel—but it has since become notorious around the planet, ever since the first nuclear weapons were exploded there, back in the late 1940s. The evident misappropriation of funds on Kwajalein, and the fate of the Kwajalein islanders who are forbidden to live on most of their own atoll, constitutes a sorry enough story. But it pales in comparison with the fate of the Bikinians, on whose homeland most of America’s atomic weapons were to be exploded. It is a continuing saga of dispossession also, since these islanders, too, are exiled from home, compelled to live hundreds of miles away, and (as we shall see in the pages that follow) in all too many cases suffering from a florid array of ailments of body and mind. Theirs is a tale—dispiritingly familiar in this corner of the ocean—from which no one in authority emerges with any measureable degree of credit.
The Pacific is an oceanic behemoth of eye-watering complexity. A near-limitless range of human and natural conditions exists within