Many passengers had left at Majuro, and others had got on, and I now found myself sitting next to a friendly woman, a nurse at the military hospital in Kwajalein, her husband part of a radar tracking unit there. She painted a less than idyllic picture of the island – or, rather, the mass of islands (ninety-one in all) that form Kwajalein atoll, surrounding the largest lagoon in the world. The lagoon itself, she told me, is a test target for missiles from U.S. Air Force bases on Hawaii and the mainland. It is also where countermissiles are tested, fired from Kwajalein at the missiles as they descend. There were nights, she said, when the whole sky was ablaze with light and noise as missiles and antimissiles streaked and collided across it, and reentry vehicles crashed into the lagoon. ‘Terrifying,’ she said, ‘like the night sky in Baghdad.’
Kwajalein is part of the Pacific Barrier radar system, and there is a fearful, rigid, defensive atmosphere in the place, she said, despite the ending of the Cold War. Access is limited. There is no free discussion of any sort in the (military-controlled) media. Beneath the tough exterior there is demoralization and depression, and one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The authorities are not unaware of this, she added, and bend over backward to make Kwajalein more palatable with swimming pools, golf course, tennis courts, and whatnot – but none of it helps, the place remains unbearable. Of course, civilians can leave when they want, and military postings tend to be brief. The real sufferers, the helpless ones, are the Marshallese themselves, stuck on Ebeye, just three miles from Kwajalein: nearly fifteen thousand laborers on an island a mile long and two hundred yards wide, a tenth of a square mile. They come here for the jobs, she said – there are not many to be had in the Pacific – but end up stuck in conditions of unbelievable crowding, disease, and squalor. ‘If you want to see hell,’ my seatmate concluded, ‘make a visit to Ebeye.’[7]
I had seen photographs of Ebeye – the island itself scarcely visible, with virtually every inch of it covered by tar-paper shacks – and hoped we might get a closer look as we descended; but the airline, I learned, was at some pains to keep the sight of it from passengers. Like Ebeye, the other infamous Marshallese atolls – Bikini, Eniwetak, Rongelap – many of them still uninhabitable from radioactivity, are also kept from ordinary eyes; as we got closer to them, I could not help thinking of the horror stories from the 1950s: the strange white ash that had rained down on a Japanese tuna fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, bringing acute radiation sickness to the entire crew; the ‘pink snow’ that had fallen on Rongelap after one blast – the children had never seen anything like it, and they played with it delightedly.[8] Whole populations had been evacuated from some of the nuclear test islands; and some of the atolls were still so polluted, forty years later, that they were said to glow eerily, like a luminous watch dial, at night.
Another passenger who had got on at Majuro – I got to chatting with him when we were both stretching our legs at the back of the plane – was a large, genial man, an importer of canned meats with a far-flung business in Oceania. He expatiated on ‘the terrific appetite’ the Marshallese and Micronesians have for Spam and other canned meats, and the huge amount he was able to bring into the area. This enterprise was not unprofitable, but it was, above all, to his mind, philanthropic, a bringing of sound Western nutrition to benighted natives who, left alone, would eat taro and breadfruit and bananas and fish as they had for millennia – a thoroughly un-Western diet from which, now, they were happily being weaned. Spam, in particular, as my companion observed, had come to be a central part of the new Micronesian diet. He seemed unaware of the enormous health problems which had come along with the shift to a Western diet after the war; in some Micronesian countries, I had heard, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension – previously quite rare – now affected huge percentages of the population.[9]
Later, when I went for another stretch, I got to talking to another passenger, a stern-looking woman in her late fifties. She was a missionary who had got on the plane at Majuro with a gospel choir composed of a dozen Marshallese in flowered shirts. She spoke of the importance of bringing the word of God to the islanders; to this end she travels the length and breadth of Micronesia, preaching the gospel. She was rigid in her self-righteousness and posture, her hard, aggressive beliefs – and yet there was an energy, a tenacity, a single-mindedness, a dedication which was almost heroic. The double valence of religion, its complex and often contradictory powers and effects, especially in the collision of one culture, one spirit, with another, seemed embodied in this formidable woman and her choir.
The nurse, the Spam baron, the self-righteous missionary, had so occupied me that I had scarcely noticed the passage of time, the monotonous sweep of the ocean beneath us, until suddenly I felt the plane descending toward the huge, boomerang-shaped lagoon of Kwajalein. I strained to see the shantied hell of Ebeye, but we were approaching Kwajalein from the other side, its ‘good’ side. We made the now-familiar sickening landing, crashing and bouncing along the huge military runway; I wondered what would be done with us while the bent wheel was finally mended. Kwajalein is a military encampment, a test base, with some of the tightest security on the planet. Civilian personnel, as on Johnston, are not allowed off the plane – but they could hardly keep all sixty of us on it for the three or five hours which might be needed to replace the bent wheel and do whatever other repairs might be necessary.
We were asked to line up in single file and to walk slowly, without hurrying or stopping, into a special holding shed. Military police directed us here: ‘PUT YOUR THINGS DOWN,’ we were told, ‘STAND AGAINST THE WALL.’ A slavering dog, which had lain panting on a table (it seemed to be at least a hundred degrees in the shed) was now led down by a guard, first to our luggage, which it sniffed carefully, and then to us, each of whom it sniffed in turn. Being herded in this way was deeply chilling – we had a sense of how helpless and terrified one could be in the hands of a military or totalitarian bureaucracy.
After this ‘processing,’ which took twenty minutes, we were herded into a narrow, prisonlike pen with stone floors, wooden benches, military police, and, of course, dogs. There was one small window, high up on a wall, and by stretching and craning I could get a glimpse through it – of the manicured turf, the golf course, the country club amenities, for the military stationed here. After an hour we were led out into a small compound at the back, which at least had a view of the sea, and of the gun emplacements and memorials of the Second World War. There was a signpost here, with dozens of signs pointing in all directions, giving the distances to major cities all over the world. Right at the top was a sign saying ‘Lillehammer, 9716 miles’ – I saw Knut scrutinizing this with his monocular, perhaps thinking how far he was from home. And yet the sign gave a sort of comfort, by acknowledging that there was a world, another world, out there.
The plane was repaired in less than three hours, and though the crew was very tired – with the long delays in Johnston and Majuro, it was now thirteen hours since we had left Honolulu – they opted to fly on rather than spend the night here. We got on our way, and a great sense of lightness, relief, seized us as we left Kwajalein behind. Indeed there was a festive air on the plane on this last lap, everyone suddenly becoming friendly and voluble, sharing food and stories. We were united now by a heightened consciousness of being alive, being free, after our brief but frightening confinement.