The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  Shoichi Yokoi went into hiding with two other men, Shichi Mikio and Nakawa Sato, [who both] died around 1964 from starvation. Alone for eight years, Yokoi was discovered by two hunters . . . on January 24, 1972. Yokoi survived 28 years . . . eating rats, frogs, snails, shrimp, coconuts, and tropical fruit from the area.

  Without even realizing what I was doing, I raised a hand to the paper and underlined the words “28 years.”

  Outside the museum, a narrow path threaded through the jungle, and led to a clearing with a Buddhist shrine and a tall stand of bamboo that splintered the midday sun, the patchwork light like a stained-glass window. Here, at the edge of the river, was Yokoi’s hideout, dug into the earth. Actually, this was a replica—the original was destroyed by a storm some years ago—but this fact does nothing to diminish the quiet power of the sight. A breeze twisted through the bamboo and, despite the heat, a scattering of goose bumps rose on my arm.

  Here was the square opening, a couple of feet across, and the two-and-a-half-meter shaft leading to Yokoi’s cave. Picture him living down there, in a hole one meter high by three meters long, with a set of bamboo shelves at one end and a makeshift toilet at the other. Home. Picture him shimmying up his bamboo ladder every day, in search of food, water, light, pausing at the top before reentering a world he believed wanted him dead, a world he had to enter to survive. Every day. For twenty-eight years.

  Yokoi was one of many Japanese holdouts after the war, as I later learned. For decades, even into the 1980s, people from Japan trekked around the jungles of Guam and other Pacific islands in search of remaining soldiers, leaving newspapers and flyers wrapped in plastic, in hopes that the soldiers would understand that the war was over. Some who saw these messages, or heard the news on their radios, assumed it was all a propaganda campaign; others, like Yokoi, believed it but were simply too afraid of what would happen to them if they surrendered. Yokoi was the last holdout soldier found on Guam, although others were found in the Philippines and Indonesia in 1974.

  Given that the cave’s surroundings have been transformed into one of the world’s most superlatively odd amusement parks—built to entertain the pilgrims who come to pay their respects to this story of perseverance—there was a bit of cognitive whiplash as I stood by the cave and reminded myself, This is real. The last traces of smart-aleck snickering from Love Land now crumpled into heartache.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of it, to bawl or to beam.

  On the one hand: The human capacity for fear of the Other is astonishing.

  But on the other hand: Look at what he pulled off in spite of that. Let’s hear it for the human capacity for survival under duress.

  WHILE JAPAN was claiming its Pacific Islands, gearing up for war, the United States was doing the same. The Americans built runways and outposts on Wake Island, Midway Atoll, and Palmyra Atoll, in some cases in the guise of tourism. Wake Island, for example, was a stopover point for trans-Pacific commercial flights, primarily by Pan Am, which also built a forty-eight-room hotel along with one of the world’s first hydroponic gardens, to provide the hotel with fresh produce.

  The Americans also made plans for three smaller Guano Islands, Howland, Baker, and Jarvis, all of which had long since been mined out and left to the birds. To officially reassert its claim to these islands, the United States needed to populate them, and the Navy decided, in an official memorandum, that “native Hawaiians be used for this purpose.”

  Government officials went to the Kamehameha School for Boys in Honolulu and asked, How would you like an adventure? We’ll pay you three dollars a day. The stipulations were that they “know how to fish in the native manner, swim excellently and handle a boat, that they be disciplined, friendly, and unattached, that they could stand the rigors of a South Seas existence.”

  “They just said you’re going to an island. They didn’t say why, what, or where,” recalled one of the men, Kenneth Bell, in the documentary Under a Jarvis Moon, produced by Honolulu’s Bishop Museum in 2010, under the direction of Noelle Kahanu, granddaughter of one of the Jarvis Island colonizers, George Kahanu, Sr. The islands were a five-day trip from Honolulu, aboard the Coast Guard cutter Itasca. The men went in groups of five, rotating every couple of months. The youngest colonists were seventeen years old. Between 1935 and 1942, the United States sent more than one hundred thirty young men, most of them students or recent alums of the Kamehameha School and native Hawaiians, to be Hui Panalä’au—the colonists.

  Paul Phillips, who was on Jarvis from July 1941 through February 1942, recounted arriving: “The islands did not look like posters of tropical islands, with lush vegetation and waterfalls. They were flat, barren. . . . There’s scrub brush and birds, that’s all.”

  At first, a couple of military personnel stayed on the islands, too, but they quickly burned out, unaccustomed to the hard work of island life. The Hawaiians did much better; some, like George Kahanu, signed on for a second round, for which there were no military representatives—it was just these young men, the birds, and the sea. When the settlements had been in place for a full year, the United States formally decreed to the world that it had sovereignty over these islands.

  The men stayed in platform tents and later built shacks. They radioed weather reports to other Pacific outposts, collected plant life for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, tended small stands of agricultural crops, studied birds, and fished—lots of fishing. They kept detailed logs, per their government mandate. Said one colonist: “I did the same thing yesterday and today. And tomorrow I’ll do the same thing.” But from photos, the general impression you get is of young men enthralled with island life, strapping and carefree, goofing around, cutting each other’s hair, posing with massive fish and docile lobsters simply grabbed from the barrier reef, hanging out in shacks with pinup girls on the wall. With fresh water rationed for brushing teeth and drinking, showers and clothes-washing had to wait till rainfall, “so it was reasonable that we became a nudist colony,” George Kahanu recalled.

  In 1937, the men on Howland got a new assignment: Amelia Earhart was coming. The aviator planned to stop at their island during her circumnavigation of the world, which the United States used as an excuse for building a runway; the Navy denied any connection to war planning, though this was the long-term objective. On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, departed the Pacific atoll of Lae, bound for Howland. The men were eager to welcome their guests. They’d built an oil-drum shower for them to use and cleaned up a bedroom for Earhart, hanging “the first curtains on Howland,” sent by one of the colonizers’ mothers.

  They waited.

  They waited.

  They waited.

  Earhart and Noonan never arrived. Somewhere, somehow, on their way to Howland, they disappeared, their fate a mystery that is famously unsolved even today. The men on Howland were distraught.

  Still, the Hui Panalä’au program on Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands was going well enough that in 1938, colonists were sent to two more islands, Canton and Enderbury. By 1940, Japanese ships began passing through the nearby waters, and the islanders filed reports. The Pacific was a sea of tension, war creeping ever closer.

  On December 8, 1941, one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, two waves of Japanese planes bombed Howland Island. “There was a formation of twelve planes,” said one colonist, Elvin Matson. “They had big bombs that left craters about ten feet deep.” Two of Matson’s fellow colonists were killed. In the ensuing weeks, Howland, Jarvis, and Baker were all attacked repeatedly, while their food supplies dwindled quickly, the Itasca unable to reach them. It wasn’t until February 9, 1942, that the colonists were evacuated. They arrived back in Honolulu to no fanfare: Don’t say anything, they were told.

  In July 1943, the U.S. officially set up a military base on Baker Island. The war was in full swing, and these tiny islands in the Pacific were some of the planet’s most valuable real estate.

  I WANTED to know more about the war history, so I emailed th
e Veterans of Guam Motorcycle Club. Actually, I’ll be honest: I was hoping for a ride on a Harley. I’d passed on the Rambo Package at the gun range, but this seemed to offer more accessible, nonviolent swagger. If it came with a bonus history lesson, all the better.

  So you can imagine my reaction when Tony Duenas, the club’s president, and Carl Blas, the vice president, roared up to my hotel in . . . Carl’s shiny white Ford F-150. The only black leather was Tony’s fanny pack. At least they were wearing Harley-Davidson T-shirts.‡ I did my best to hide my disappointment, and my mood brightened after a round of handshakes. They were Chamorro, supremely friendly, with a low-key rapport; both were former cops. Carl, who now worked in IT for the Guam Department of Education, was nonchalant in denim shorts and a casual-yet-professional crest of graying hair. Tony, retired, had more of a free-spirit vibe—hair pulled back into a ponytail, scraggly goatee, tattoo on the back of his hand, a police-badge belt buckle—and was also Mr. Hospitality, silently opening the truck door for me, as I got into the backseat. Carl switched on the radio, settling on “Tiny Dancer,” and off we went.

  There was a big blue charter bus outside our first stop, the Pacific War Museum, when we arrived. A docent greeted Carl with a familiar wave before returning to her spiel, in Japanese, to her tour group. Glass cases displayed decades-old Coke and sake bottles; rusted machine guns and bazookas and centuries-old samurai swords; forks and knives and bento boxes; landscape drawings sketched by Japanese prisoners of war on threadbare pieces of fabric.

  As I looked at the exhibits, Carl excused himself—he wanted to find his grandfather’s name on a list of prisoners of war. A minute later, as I studied a wall of historic photos, Tony appeared by my side and pointed to a grainy image of a young priest with glasses and a half smile, staring right at the camera. “That’s my uncle,” he said softly. The placard said his name was Father Jesus Baza Duenas.

  On Guam, the legacy of war is personal, recent, and omnipresent.

  The United States has a general dearth of fresh battlefields, for which I’m truly grateful, but this can make it difficult for us to understand the full impact of war. You can tour Gettysburg or Fort McHenry; you can trace your fingers over a small-town plaque honoring the soldiers who didn’t come home. But the horrors they commemorate are so distant in time or geography that they can feel like abstractions, with only metaphorical impact on here and now. We remember, then we move on with the day’s agenda.

  All of Guam was a battleground. War’s sear is inescapable, its wounds not fully healed.

  There are official markers across the island, even in the parking lot outside the strip-mall coffee shop where we’d had breakfast. “There used to be a couple of tanks next to it,” Carl said, “but someone stole them and sold them for scrap metal.” And there are unofficial reminders in the hidden stories all around you. At the War in the Pacific National Historical Park, a ranger warned me not to venture off-path, because there’s still unexploded ordnance lying around; he handed me a brochure featuring a cartoon icon of an angry-faced bomb, with the caption “DO NOT TOUCH, KICK OR MOVE.” Over the years, Carl and Tony have found swords and machine guns and other war relics in the jungle. As we drove, they swapped stories, until Carl said, “One time, I found a skeleton with a bullet hole through the skull.” Thus ended the one-upmanship.

  The Japanese gave Guam a new name, Omiya Jima, and instituted martial law. They cut off access to outside news, including details of the war, banned U.S. dollars and the use of English. They forced the Chamorros to sing patriotic songs praising Japan, and to dig tunnels and build fortifications. The new troops overwhelmed the island: six thousand soldiers needed to be housed (so they simply claimed every building in Hagåtña) and supplied (leading to shortages for the local residents of food and other basic needs, including shoes, meaning they had to go barefoot and rates of hookworm infection spiked).

  The war in the Pacific shifted in momentum, beginning with the Americans’ victory at Midway in June 1942 and then at Guadalcanal in February 1943, and continued as they seized more islands, with the critical addition of Saipan—Japan’s colony about 140 miles north of Guam—on July 9, 1944. Knowing an American invasion of Guam was imminent, the Japanese forced some 80 percent of Chamorros into concentration camps in the jungle, with no buildings, not even an outhouse. Others were simply massacred; in the villages of Faha and Tinta, forty-six Chamorros were killed with hand grenades.

  The Japanese feared that the Chamorros would help the Americans, and with good reason. They’d been resisting their occupiers all along, including passing along war news in soap-paper wrappers. A popular Chamorro ditty, banned by the Japanese, was called “Uncle Sam, Won’t You Please Come Back to Guam?”

  Father Duenas, Tony’s uncle, was the acting head of the Catholic Church on Guam and a prominent leader of the Chamorro resistance, proclaiming, “I answer only to God, and the Japanese are not God.” He was one of several people who helped six U.S. servicemen in hiding, most famously Radioman First Class George Tweed, who survived thirty-two months in the jungle.§ For this, Father Duenas was tortured and then beheaded, along with two other men, on July 12, 1944.

  Eight days later, the liberation of Guam began when Chamorros from the village of Merizo being held at a camp used a Springfield rifle they’d secreted away to kill six Japanese guards. One day later, July 21, 1944, Uncle Sam came back to Guam, in the form of fifty-five thousand troops. The Japanese had predicted that the Americans would arrive at Asan Beach and were well prepared when this turned out to be correct, setting up positions in fortifications and caves that they, and the Chamorros they forced to help them, had dug into the hills above the waterfront.

  There’s a monument on the top of those hills now. Carl, Tony, and I drove up there and silently surveyed the landscape. Even without mortars and machine-gun rounds raining down, this is tough terrain, hills on fractalling hills, a scrubland snapshot of a hurricane-churned sea. Plus, it was crazy-hot. I was wearing a quick-dry T-shirt and shorts, and I could barely move. I tried to put myself in the military-issue boots of the soldiers hunkered down in caves or arriving in amphibious vehicles, but of course I couldn’t begin to imagine it—the uniform, the gear, the weapons, the weight of the world on your back as you scramble as best you can over this impossible terrain, surrounded by an apocalypse of explosions and carnage and expected to do your part to add to it, because the very fate of your nation depends on it.

  Japanese Second Lieutenant Yasuhiro Yamashita was on a hill near where we were now, and later described the scene: “All over, bodies were being blown up as the cannon shells fell. The earth and sand buried the soldiers.”

  WAR WASN’T the only part of the day’s agenda. We stopped for a leisurely lunch at Jeff’s Pirates Cove, with a pirate-themed gift shop up front and postcard-worthy ocean views out back and a little history museum and what Carl claimed were the best burgers on the island. They came with a skull and crossbones branded on the bun. Carl’s radio switched to “Piano Man” and then a somber announcement that a typhoon was heading for Guam in a few days, followed by a cheery ad for Chamorro immersion summer camps—from food to dance to language to the ubiquitous latte stone iconography, Chamorro culture was having a minor renaissance. We followed a convoy of tour buses to Two Lovers Point, an overlook with 340-foot cliffs, where Chamorro legend has it that a young couple with a forbidden romance once jumped to their deaths and where, Carl said casually, he used to practice rappelling when he was on the SWAT team. A beaming Japanese couple were taking wedding photos while dozens of their compatriots snapped photos of the view and bought souvenirs from the gift shop near the cliff’s edge.

  But the war always crept into the narrative. The museum at Jeff’s Pirates Cove was largely dedicated to Yokoi. At Latte Stone Park, near a group of the eponymous columns, there was a low cliff with a cave carved into its base—yet another bunker dug by Chamorros ordered to work under threat of death. More than once, our tour took us along one of the island�
��s main drags, Marine Corps Drive.

  And, everywhere, planning was in full swing for the celebration of Liberation Day—the sixtieth anniversary was just days away. There would be a Liberation Parade featuring seven liberators—soldiers who’d been here in 1944—and a Liberation Queen. Out past the airport, the Liberation Carnival was already under way, with a Ferris wheel and a whirling “Super Twister” ride and aisles of games (the ring-toss, the pop-a-balloon-with-a-dart) and classic county-fair foods like corn-on-the-cob and barbecue and fish balls. Signs reading HAPPY LIBERATION! and GENERATIONS OF SERVICE AND SACRIFICE served as a constant reminder of the carnival’s origins, and the site’s temporary streets had occasion-worthy names: Courage Circle and Liberation Walkway intersected near the kiddie train. For their part, the Veterans of Guam Motorcycle Club always marked Liberation Day by helping to plant thousands of flags in the ground at Asan, honoring the American troops and Chamorros killed during the war.

  As we drove, other wars, too, kept popping into the conversation, wars that didn’t take place here but have left a lasting impact nonetheless. In the hills on the south side of the island, we stopped at a memorial plaque honoring the more than seventy men from Guam who died serving in the Vietnam War, including a buddy of Carl’s named David Flores.

  “I saw him at training in February” of 1972, Carl said as he ran his fingers over his friend’s name. “He said, ‘I’ll see you over in Vietnam!’ He flew over there in May and was killed on his very first mission.”

  Growing up, Carl watched lots of Audie Murphy and John Wayne movies and wanted to be a Marine. He enlisted and became a top sniper. All the other units would send their best men to compete against him, he said, and he always won. “I had to learn how to shoot when I was little,” he explained. “My dad said, ‘Go get a bird!’ If I didn’t get the bird, I didn’t eat.” Carl’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was a kid, leaving his father to raise Carl and his four siblings. Before she died, Carl’s mother made his father promise that their children would learn to speak English, not Chamorro.