The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  Carl doled out the stories here and there, as I pieced them together to form a cohesive narrative—he may have seemed like a jovial sitcom dad but he was as close to an action hero as I’d ever met. He was also an expert welder, he mentioned in passing, so he made the SWAT team’s big battering ram himself, with a smiley face on the end. Carl was proud of his family’s history of U.S. military service: his grandfather served in World War I, his father in World War II, and now his son, Carl, Jr., lived in New Jersey and served in the Coast Guard.

  All territories, not just Guam, have duel legacies as scenes of conflict and home to particularly high numbers of American troops. Charlotte Amalie on Saint Thomas and San Juan, Puerto Rico, were key refueling ports and bases for patrols combating German U-boats operating in the Caribbean. In American Samoa, U.S. Marines trained locals and set up huge guns (which are still in place) to protect Pago Pago Harbor, anticipating that the fighting might come to the island. There were no battles, but one Japanese mortar round landed on the island, hitting a store run by Japanese immigrants. And in terms of service, American Samoans may have the highest rates of enlistment and casualties, but the people of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands also serve and die at rates higher than residents of any state. In Guam and American Samoa, the rate is three times higher than the states; in the most recent wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pacific islanders’ casualty rate was six times that of service members from the states. In each territory, when you ask if someone knows anyone currently serving, you don’t just hear about a cousin here and there, but long lists of siblings, aunts, uncles, best friends. There are more than twenty thousand members of the United States Armed Forces from the territories, and for many it’s not just about opportunity but something deeper—there’s a true pride in being part of their island’s legacy in the armed forces. (Meanwhile, one in eight Guamanians is a veteran but, as a recent PBS report noted, the island “ranks dead last in per-capita spending on medical by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.”)

  Past efforts by Guamanians to lobby for true congressional representation have sometimes been rebuffed by Congress with an inversion of a familiar saying: “No representation without taxation.” That is: You don’t pay federal income tax, so you don’t get a congressperson. But even beyond the fact that territory residents do pay various other federal taxes (Social Security, Medicare, import and export taxes, commodity taxes), “we also pay a blood tax,” Carl said.

  Carl’s own service seemed to have made him all the more attuned to the pain of war for soldiers on all sides.

  “If you think about it, Doug, the Japanese soldiers had mothers and fathers, too,” he said when we visited the site of the Japanese last stand on Guam, which is now the South Pacific Memorial Park. It’s a grassy expanse tucked between swaths of jungle and two white modernist structures: a chapel with a curved, pagoda-like roof, and a fifty-foot tower designed to look like two hands pressed together in prayer.

  “Most locals don’t even know about this place,” Carl said. “I haven’t been back here since I was a kid.”

  The Americans had reclaimed most of the island by the beginning of August 1944 and the Japanese set up one final defensive line here, in an area called Yigo, and forced Chamorros to dig a bunker. On August 11, the Americans used four-hundred-pound blocks of TNT to implode it, killing the sixty Japanese soldiers inside. Four days later Guam was officially back under American control. More than seventeen hundred American troops died during the twenty-six-day Battle of Guam, along with more than fifteen thousand Japanese. If you count Guam as still being part of the USA at this point (despite the Japanese occupation), it was the deadliest battle ever on American soil, with more fatalities than the Pearl Harbor attacks or the Civil War’s infamously bloody battles at Antietam and Gettysburg. Nearly twelve hundred Chamorros died during the years of Japanese occupation and the Battle of Guam. (If you think about the standard narrative of the war in the Pacific, it’s always USA versus Japan, with little acknowledgment that many of these islands were already populated by people caught in the middle.)

  The South Pacific Memorial Park was established in 1970, a joint Japanese-Chamorro project. There’s no ill will here, just a mutual sorrow. Carl pointed to the sharply curved base of the tower. “We used to bike up that slope. We didn’t know what it was. We were just kids.”

  The air was still and there was no one else around and I was at a total loss for words.

  “Just like these soldiers,” Carl continued. “Kids. Their families never saw them again. They just know they’re somewhere on Guam.”

  “A lot of them don’t even know that,” Tony said. “They just know their sons were fighting and didn’t come back.”

  The ache in his voice was palpable. These two ex-cops, bona fide badasses, bike-club leaders, were on the verge of tears. From the jungle, I could hear what sounded like a dog barking. “That’s a frog,” Carl said.

  One grave marker had a can of Budweiser and a can of Coke placed on its base, with a votive candle between them. The brass plaque on top had several divots.

  “Someone must’ve done that with a pickax,” Carl said.

  There was a small fire in Tony’s eyes. He shook his head. “Crazy people. Got no respect.”

  Carl slowly turned around, scanning the monument, the graves, the hillside that once held the Japanese bunker. “It’s real sad,” he said. “But it’s good they keep the park up so nice so we can remember.”

  THERE WAS a question that was starting to bother me: How, when, and why did the issue of the territories fall out of the conversation back in the states?

  Back around 1900, of course, the issue of overseas expansion, and the very existence of long-term territories, had been an issue of considerable national debate, at times the central issue of debate. Since then, from Guam’s battlefields and beyond, the territories—even the tiny islands—had played an unmistakably important role in American history and in making the USA what it is today, a global power. An empire. And this empire had been assembled with purpose; contrary to what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce wrote in his seminal 1941 article “The American Century,” it was not something that happened “blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves.” There was plenty of bumbling, to be sure, but also lots of planning and goal-setting, for the very reason that the territories were firmly on the national agenda.

  Today, people in the territories still ponder their relationship to the United States, constantly. For them, the question of what it means to be American is not an academic abstraction but a matter of everyday import.

  But for those of us back in the states, at some point, the territories seemingly just disappeared. In the introduction to his 2013 book The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects, author Richard Kurin—the Smithsonian Institution’s undersecretary for history, art, and culture—uses the steering wheel of the USS Maine to illustrate that sometimes an artifact’s “meaning as a museum object changes.” Kurin writes that initially the steering wheel “was put in a place of honor in the museum as a sacred, patriotic object. Over the years, the fervor that fueled its treatment subsided, and now it is relegated to distant storage.” Unintentionally illustrating this point, in Kurin’s own book the several pages of maps in the endpapers omit the territories.

  So how did the territories go from a subject that was “impossible to avoid,” as the Atlantic put it in 1898, to an utter afterthought? I was starting to develop an answer, or at least the beginnings of an answer. There were a few different factors on my list so far.

  First, each territory, and even the Minor Outlying Islands, held some particular strategic importance for the U.S. military and commercial interests: coaling stations, plantations, other resources, control of the sea. But in large part, expansion was an end unto itself, a way of flexing the national muscles. When William McKinley won the 1900 election, granting a tacit approval for the nation to take the path of empire, he wa
s given no particular mandate on what to do with that empire. The point was simply to create it, to check that box and say, Yes, we are an empire, a global power, without much concern of the follow-up question of, “Now what?”

  But soon the United States did, in fact, have to consider what to make of its latest possessions, and here we come to the second factor: the Insular Cases. The Supreme Court took the American public’s broadly held view of the territories’ residents as “alien races” and put it into law. In doing so, the court applied this label not just to particular to ethnic groups (which would be bad enough) but to entire landmasses—everyone who lived in these places would be treated differently—which underscored the idea that the territories were, in fact, foreign rather than American. This designation largely continues today. To give just one example, This American Life, the popular public radio show, has very rarely seen fit to document these American lives; it has aired more than five hundred episodes spanning the globe while only touching down in a territory once, as part of a story about drug addicts from Puerto Rico living on the streets of Chicago.¶ Public radio’s internationally focused show The World, however, has featured the territories many times.#

  That categorization—“they are not us”—leads straight to factor three: competition for attention. The Spanish-American War had helped put the United States on the global stage, and soon there were much bigger battles, literally, than what was going on in these small islands. The United States became more deeply involved than ever before in goings-on across the globe, at the same time that the ever-growing mass media was covering ever more stories in ever more distant places. The territories were overshadowed by the competition. These “foreign” islands were no longer the most interesting foreign lands.

  EVEN AS GUAM is often forgotten back in the states, its strategic importance for the United States hasn’t waned.

  More than three-quarters of the island’s houses were destroyed in the war. Afterward, when rebuilding began in earnest, the U.S. military started claiming land (farms, homes, you name it) for building its own bases or just to hold in reserve for future potential use. This being a U.S. territory, regular federal laws didn’t apply, a fact that confounded U.S. congresspeople in a 1946 hearing—“a very unusual thing,” commented one.

  In 1950—the same moment when Guam’s lot seemed to be improving with its Organic Act and full citizenship—the Navy decreed that the whole island was effectively a base, and no one was allowed on or off without a security clearance. The war was over, yes, but the Cold War was in full swing—one of those new international distractions that overshadowed the territories, while also keeping the U.S. military on guard, eager to maintain its strategic outposts.

  The travel ban was lifted in 1962, which was when tourism started to rise, but today the military still holds one-third of the land on Guam. Some of it is the Andersen Air Force Base and some is the Naval Base Guam at Apra Harbor, which includes the Polaris Point submarine base (along with the westernmost point in the United States, which is called Point Udall, just like the easternmost point on Saint Croix, although the two namesakes are not the same person but brothers Stewart and Mo, both former Arizona congressmen).** But much of this land is neither actively used by the military nor owned by it—the military simply controls the land, and no one else can do anything with it, because the military might, at some future point, want it.

  The connection to the land on Guam might not be quite as profound as in American Samoa, but it’s still plenty strong. “When you meet people, they’ll always ask, ‘What village are you from? What’s your last name?’ And they’ll try to create a connection,” a woman named Regine Biscoe Lee told me when I met her and her friend Josh Tyquiengco at a Tumon coffee shop.

  Josh’s family had lived on the southern part of the island “for generations, and they’ve never moved. The idea is that this land belongs to me, but also I belong to the land. And eventually, when I die, I’m going to become part of this land.”

  When it comes to challenging military control of the land, Regine said, some people, especially older people, say, “‘Oh, we don’t really impose . . . we don’t want to ask them for too much.’ And you’re like, ‘No, we need to ask them, we need to tell them that these are rights that all Americans enjoy, and if we don’t ask for it, then we’re never going to get it!’ But that’s totally contrary to traditional Chamorro culture. But that’s just embarrassing. It’s called mamolo—like, you’re embarrassed to ask for too much.”

  Land use is only going to get more contentious on Guam in the coming years, as the military prepares to move some five thousand Marines—along with an estimated thirteen hundred dependents—from Okinawa to Guam. Most local elected officials support it as a boost to a struggling economy reliant on the military and tourism. But it’s a tenacious debate. Will the local infrastructure—the one hospital, the roads, the schools—be overwhelmed? If you add more infrastructure, how will that impact the environment? The island is not large; its land area is smaller than the city of Chicago.

  “If you’re an individual in the military, we’ll welcome you with open arms, on a person-to-person basis,” Regine said, adding that her husband was a Marine. “But the idea of hundreds and thousands of them, we’re like, ‘Sorry, we can’t.’ ”

  When the discussion started, in 2005, the plan was for eight thousand Marines and a new bombing range at the ancient village of Pagat, an important historic site. In 2009, a group of young Guamanians formed an opposition movement, called We Are Guåhan (using the Chamorro word for the island). I met one of We Are Guåhan’s cofounders, a young lawyer named Ana Won Pat-Borja, for coffee near the end of my time on Guam, during an on-and-off pre-typhoon rain. She had long black hair and an air of apprehension about meeting with me, but Mars was a mutual friend and, it seemed, had talked her into it. We Are Guåhan, she said, had initial success with a lawsuit that pressured the military to do further studies on the impact of its firing range. Ultimately the military moved the location from Pagat to Ritidian—a wildlife refuge, another vulnerable place.

  “It’s really just this procedural dance,” Ana said with a sigh. Time and again, “we’re dancing around the same issue of whether or not we have a voice in [what happens with the land] and knowing full well that all we can do is respond and not expect particular action to be taken.”

  Environmental studies conducted by or on behalf of the military are so numerous that they have their own section at the public library. Studies don’t mean change.

  Ana felt the same way about the political status debate, which had heated up with the talk of military buildup but where change was also elusive. Completely severing ties with the United States was unlikely and had essentially no support, Ana said, but she favored becoming a separate, autonomous nation with strong ties to the United States, a so-called “freely associated state,” which had some precedent in other Pacific islands. But overall, she said, altering the political status wasn’t a big priority for most Guamanians. There was a political-status referendum in 1976, with “status quo with improvements” getting 51 percent of the vote, while statehood got 21 percent and independence got 5 percent.

  “When the economy is hurting and people have other things to deal with, they don’t want to talk about self-determination. They want to talk about how gas is almost five dollars a gallon right now,” Ana said. We Are Guåhan had fractured, too, and she was no longer involved. “The thing is, it’s rough running a movement,” she said with a resigned laugh.

  But the military buildup and land use were such widespread concerns that even Carl and Tony—hardly activists—had their reservations.

  “Everything you see over here to the left is Tony’s family’s land,” Carl said as we drove toward Anderson Air Force base at the northern end of the island. That is, they owned it but couldn’t use it. President Obama told the military that they had to start returning any land they weren’t actively using, but the order has been disregarded, Carl added.

/>   “We’re still loyal and grateful [to the United States],” Carl said, “because otherwise we’d be speaking Japanese or Spanish. But look over here.” He pointed to the right. “All this used to be houses but the military kicked them off.” A short distance later, he pointed out a McDonald’s the Air Force was building on the edge of its base. “Why don’t you give us our land and we’ll build the McDonald’s?”

  Tony nodded toward to the edge of the base and said dryly, “But they do have a nice fence, though.”

  “This is why Guam is so important,” Carl said. “You got the B-52s here. You can hit Japan, China, Afghanistan.”

  This was part of the reason for the buildup: the Department of Defense had recently announced an “Asia-Pacific Shift.” Given the USA’s long dealings with Europe and the political and cultural weight of the East Coast, it’s easy to forget that, thanks in large part to the territories and Hawaii, the United States is a Pacific nation even more than an Atlantic one. But now the country’s gaze is beginning to tack more firmly, more overtly, westward. There’s one key reason for this: China. As an American official testified before the House Armed Services Committee in 2015, that nation’s rising economy and military have “created a much more complex security environment in which we are now operating.” At the same time, China’s booming economy had expanded its middle and upper classes, and with these increased paychecks came, in part, a desire to travel—with Guam, USA, as an increasingly popular destination. Russian tourists, another up-and-coming market, had recently gotten visa waivers, and officials on Guam were talking about extending the same courtesy to Chinese tourists, too, in hopes of attracting even more. Guam was, in other words, simultaneously the USA’s welcome mat and its heavily armed guardhouse, a tricky, burdensome dual identity.