The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  Before the war, Saipan, Tinian, and Rota were plantations for tapioca and sugar, with booming cities and military bases. In 1941, Saipan was home to more than forty-two thousand Japanese civilians and thirty thousand Japanese troops, along with four thousand Chamorros and Carolinians. As fighting advanced across the Pacific, the Americans employed an “island-hopping” strategy that came to the Marianas in full force in June 1944, beginning with the two-day Battle of the Philippine Sea, an aircraft carrier battle in which American pilots inflicted so much damage—sinking three carriers and destroying more than five hundred planes—that they nicknamed it “the Marianas Turkey Shoot.”

  On June 15, the Americans invaded Saipan. Eight thousand Marines landed in the first twenty minutes, another twelve thousand arrived by the end of the day. “Just as D-Day in Normandy broke Hitler’s grip on Europe,” Japanese Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Miwa of the Imperial Navy’s Sixth Fleet later recounted, “the battle for Saipan would unlock the door to Japan’s defenses.”

  Saipan is the bloodiest twentieth century battleground anywhere in the United States—more people died there than on Guam, and war’s sear is even stronger on Saipan than on Guam. Just offshore from a tranquil oceanfront park was a Sherman tank sitting, rusting in the water. One man told me that he swam out to it most weekdays during his lunch break. Outside the airport fence were more tanks, covered in pine needles and green shoots, and a cave-like bomb magazine, its inside cavernous and echoing. Near the north end of the island, the Japanese Last Command Post was hollowed out inside a cliff; I climbed around with a family of Russian tourists before we went back outside to buy water from a cart run by a young Japanese man.

  “I was four years [old] when the war came,” a Carolinian man named Lino Olopai told me. “We were up in the mountain, in the caves, running around trying to avoid all those things. I was on the back of my mom, crying, hungry, and thirsty. And it’s a bad experience.”

  For many of Saipan’s Japanese residents, it was even worse. Just past the Last Command Post, at the northern tip of the island, cliffs loomed a hundred feet above the ocean. The Japanese military warned their civilian compatriots that the advancing Americans had come to torture and kill them. There is no escape. There is only one way out with honor. Take your own life. Take your family, too.

  And so they did.

  Here at this prominence, now called Banzai Cliff, and a few miles away at Mount Tapochau, where the north face is an eight-hundred-foot sheer drop known as Suicide Cliff, two thousand to four thousand—perhaps more—Japanese civilians and troops leapt to their death.† Men. Women. Families. At the American Memorial Park in Garapan, a video about the war included a clip from Banzai Cliff. It was only a second or two, grainy, distant, black-and-white, but it’s etched in my memory. A woman in a long black skirt, with a baby in her arms, stood at the edge, then jumped.

  A U.S. military report described the scene in the roiling sea: “A commander of a patrol craft said that progress of his boat . . . was slow and tedious because of the hundreds of corpses floating in the water.”

  Today, dozens of stone tombstones and obelisks and statues stand along the edge of the cliff. Remembering, bearing witness, forming a dotted delineation between this world and the next. Stand there, looking out at the blank horizon a stiflingly hot day, and you’d swear you’re at the edge of the world, the precipice of life. The air was calm. The waves below me were towering yet slow-moving, hypnotic, sirenic.

  SAIPAN WAS an important acquisition, but the Americans had a particular interest in its smaller neighbor, Tinian, three miles away. The Fourth Marine Division invaded the island on July 25, 1944, and captured it a day later. Within a year, the USA had built six runways, four of them on the North Field, which quickly became the busiest airfield in the world.

  To get to Tinian from Saipan today requires a flight of less than ten minutes, but multiple locals warned me away, including a burly Navy vet who said he’d never made the trip because he didn’t trust the planes. But on a clear morning, I decided to chance it—most flights didn’t crash. Just in case, I left a gooshy note for Maren in my hotel room. At the airport, I was not reassured. The thirty-dollar fare was cash-only. There was no security check, not even real tickets: the agent simply handed me a dark green strip of plastic. One of the three other passengers—I swear this is true—was wearing Mickey Mouse swimming trunks and a life preserver. Our shoe box of a plane clattered up and then plunged down, yo-yo-like, and soon we were on Tinian, alive and dry. In a gate area smaller than a two-car garage, Fox News blared on a wall-mounted television, above shelves holding perhaps a dozen baseball trophies.

  I rented a beat-up Yaris with a Natural Fresh Coconut air-freshener swinging from the mirror, and drove into the main town, San José, population two thousand or so, of whom there were just a handful out and about. It was a quiet place in the midday heat, and I was in my own pleasant daze, looking around—the ruins of a Spanish-era church steeple in the middle of one block, a couple of old boats beached by the waterfront—when I spotted something that jolted me upright, something that underscored just how far I was from home, because if it were somewhere even slightly more accessible, there would be tour buses lined up for miles: the House of Taga, latte stones on steroids.

  Guam’s lattes max out at seven or eight feet, but here were a dozen lattes at least sixteen feet tall and, according to an explanatory sign, twelve to fifteen tons each; their tasa capstones were the size of hot tubs. Only one was upright and intact—the rest were scattered like toppled rooks from a Brobdingnagian chess game—but the impact was no less stunning, like stumbling upon Stonehenge, minus the crowds and visitors’ center.

  What? I sputtered to no one. How . . .

  Even more gobsmacking than the stones themselves was the fact that they were erected as the foundation for a structure perched on top and built, according to the legend told on the sign, by a chief with “superhuman strength.” I looked around, instinctively wanting to share this with someone, but there was no one to be seen at this little-known national treasure.

  So I drove on, passing streets named during the war: Broadway, Riverside Drive, Canal Street, Wall Street, Lenox Avenue, an alternate-universe Manhattan. After about fifteen minutes, the jungle started to close in. Starting in 1926, the Japanese sugar company Nan’y Khatsu Kaisha (NKK) converted 80 percent of Tinian into a sugar plantation, and here and there paths, roads, and even abandoned rail lines, all covered in tall grass, led into the trees, where crumbling villages and shrines still stood, even more ubiquitous than on Saipan, and more haunting for the simple fact that there was no one else around, not a living soul.

  Along the main road were administrative buildings built by the Japanese, with thick concrete walls. The Radio Communication Building was the largest, two stories and quite wide—hundreds of people must have worked there. Now: empty. The hulking shell looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game. Farther north were air-raid shelters, with buttressed walls. The afternoon sun was casting shadows everywhere, adding a bit of atmospheric creepiness. I kept driving, following wooden signs to Runway Able, and suddenly realizing with that I was on the runway, its entire length empty but for me and my Yaris. The accelerator suddenly begged to be pushed to the floor—the car-rental agent had assured me that “all tourists bang this thing up”—and I obliged, watching with nervous glee as the speedometer ticked upward.

  My heart was racing when I finally slowed and turned off Runway Able. I pulled into a broad, paved square flanked by flame trees, where there were two pits topped with glass pyramids. There was another car at one pit, a dinged-up white sedan with two middle-aged men from the states, one in green surf shorts, one in yellow, both wearing white sunglasses. They were as surprised to see me as I was to see them.

  The North Field was built to accommodate the new B-29 Superfortress long-range bombers, two of which were taken to these isolated pits to prepare for especially top-secret missions. On August 6, 1945, a 9,700-pou
nd, ten-foot-long bomb known as Little Boy was loaded from one pit into a B-29 called the Enola Gay, and then dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, in the other pit, the even larger bomb Fat Man was loaded into a plane called Bockscar, then dropped on Nagasaki. They were the first atomic bombs used in warfare. On August 10, the emperor of Japan surrendered.

  In the immediate aftermath, for most Americans, the narrative was straightforward as this: bombs drop, mushroom clouds rise, war over, we win. It was not until August 1946 that many Americans understood the rest of the story, not just the sheer numbers—150,000 killed in Hiroshima, 80,000 in Nagasaki—but the unimaginable on-the-ground details, which first reached a wide audience with a John Hersey piece to which The New Yorker devoted an entire issue, with page after vivid page of reporting on the human impact:

  There were many dead in the gardens. At a beautiful moon bridge, [Father Kleinsorge] passed a naked, living woman who seemed to have been burned from head to toe and was red all over. . . . [As] he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, “Have you anything to drink?” . . . When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw that there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.

  This was the toll of Little Boy and Fat Man, we now understand. A faded memory flashed in my mind: A peace rally my parents took me to when I was a child, at which one of the speakers was a Japanese man who had survived one of the bombings; patches of his face and hands, too, were maimed, the skin shiny and warped. His tone conciliatory, as Carl and Tony’s had been when they took me to the park on Guam.

  “Such a serene environment,” Green Shorts said softly as we looked at the pit and the flame trees surrounding the paved square. “You’d never expect a place like this would be the start of something that would wreak such havoc.”

  I nodded.

  He continued, “All because of some Pearl Harbor bullshit. You did wake a sleeping giant.”

  He snapped a photo with his phone, grinning, then walked over to his car. Just before he slammed the door shut, he yelled enthusiastically, “MAN, THAT’S COOL SHIT!”

  AFTER THE war ended, the USA controlled the Northern Marianas. They weren’t yet part of the United States—and wouldn’t be for another three decades—meaning the Americans were, officially, an occupying force. For two years, while they cleared unexploded ordnance and started setting up their own facilities on Saipan, they forced all the island’s civilians—Chamorros, Carolinians, Japanese, Koreans—to live in camps, removed from their villages.

  On July 4, 1946, the people of Saipan were finally allowed to go home. Liberation Day is still celebrated every year, Angelo told me, but “the meaning has been muddled, because we are now American, we watch baseball.” Even among locals, the camps don’t fit the preferred narrative of what the USA stands for, particularly since Liberation Day also happens to be the Fourth of July. “So in essence,” Angelo said, “in the CNMI, we celebrate our liberation from and our relationship to the United States on the same day.”

  The newly formed United Nations took control of eleven former Axis possessions; they were called the Trust Territory and were administered by specific nations. New Zealand oversaw Western Samoa (now Samoa), Britain ran the show in Togoland (now Ghana), and the United States took responsibility for a scattering of Micronesian islands formerly controlled by Japan, among them the Northern Marianas, the Marshall Islands, Chuuk, Palau, Pohnpei, Kosrae, and Yap. The Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands’ capital was Saipan.

  It was a happy place, said Lino Olopai, the man who had been a four-year-old when the Americans arrived in 1944. After the war, “us kids, we don’t worry. We were having fun watching the GI driving the big trucks and they’d throw candy and bubblegums to us, which was a new thing to us.” Americanization had begun in earnest. School lessons were taught only in English, and from 1950 to 1962—the same time that civilians couldn’t travel to or from Guam—the United States blocked off areas of Saipan as secret CIA training grounds for insurgents fighting communism in China and Southeast Asia.

  Walt Goodridge introduced me to Lino. We arrived unannounced one morning at Lino’s small house just off the beach and next to a high-rise hotel, and he appeared at the door shirtless and understandably surprised to see us. After a brief explanation from the ever-cheerful Walt, Lino gestured to a picnic table shaded by pine trees, and popped into the house to get a coffeepot and mugs.

  When he was seventeen, Lino lied about his age to get a job as a security guard for the CIA site. A few years later, he got a job as a language teacher on the island, working for the Peace Corps, which was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as part of the USA’s postwar image-softening efforts to show that it was powerful and benevolent. (Think also of the Marshall Plan and the founding of the United Nations.)

  “I think that’s when we started looking into bringing back our way of life,” Lino said, pouring himself a mug of coffee. “They say, ‘Yeah, your [traditional] ways are also very important, too,’” Lino said. He was surprised to hear this seemingly subversive message from the young Americans. “‘You mean I can speak up against my government?’ They said, ‘Yes, it’s a democracy.’”

  Lino spoke methodically, with a soft gaze accentuated by bushy eyebrows. Before the islands formally joined the United States, he said, “I can already see the impact of the giant that was coming.”

  The Trust Territory was, by design, a temporary setup. The United Nations’ very charter had emphasized the importance of self-government and the UN got even more serious when it established its Special Committee on Decolonization in 1961. In 1945, there were ninety-seven “non-self-governing territories”—colonies—with a combined population of some 750 million: about one in three people on the planet at the time. Two years later, after a long independence movement, the world’s largest colony, British India, became the sovereign nations of India and Pakistan. By 1965, more than sixty onetime colonies had been removed from the UN’s “non-self-governing” list; within another decade, all of the Trust Territory except for the Pacific islands had become independent.

  The Americans had never really considered themselves colonizers, of course. More like liberators, and noble overseers of “effective poorhouses” constructed by others. But the fact remained that, by UN standards, the United States controlled several colonies at war’s end: Alaska, Hawaii, the Panama Canal Zone, Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The anticolonial movement put the United States in a bind: we still wanted to hold these territories, and relied on them in the Cold War (particularly Guam’s military base and Saipan’s CIA training ground). But this empire was becoming a problem for the national brand; as early as the 1950s, the State Department itself noted “the importance of colonialism and imperialism in anti-American propaganda.”

  Most people in the Northern Marianas wanted to become part of the USA. In four separate referenda—1958, 1961, 1963, 1969—they voted to incorporate with Guam, only to have Guam voters reject the proposal. In the early 1970s, a new idea was proposed: the islands would join the United States on their own terms.

  Lino, for one, wasn’t interested. In 1974, the year before the referendum, he hopped aboard an outrigger canoe with his cousin and set sail for the outer Caroline Island of Satawal, more than 450 miles south. The whole island is less than one square mile; at the time, Lino told me, the buildings were all made with thatch, except for the clinic. He set out to rediscover his roots, as the Peace Corps volunteers had encouraged. The old ways were alive and well on Satawal, including dancing, massage, and his particular interest, navigation—sailing guided only by stars, currents, cloud movement, and other cues from nature. Lino and the other men learning the techniques of traditional navigation were isolated from the rest of the village and sat on special mats, call
ed sághi al palu, while they learned to count and name each star in the night sky, “like ABCs,” Lino said.

  “You name all the stars, backward, forward, you get to know which is the opposite of another. The opposite of the North Star is the Southern Cross. And then you recite in the canoe, out in the ocean, which island is under which star.”

  This is how the Pacific was settled—Satawal, Saipan, American Samoa, Guam, all those dots in the ocean. Hawaii, too. Lino’s teacher, in his three years on Satawal, was a man named Mau Piailug, who in 1976 helped teach native Hawaiians traditional navigation, a skill that had been lost on the islands.

  Today, thanks in part to Lino’s own teaching, there are still some young navigators learning and practicing the craft. Walt, who had been quietly listening, raised his hand. “Including one Jamaican!” We made an unlikely trio: a bare-chested Carolinian, still strapping in his seventies; a Jamaican in a white linen shirt that he self-deprecatingly called his “guru gear”; me in crumpled clothes dug from the bottom of my backpack, weeks into my trip.

  Lino told a story about Mau Piailug going out in a boat with a nephew who was showing off his brand-new navigation gadget. “Yeah, you can program it and find out where you are going and punch this and punch that,” the nephew had said.

  “Let me see it,” Mau had replied. “Ooh, so this what you call GPS, yeah?” Then he’d thrown it in the water.

  Lino chuckled and added: “You are not gonna be brave if you have these things.”

  Here was a true experimenter, a man who remade himself to be as rugged and self-reliant as they come, as a direct rejection of the United States and its political experiments and cultural trappings. That’s not to say that he shunned modernity. He ate at McDonald’s, used email. It was, as so many people had told me across the territories, all about finding a balance, and holding on strong to your roots even as you accept some changes. At the high-rise hotel next door, power saws whined and hammers pounded, renovations in progress.