Authors: Tom Wright
“I know that. I’d never say where I got it….them.”
My eyes continued to bore into Bill, searching nervously for any sign that the jig was up. Only a few seconds had passed, but I could stand the silence no longer. “You’re not going to turn me in, are you?”
The wind suddenly kicked up, and the sky to the east darkened as a shower approached. The air cooled as the sun ducked behind the looming cloud. Bill furiously worked his toothpick back and forth as he considered my question. Then his face brightened.
“No. Your secret is safe with me.” Bill slapped me on the back.
“So there is nothing you can do for us? No stockpiles of weapons anywhere that could come up a couple short without anyone noticing?”
“Not really. We do an inventory of issued weapons and ammunition on every shift. We have to sign off on it along with another officer. I’d have to get half the force to go along with me in order to pull that off. The rest of our shit is locked away in the armory. No way to get at that without raising all kinds of flags.”
“Any idea who might have personal firearms and might be wanting to sell them around here?”
“Have them, yes. Sell them? I don’t know. In this situation? Yeah, I suppose I know a few, but…”
“So?” I interrupted.
“I can’t say. I swore I’d never say, and I’d get shit canned just for knowing and not telling.”
I sighed, nothing much left to say. “You were our only hope. I guess we’ll just have to wing it.”
“You guys don’t have anything?”
“No.”
“Damn,” Bill muttered, noticeably disturbed by the thought—the first negative emotion he’d shown during the conversation.
“You might be able to come up with something on Ebeye. But ask the wrong person and you could end up in their jail. You know what that means.”
I sure did. In the Marshallese culture, it was the responsibility of the inmate's family to take care of the incarcerated. If you didn’t have family there, you would have to persuade the jailers or fellow inmates to give you food. As is typically the case in jails the world over, that meant sexual favors. The jails were bad enough in and of themselves, but to add further humiliation to the process, inmates were stripped naked before being thrown in—to remove any remaining vestiges of personal defense.
Several years earlier, a bunch of Greenpeace activists managed to breach security and delay a local missile test. They landed in zodiacs, walked right up to the launch silo, and looked down in. Everyone was stunned by their audacity, but much more so at how easily they did it.
The Range was none too happy about it, and because they knew it would be much worse and thus more of a deterrent to any future ambitions of a repeat, they let the Marshallese police deal with the violation. Months later, the activists blogged about their experiences in the Ebeye jail and worse, their transfer to the jail on Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. One described spending weeks naked in the jail cell with little to no food, surrounded by violent offenders, and having to sleep sitting up against a wall—to protect his backside.
“I might rather take my chances out there,” I said, pointing toward the ocean. Even though I said that, I already knew I was heading for Ebeye as soon as possible after I finished talking to Bill. I had a Marshallese friend on Ebeye that I thought I could count on. Nobody knew when the Commander would shut them down, and I suspected that time was short.
“I would ask around, see what you can dig up. People know things, especially the old-timers,” Bill continued.
“I don’t know about that. T
he fewer people that know about my plan the better. You are the first we’ve told. And time is not on our side.”
We walked back to the police station without any further discussion. Before I rode off, Bill said one last thing:
“Don’t worry. You never know how things are going to turn out. I’ll poke around. Check back with me before you leave, and I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”
7
2 P.M., WEDNESDAY MAY 30
TH
, EBEYE ISLAND, KWAJALEIN ATOLL, MARSHALL ISLANDS
“The miserable have no other medicine but only hope.” - William Shakespeare
The boat ride had been rough, and my stomach quivered—not from the motion alone but rather a combination of motion, heat, and the smell of diesel exhaust. My stomach’s emptiness and the ubiquitous body odor of dozens of natives didn’t help either.
As I rode the Landing Craft Mechanized (or LCM)—the Army’s vehicle of choice to ferry personnel and equipment around the range—I thought about the true purpose of the vehicle. I imagined myself as one of the troops aboard such a boat as it landed at Omaha Beach. How must it have felt to hear the rapping of bullets on the steel hull as the craft beached and the ramp in front lowered and they stepped off that ramp with no defense beyond their rifle, helmet, and luck? How were they able to get men to do it? Or rather, how were men able to summon the courage to step forward?
I once heard it said that courage is simply the willingness to be terrified and act anyway. Living on a WWII battlefield supplied ample reminders that I had never had the opportunity to discover if I possessed such virtue. Mostly I was grateful that such personal sacrifice had never been required of me, but in another way, it made me feel empty.
The procession off the LCM was slow because, in rough seas, you had to time your step onto the pier to coincide with the peak of the upward heave of the vessel. In the trough between waves, the pier was chest high. A steward stood by to help women and children, but men were on their own. Now that
the boat had docked, the flies settled in again, buzzing people's eyes and slowing the procession further.
At the end of the pier in front of the ferry, several dilapidated fishing trawlers bobbed up and down. Loitering on their decks were young, surly-looking crew members who, apparently having nothing better to do, menacingly scanned the disembarking passengers through squinting, suspicious eyes. Between the boats, a miscellany of Styrofoam cups, plastic grocery bags and other anthropogenic detritus floated among a putrid surface film, flies buzzing just above the surface.
As I picked my way through the crowd toward the end of the pier, I scanned the faces hoping to locate a Marshallese friend of mine called Denver who lived there. He was the only person I knew on Ebeye and, really, my only hope to find a gun since I knew virtually nothing about the island other than where to find food.
I was a good four inches taller than the average local, which made it easy to scan the crowd but harder to see the variety of coolers, shopping bags, and other makeshift luggage scattered about on the concrete surface.
The main street ran perpendicular to the pier. A hot, gusty breeze flowed straight down the road and kicked up dust clouds from the uneven surface. Bits of trash skittered and tumbled along. Other than the dirt, sand, and debris that had settled into low spots as the water retreated, there was hardly any sign of the typhoon that ravaged the island just a few days prior.
I stepped to the curb as the crowd in the street parted and a rundown black Mitsubishi pickup filled with young men whizzed by. Then the crowd closed up again. Had the youths in the pickup been wielding machetes or machine guns, the scene could have been straight out of the Congo. But this was Ebeye Island, a veritable Villa
Miseria in its own right, just a short, three-mile ferry ride from my utopian home on Kwajalein Island.
What the two islands lacked in spatial separation they more than made up for in socioeconomic disparity. The contrast between the two places was so stark that it was literally like boarding a ferry in Beverly Hills and finding yourself in Bangladesh fifteen minutes later. And the flies, my God, the flies! What was a significant nuisance on Kwaj was torturous on Ebeye. It was so bad on Ebeye that we referred to the flies as the “Ebeye Air Force.”
Ebeye Island was home to the vast majority of the Marshallese population on Kwajalein Atoll. The island was a mere one-tenth of a square mile and home to approximately fourteen thousand people, making it was one the most densely populated places on earth. With no industry and virtually nothing to export, the conditions were squalid. It hadn’t always been that way on Ebeye, and it wasn’t really like that around the rest of the Marshalls. It was the presence of the American government on neighboring Kwajalein Island, and the associated jobs, that brought ever increasing peoples to Ebeye. After the initial migration to the island, natural processes soon took over, and the population increased exponentially. Over half the population on Ebeye was under age eighteen.
I crossed the street, and with Denver nowhere in sight, I headed toward the fish market. Denver was a fisherman, and I thought that someone in there might know where to find him. The Ebeye fish market was in an old, light blue concrete building. A wooden sign that read ‘Fish Market’ hung precariously over the door by a single wire on one side. The eye screw on the other side of the sign had long since rusted through in the heavy, salt-laden air, and its wire dangled uselessly above. The sign squeaked as it rocked in the breeze, and I kept one eye on it as I passed beneath.
As I entered the building, the rush of heat and humidity typically found in unconditioned buildings on Ebeye curiously failed to materialize. The market was uncharacteristically well-stocked with fish, all packed in ice. In addition to chilling the fish, the ice served to keep the room cool and discourage bugs. The incorrigible obviously existed in the insect world as well, evidenced by the many that struggled to free themselves from strips of fly paper dangling from beams and doorways.
The market segregated fish by grade—highly prized
Yellowfin, Mahi Mahi, and Ono on one row and all manner of lower grade fish and edible sea creatures on another row. Marshallese peoples jammed the lower grade row, bargaining for the cheaper foodstuffs, while the high-grade row sat empty waiting for Americans to arrive.
Americans frequented the high-grade row more often not due to a lack of delicacies on the other side—on the contrary, some of the strange looking tropical fishes were said to be quite delicious—but because the fish from the tuna family were the ones least likely to infect the diner with a nasty case of ciguatera. Ciguatera is a flu-like poisoning that comes from eating tropical reef fish contaminated with
ciguatoxin. The Marshallese, who were mostly immune to its effects, called ciguatera “beep beep” which was almost certainly onomatopoeic given the fact that diarrhea and other gastrointestinal disturbances were the most common symptoms.
I approached the person who seemed to be in charge of the market and asked him if he knew Denver. He stared at me blankly. I asked the men assembled behind him if they spoke English and they too just stared.
The higher than normal stocks of fish produced a higher than normal odor, and my stomach had not yet settled from the boat ride over, so I headed back out into the street. I passed the security booth and then turned back remembering that, as a noncitizen, I was supposed to sign into at the booth. I was, after all, technically on foreign soil as soon as I set foot on the island.
When I stepped up to the window, the startled guard jumped to his feet.
“Yokwe,” he said. Then, realizing he was staring at an American, repeated in English: “Hello.”
He grabbed a clipboard and a pen and pretended to have something important to write down all of a sudden. Then he asked: “May I help you?”
“I just wanted to sign in, and I’m looking for Denver,” I said, suddenly realizing that I didn’t know his last name.
“Ok, just fill this out and sign here.”
I penciled in a fake name and social security number. They never checked ID, and in the age of identity theft, I had no intention of putting down my actual social security number. The guard studied my inputs and then said: “Komol tata. And please remember to check out when you leave.”
“Denver?” I questioned.
“Yes, Denver. Maybe church,” he said pointing down the street.
I walked along the main street toward Lagoon Road, which did not run along the lagoon. Its name derived from the fact that, of the two roads that ran the length of the island, it was simply the closest to the lagoon. Ocean road, by contrast, did actually run right along the ocean. I walked past the only grocery store on the island with its barred windows and chain-adorned doors. I passed a makeshift restaurant with women lined up to buy entrees. Their children milled about the candy case, a longing look on their faces, green sleepers in the corners of their eyes, and fluid oozing from their noses and down their upper lips. It was all I could do not to swat at the flies that crawled, seemingly unnoticed, over their faces.
I passed a blue building labeled with the word “school.” A poorly dressed Marshallese kid of maybe eighteen studied me carefully as I passed. I greeted him, but he responded with a frown.
I reached Lagoon Road and turned right. I walked past dozens of plywood and cinder-block houses, some with corrugated metal roofs, others with plastic covered plywood, others a combination of the two, and still others with something altogether unidentifiable making up the roof—or even some with no roof at all, its rafters having rotted through and its occupants, too poor to replace it, having moved on. I found it amazing how fast they were able to resurrect the tenements after Typhoon Ele. There was hardly any indication that anything had happened.
The gutters in front of the residences contained a visually offensive fluid—not exactly water but containing water and not exactly sewage but containing sewage. I couldn’t smell it, but its appearance strongly deterred me from stepping in it. The odors emanating from the structures were generally offensive but were interspersed with the occasional sweet smell—laundry soap or Pine-Sol—and one house even gave off a pleasant smell of wood smoke and barbecuing chicken. A pang of hunger rose in my belly but quickly gave way to the thought of the flies that probably crawled all over the meat, or at the very least, hovered patiently just above, waiting for it to be removed from the fire. It never ceased to amaze me how uninterested flies were in fire or smoke until a piece of dead flesh appeared. They’d come from miles around just to throw up on it.
I stopped at the intersection of Lagoon road and a side street and looked up the
length of the side street. Midway up the street, several children stood in line next to a blank plywood wall along the sidewalk. The first child in line stood on a wooden box and waited. Shortly, a hand holding a can of soda extended from a small hole in the wall. The child took the soda and placed an amount of money in the hand. He stepped down, and the next child stepped up to the hand. The hand provided the next child with some sort of candy. And on it continued—a human vending machine.
I walked a little further and came to the church that I thought the guard must have been pointing toward.
The church was the tallest and most well maintained structure around. It was painted entirely white and had ocean blue trim. The windows contained no glass but were framed in with approximately three-foot squares of wood stacked three high and two wide. Each square was divided further by wood slats from top to bottom and side to side in the middle, as well as from corner to corner, forming eight right triangles within each square in an obvious attempt to make it difficult to see in, but at the same time allowing free flow of air. Above the windows sat half-circle-shaped wooden awnings painted in the likeness of a rising sun. There was a steeple on top with a cross on top of that. A large main door in the middle, supplemented by two subordinate doors on each side, provided entrance to the building. The courtyard before the church was level and covered in coral gravel, some pieces large enough to cause an ankle to roll over if stepped on askew.
In the courtyard, hundreds of Marshallese stood in lines waiting quietly. A sea of white dresses, shirts, and slacks was punctuated only by the thin, red ties on the men and red ribbons in the hair of the females. Most stood stoically, but a few of the younger performers swayed back and forth as if thinking through their moves or humming in their heads the tune of the song to which they would soon dance. One boy leaned over to rub a spot on his shoes and was immediately admonished by the boys in his vicinity and erected himself. None of them looked the least bit uncomfortable despite the blaring heat and lack of wi
nd in the protected courtyard.
I had apparently arrived just in time for the start of some event. I made my way through the crowd of white and into a seating area off to the side of the church. Inside the church, thousands of mostly women parishioners sat respectfully stiff-backed in the pews. Young women held infants while old and fat women sat fanning themselves with any contrivance capable of moving air. Men, dressed in their best, sat in the back of the church or stood against the wall as if they had just happened in. Perhaps they were unsure of what to expect and desired an easy escape should they find whatever was to come unpleasant.
I scanned the back rows and walls and did not notice Denver. Although a lot of people thought it a sign of racism to say so, I had a hard time distinguishing among the Marshallese—the truth is what it is. I took a seat so that I could search the hundreds of faces without being obvious about it.
A preacher took the pulpit and began to speak in Marshallese. I recognized it as a prayer only because of the sudden bowing of heads. I did not bow my head because I already knew no one was listening. My own beliefs
notwithstanding, one didn’t have to spend much time in the deprivation, squalor, and suffering of Ebeye to recognize that the prayers of all those people went largely unanswered. But I understood that religion offered such people a ray of hope in spite of the obvious hopelessness. Ignorance is bliss, as they say. As usual, I felt self-conscious about not bowing, but only until the prayer ended.