The Island of the Colorblind

I wandered out to join Bob on the beach, with its fine-grained white sand and coconut palms. There were breadfruit trees here and there and, hugging the ground, low tussocks of zoysia, a beach grass, and a thick-leaved succulent which was new to me. Driftwood edged the strand, admixed with bits of cardboard carton and plastic, the detritus of Darrit-Uliga-Delap, the three-islanded capital of the Marshalls, where twenty thousand people live in close-packed squalor. Even six miles from the capital, the water was scummy, the coral bleached, and there were huge numbers of sea cucumbers, detritus feeders, in the turbid water. Nonetheless, with no shade and the humid heat overwhelming, and hoping there would be clearer water if we swam out a bit, we stripped down to our underwear and walked carefully over the sharp coral until it was deep enough to swim. The water was voluptuously warm, and the tensions of the long hours in our damaged plane gradually eased away as we swam. But just as we were beginning to enjoy that delicious timeless state, the real delight of tropical lagoons, there came a sudden shout from the airstrip – ’The plane is ready to leave! Hurry!’ – and we had to clamber out hastily, clutching wet clothes around us, and run back to the plane. One wheel, with its tire, had been replaced, but the other was bent and difficult to remove, and was still being worked on. So having rushed back to the plane, we sat for another hour on the tarmac – but the other wheel finally defeated all efforts at repair, and we took off again, bumping, noisily clattering over the runway, for the next lap, a short one, to Kwajalein.

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.