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A wet, wierd place - GuamNov 23, 2007
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| The flight to Guam was filled with Japanese vacationers, who took flash photographs of each other at every possible moment, making the plane appear to hold a miniature thunderstorm. They were mostly older, with families, and unfailingly polite. For the Japanese, Guam is a resort island, a 3-hour flight away, where they can catch their tour bus to the resort and go shopping in American malls. To us, Guam was an odd American outpost, a suburb 4,000 miles from the nearest American city. It's an overgrown military fortress, a remnant of American might and World War II. Every year they celebrate Liberation Day in Guam, the anniversary of the invasion that killed almost all the Japanese occupiers. Then they go back to grumbling about the loss of their culture and gloating over the billions of dollars the military spends here. We spent one night in the Days Inn, then we went to the mall to catch a movie. It had the same faded linoleum and shouting, running kids as any other American mall in Dubuque or Topeka or Berlin, Vermont. We watched American Gangster, a decent crime flick carried by Russel Crowe and Denzel Washington, and then an ice cream sundae at Coldstone Creamery. I had a pang for home - we woke up in a soft bed with clean sheets, and I had imagined taking a shower and heading off for work with a cup of coffee in my hand. Items from the Pacific Daily News (A Gannett Newspaper), "Hafa Adai, it's Saturday," Guamanian government $1 billion short on upgrades needed to accomodate 8,000 US Marines and 12,000 dependents who will be moved to Guam from Okinawa (total cost, $10 billion); 12 DUI arrests on Thanksgiving, along with 6 charges of public drunkeness; government agencies are late on rend; a man fell asleep while robbing a house, he was drunk. A classified ad: "Military leaving island - everything must go. Bhind Asan Mayr's Office Nov. 23-25 5am-???" We found a museum tucked into a corner of the mall; it featured fragments of pottery, pestles, tools and the story of Spanish occupation through US ownership to Japanese invasion to Liberation. I thought about my Grandfather Rockwood on his destroyer not far from here, waiting for the kamikazes off Okinawa. He was so far from home. Statistics from the liberation of Guam: 1,198 Americans killed, almost 12,000 Japanese defenders killed. One who wasn't was a sergeant who lived for 28 years in a hole 7 feet underground in the jungle of Guam, fishing and harvesting food from the land. He was found by two villagers in 1972 and emerged a hero, even in Guamanian eyes, for lasting so long and for inadvertently copying native handicrafts to survive: weaving pago tree bark into a uniform, weaving traps and creating a filter out of coconut husks to conceal the smoke from his cooking fire. He was featured prominently in the museum. The curator on duty that day told Bean he had been to Vermont; his late wife was from Connecticut. On the way back to the hotel, the cab driver ripped us off, pretending to be confused over which Days in we were at, and taking us to the wrong one. He pretended surprise when we finally convinced him it was the wrong one, and by then the meter was up to $40. We cut back through abandoned military housing, low concrete buildings with narrow windows and tin roofs. They resembled the migrant worker blocks we had seen in the coffee regions of Panama, except these ones each had a concrete pad with a roof to shelter the car of the enlisted soldiers who lived there. We threw money at the asshole cab driver, paying less than he wanted but more than we should have, and caught the shuttle to the airport. |
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