“Someday I’m gonna bring the wife along,” Buddy said. “She dudn’t believe me, ’bout how pretty them waters is. You been here before, Nate—ever see the like of it, anywheres else?”
“The folksier you get, Buddy,” I said, “the less you’re getting out of me.”
Buddy was frustrated that I had yet to open up about my own Saipan experiences.
“And the stars at night…” he began.
“Are big and bright? Deep in the heart of Saipan?”
“Back in ’45, every night, we’d be on our cots in our tents and Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ would come driftin’ across the camp, over the loudspeaker…. It was like he was singin’ about Saipan.”
“I doubt he was.”
“Well,” he said defensively, “I never seen the like of it. Parade of damn stars traipsin’ across the sky…. Or was I just young, and my memory’s playin’ tricks with me?”
“I ask myself that often,” I said.
Even from the air, the scars left on this island by World War II were readily apparent, violent punctuation marks in a peaceful sentence: a tank’s head poking out of the water a few hundred yards offshore; a barge marooned on the coral reef; a wrecked fuselage, half in the water, half on the beach—shimmering twisted metal in crystal-blue waters.
The DC-10 touched down at Kobler Field, near the former Aslito Haneda, aka Isley. We taxied over to a cement shed with a wooden roof emblazoned saipan in white letters; this and two Quonset-hut hangars was the Saipan airport.
“This is my fourth time here,” Buddy said coming down the deplaning steps, “and I never quite get used to how different it is from the war—no jeeps, or military trucks, no soldiers, sailors or Marines.”
The tiny airport, run by Chamorros, was a surprisingly bustling place filled with the Babel-like chatter of many languages—tourists from all over the world coming to this vacation center, Europeans, Arabs, but mostly Japanese. Buddy had told me to expect that: Saipan was a combination war shrine and honeymoon resort for the Japanese.
“Yeah, and they’re buyin’ back this island they lost,” he’d told me on the plane, “piece at a time.”
A Ford van Buddy had arranged was waiting, and we loaded our suitcases and the camera and recording gear—which was ensconced in heavy-duty flight cases—into the back. The two-man camera crew was also from Dallas; Phil was clean-cut and owned the video production company that had gone in partners with Buddy on a documentary of our visit, and Steve was a skinny, bearded, longhaired good old boy who I took for a hippie until I realized he was a Vietnam veteran—both knew their stuff. I told them I didn’t want to be on camera and they said fine, I could “grip.”
“What is a grip?” I’d seen that in the end credits of movies and always wondered.
“It means you help haul shit,” Steve said, ever-present cigarette bobbing.
Japanese machine-gun bunkers provided decorative cement touches on the road leading out of the airport. Beach Road itself, lined with flame trees, was a macadam fast track—back when the shichokan had driven me through this part of the island, the dirt road had been a glorified oxcart path. The cars outnumbered the bicycles now, but there were still plenty of the latter, often with Japanese tourists on them.
We passed through several native villages that had turned into modern little towns—Chalan Kanoa, which sported banks and a post office and a shopping district, as well as wood-frame houses and tin-roofed huts, vaguely similar to Garapan of old—and Susupe, which the army’s tent city had evolved into, where we stayed at a motel called the Sun Inn, behind a ballpark by a high school.
“Now I know you think I’m probably just bein’ a cheap bastard,” Buddy said, as we unloaded our stuff into a motel that looked like it belonged next to a strip club outside the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport. “But if we stay in one of them new fancy tourist highrises, up in Garapan, we’ll have trouble holdin’ court with the locals we need to talk to.”
The Sun Inn had a freestanding restaurant where we could sit and talk and sip coffee with our Chamorro subjects, in unintimidating surroundings.
“I’d like to bitch,” I said, “but as a veteran of a hundred thousand interviews, I agree with you. Once we get checked in, you mind if we take a spin up to Garapan?”
“Not at all,” Buddy grinned. “Kinda curious to see your old stompin’ grounds?”
“I think that’s ‘stamping grounds.’”
“Not in Texas.”
Garapan had not changed. It had gone away. This new city, called Garapan, wasn’t even on quite the same patch of earth; it was further south, its resort hotels lining white Micro Beach. Buddy took me to Sugar King Park, where the statue of Baron Matsue Haruji lorded over what was now a small botanical garden; also on display amid the palm and flame trees—and popular with Japanese children—was a little red and white locomotive, looking like the Little Engine That Could, resting on the last fragment of railroad track that once circled Saipan. It was probably the locomotive I saw at Tanapag Harbor, so very long ago.
“That statue is one of the handful of survivin’ physical remains of the original Garapan,” Buddy told me. His camera crew was catching some shots of the park, for color.
“Looks like the Baron’s got a bullet hole in his left temple,” I said, taking a closer gander.
“Yeah. Probably some jarhead, when we were occupyin’ the place, takin’ target practice…. There’s only two buildings from old Garapan still standin’—if standin’ is the word.” He nodded his head across the way, where the walls of the old hospital poked above overgrown grass. “That’s the old imperial hospital…and, not too far from here, the old Garapan Prison, which is all overgrowed. We need to get shots of that.”
“I’ll pass,” I said.
He frowned in surprise. “You don’t want to go over there to the prison with us?”
“If you don’t mind, no.”
“Well, we’ll do it another day, then. We need to get ahold of Sammy Munez, anyways.”
Munez met with us in a booth at the back of the Sun Inn coffee shop. Samuel Munez was a respected member of the community, a member of the House of Representatives of Micronesia, and had avoided previous researchers into the Earhart mystery.
But Buddy Busch was an ingratiating guy, and after three trips to Saipan, had made a lot of friends; the head of a local car dealership—who had provided our van—had arranged for us to meet with Munez, a compact, not quite stocky Chamorro in his mid-thirties with pleasant sad features on an egg-shaped head.
“You served in the Army here?” Munez asked Buddy. Munez wore sunglasses, a yellow and green tropical-style sportshirt, and navy shorts. “Wartime?”
It was just Busch and me and Munez in the booth; no camera crew yet. Buddy and Munez were drinking coffee but the climate—eighty degrees that would have been heaven if it hadn’t been so damn muggy—had me drinking Coke.
“Yes I did,” Buddy said, “only I was a Marine.”
“You, too?” Munez asked me.
“I was a Marine,” I said. “I was in the Pacific but not here. Guadalcanal.”
“I have a souvenir a Marine gave me,” Munez said, with a sly smile. His English was near perfect, though he had an accent, which had a jerky Hispanic lilt.
“Must be a lot of those on this island,” Buddy said affably.
Munez patted his thigh. “Mine is from a hand grenade. Still in me. What is that called?”
“Shrapnel,” I said.
Munez smiled, nodded. “The Marine who threw it was very upset. He apologize to us, bandage my leg himself. He thought we were Japanese…. You Americans were much kinder to us than the Japanese.”
“Mr. Munez…” Buddy began.
“Sammy. All my friends call me Sammy.”
“Well, Sammy, as I think you know, we’re attempting to trace Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan. Lots of people like me have come here, and lots of your people have told stories…but everything seems…secondhan
d. We need eyewitnesses.”
Munez sighed and thought for a long while before he answered. “Mr. Busch…”
“Buddy.”
“Buddy, I can find people to talk to you. But some will not. You stir up bad memories for Saipanese. Almost every family on the island lost family members during the Japanese occupation. We have survived centuries of occupation by doing nothing to invite punishment, nothing to invite reprisal. To come forward, even now, with public testimony, is to ask trouble.”
“From the Japanese?”
He nodded. “They begin to rule our island again—in a different way. But those who speak against them might suffer. And during the war, there was a local police force of Chamorros who worked for the Japanese. These were bad men who tortured and punished their own people. Many of them are still here.”
“Like Jesus Sablan?” I asked.
That I knew this name surprised Munez. He blinked and said, “Yes.”
“I heard he was shot and killed, a long time ago,” I said.
Buddy was gazing at me with golfball eyes.
“That is one reason why he is so feared,” Munez said. “The story that bullets could not kill him…. Yes, he is alive and meaner than ten brown tree snakes.”
“What’s he doing these days?” I asked.
“He is in the junk business.”
“He peddles dope?”
“No! Junk. He has a junkyard by where the seaplane base once was. He has Saipanese employees to haul scrap to the pier. War wreckage from the jungle. He sells it to the Japanese.”
So the jungkicho was a junk king.
“He lives in a nice small house outside Chalan Kanoa,” Munez was saying. “He is a man who likes his privacy.”
“Does he like money?”
“That is his great love. What is your interest in this man, Mr. Heller?”
“It’s Nate, Sammy. I just heard he knows a lot about Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.”
Sammy nodded vigorously. “They say he knows more than anyone else on this island. He has offered to speak about this, before.”
This was obviously news to Buddy. “I never talked to him.”
“Others have. Fred Goerner. Major Gervais. But none would pay Jesus his price.”
I sipped my Coke. “Can you arrange a meeting?”
“He won’t meet with more than one man at a time. Some men attacked him once—one researcher who had Guam policemen with him who lived in Garapan during the war.”
“Ah, and held a grudge.”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said cheerily, “Mr. Busch here would like to see the jail, and I have no interest. Perhaps you could arrange a meeting for me, with Mr. Sablan, while you and Buddy and his camera crew tour the old jail.”
That seemed agreeable to everybody. We would need an extra set of wheels, but Buddy felt that would be no problem, he’d just call his car dealership pal.
Over the next three days, we interviewed Chamorros that Munez lined up for us; the idea was to talk to them informally at the Sun Inn coffee shop, and the best ones would be invited to speak on camera. We spent two days doing the pre-interviews, and another shooting footage with the better subjects, at the Sugar King Park, which provided a scenic backdrop.
Two farmers traveled together from the village of San Roque with similar stories of having seen the male and female fliers at Tanapag Harbor and later in Garapan. A retired dentist had not seen the two white people but, as his practice had been restricted to Japanese military officers and police officials, he’d heard much talk of the American fliers captured as spies; the officers had joked about the U.S.A. using women as spies.
Munez’s sister, who was in her mid-sixties, had done laundry for the hotel, the Kobayashi Ryokan, and spoke of the American woman’s kindness and gave a detailed description, even identifying Amy’s photo.
A man who had been a salesclerk at the Ishi-Shoten, the general merchandise store next to Kobayashi Ryokan, spoke of often seeing Amelia in a second-floor window.
A pleasant middle-aged woman born of a Japanese father and Chamorro mother said her name was Matilda Fausto Arriola, and told of living in the house next door to the Kobayashi Ryokan. Her English limited, she chose to speak to us in the Chamorran language (which to me sounded like a combination of Spanish, French and bird calls) and Munez translated, but I knew she spoke the truth when she talked of Amy helping her with her homework, and giving her a gold ring with a pearl, which had been lost in the war. She told of the woman being followed everywhere by the Chamorran security police.
She also spoke of the burns she noticed on the white woman’s neck—from cooking oil, she thought.
I didn’t correct her.
Only one familiar face showed up: the desk clerk from the Kobayashi Ryokan, who turned out to have been the owner. He didn’t seem to recognize me, which hurt my feelings—hadn’t I spared his life? On the other hand, maybe he did recognize me, and that’s why he didn’t bring up the priest and the Chamorro who got shot in his lobby.
These and eight other witnesses told a story that provided the mosaic tiles for the following: American fliers, a man and a woman, had been brought ashore at Tanapag Harbor; the woman had short hair and dressed like a man, the man had a head injury. They were taken to the police station and then to the jail; the woman was only in the jail a few hours, and later turned up at a hotel used by the military to house political prisoners. No one seemed to know for sure what happened to these mysterious white people, but the consensus was that they’d been executed.
Buddy was generally pleased, and got some good interviews for his documentary—a few of the Chamorros spoke English, which was helpful. But he was frustrated not coming up with anything new. I suggested perhaps that the researchers had gone to the Saipan well once too often.
That made the Texan pout.
Munez said, “You might find it worthwhile to talk to Mrs. Blas—my sister says this farm woman knows something about Amelia—but she won’t come into town. She doesn’t come to town very often. You would have to go to her.”
It wasn’t much to go on, but on the fourth day, with no other interviews lined up, we followed a winding dirt back road into farm country, where the foliage was so thick, it was as though the van were moving down a green tunnel. Then suddenly the road was cutting through cultivated land, and Munez pointed out a modest tin-roofed wood-frame farmhouse.
Mrs. Blas was a tiny, slight, dignified woman, probably around sixty but with a smooth lightly tanned complexion that would be the envy of many a younger woman. She wore a black and lime and white island print dress that was similarly youthful. Against a backdrop of swaying sugarcane, with Munez translating, she told a chilling tale.
First she recounted, as so many others had, having seen the two Americans, man and woman, at Tanapag Harbor; they were taken to the police building on the town square. But several years later she saw the woman again.
“She say she was working on the farm when a motorcycle driven by Japanese soldier go by with the white woman slump in the little seat on the side,” Munez said. “The woman is blindfolded. Another motorcycle with two more Japanese follow. Mrs. Blas say she follow the Japanese soldiers without them seeing. They take the woman to this place where a hole already been dug. They make the woman kneel in front of that hole, tear the blindfold from her face and toss it in the grave. Then they shoot her in the chest. She fall backwards into the grave.”
“Did this happen near this farm here?” a stunned Buddy asked.
Munez’s translation of her answer was that it had been another farm, closer to Garapan. She had run from the place, afraid the Japanese soldiers would see her; but later she went back and saw that the grave had been filled in.
“Mrs. Blas,” Buddy asked, his voice breaking, “is it possible you could find that place again?”
She said the grave was under the biggest breadfruit tree on the island, a tree she had been to many, many times. It seemed the Japanese took all the
food the farmers grew, and her family depended on the fruit of this wild tree.
Soon we were back in the van with Mrs. Blas in the rider’s seat of honor up front, Buddy Busch at the wheel, trembling with anticipation. I didn’t know what to think. Old questions were stirring. Had the Japanese hauled Amelia out of the waters that night, only to execute her later? Or had they carted her corpse in a motorcycle sidecar, and what Mrs. Bias had seen been simply a further desecration of Amy’s body before the unmarked grave took her?
But where Mrs. Blas directed Buddy was to an expansive parking lot covered with crushed coral on which bulldozers and tractors and other heavy equipment perched like stubborn dinosaurs that didn’t know they were supposed to be extinct. All of this was behind a seven-foot chain-link security fence topped with barbed wire.
And there seemed to be no breadfruit tree within the fenced-off area.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Blas insisted, through Munez, that she could identify the exact spot.
“This looks like a road maintenance storage yard,” I said. “That means government.”
Buddy nodded. “We have some fancy talking and red-tape-cutting ahead of us.”
That afternoon, in a jeep that Buddy’s car dealer had loaned me, I headed toward Chalan Kanoa for a meeting with an old friend. Buddy and his camera crew were shooting Mrs. Bias at her farmhouse and then planned to get the Garapan Prison footage they needed. I made a stop at a hardware store, to pick up a machete, and was right on time, when I pulled up in front of the Saipan Style Center.
On the outskirts north of Chalan Kanoa, the Saipan Style Center was a tin-roofed, ramshackle saloon with a restaurant and trinket shop in front, the flyspecked show window with two beach-attire-clad mannequins apparently inspiring the joint’s grandiloquent name. Moving through the small trinket shop, with its cheap made-in-Japan items—paper fans, windup toys, hula dolls—I pushed through the hanging bead curtain into the bar where a jarring cold front hit me, thanks to a chugging air conditioner.
The surprise of the chill was matched by the darkness of the bar. I took off my sunglasses and it didn’t make much difference: the only illumination was courtesy of occasional Christmas tree lights haphazardly tacked on the walls, and a garish jukebox, out of which came Wilson Pickett singing “In the Midnight Hour,” despite it being two o’clock in the afternoon. A half-dozen Chamorran males at the bar registered mild surprise at seeing a white man, then returned to their drinks. The waitresses—voluptuous Chamorran babes in unmatching bikini tops and hot pants—were much happier to see me, three of them swarming after me like sharks sniffing blood.
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