by Tom Wright
“Tim, we’ve been having some problems with the cipher lock on the east end of the weather station after Ele. I was wondering if you would take a look at it.”
“Sure, right after lunch.”
“Could you do it right now? We’re not supposed to have those doors unlocked, and it’s been that way for days. I know it’s not that big of a deal, but it is SOP.” I cursed myself for having just given him a way to put off my request.
“It will be fine until after lunch,” he said. “We’re the ones who’d write you up anyway,” he said looking at me curiously. “And we won’t.”
I stood there searching for another idea and quickly became uncomfortable. I sensed that they were already becoming suspicious. Cops are not easily fooled. I could have just asked to speak to Bill alone, but surely Tim would ask what it was about, and I didn’t know if Bill would rat me out. It’s harder to keep a secret when someone else knows you are trying to. So I gave in and decided to have lunch with both of them.
After showing our resident ID to the cashier (nonresidents visiting Kwaj had to pay), the three of us filed through the buffet line like so many cattle on the way into the slaughter house. The only consistently good thing about the chow hall food was the variety. Even if any particular item wasn’t very good, at least one could usually find a couple of tolerable foods.
As fire and police personnel always did, Bill and Tim gravitated to a table close to the exit. We made mostly idle chitchat through the meal. I was eager to get to my point with Bill, but I thought better than to push my luck any further with Tim present.
As I chattered about a trivial matter, Tim’s eyes suddenly slewed to my left and focused on something behind me.
“Oh God. Look who’s coming,” Tim said.
Tim and Bill both averted their eyes downward to their plates.
“Holy Cow! What are you guys doing?”
It was Randy.
“Same thing everyone else is in here: having lunch,” said Bill.
“Is someone sitting here?” Randy asked, pointing to the fourth unoccupied chair at the table.
Tim verified the emptiness of the chair by waving his hand over it. “Nope. Nobody there.”
I couldn’t help but smile. Bill laughed out loud.
“Actually, we’re waiting for someone.” I lied.
“Not a problem,” Randy said in his whiny, nasally voice. He walked over to the next table and said something. A guy waved his hand over an empty chair, and everyone at the table laughed. Randy dragged the chair over to our table, its legs screeching obnoxiously across the floor.
After making himself comfortable and the rest of us less so, Randy asked: “This is some disease going around huh?”
“Sounds like it.” I said, noticing that, like me, both Tim and Bill were eating faster.
Randy’s wife, Joyce, was the Commander’s secretary, which by osmosis afforded Randy a level of respect he did not deserve. This fact alone generally kept people from telling Randy what they really thought of him. It was still quite easy to make him the butt of jokes, since he rarely understood any of it.
“Anyway, I should be good. I’ve got plenty of antibiotics,” he continued.
“How do you have plenty of antibiotics?” asked Bill.
“I always keep the leftovers from my prescriptions. I’ve got a couple of bottles.”
“Sounds like you are part of the problem,” Tim said as he shoveled in another fork full of food. “You’re supposed to take the whole prescription every time.”
“Well, once I get better, what’s the point?”
Tim rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“Besides, this is a virus going around,” I said. “Antibiotics only work against bacterial infections.”
“Whatever.” Randy said. He then smoothed his obviously restored and unnaturally dark hair and rubbed his absurdly white, capped teeth with his finger. Randy’s vanity was unmatched.
He turned to Bill: “Anyway, so, what’s new in the cop shop?”
Bill quickly took one last fork full of food, dropped his fork and napkin on his plate and said through a mouthful of food: “Nothing. Time for me to go.”
Tim and I followed suit and began to get up.
“Hey, I thought you guys were waiting for someone.”
“Doesn’t look like he’s going to show,” I said.
Randy shrugged, got up, and dragged his chair noisily back to the table from which he got it. He sat down. They all began to eat quickly.
We emerged from the hall into the sticky, hot air. Bill removed a toothpick from his pocket, peeled back the wrapper, and stuck it in his mouth, letting it settle into the corner. Satisfied, he exhaled.
As we stood in front of the building, I struggled for a plan to separate Bill from Tim without further arousing their already heightened suspicion. Before I could completely embarrass myself, Bill turned to Tim.
“Tim, why don’t you go check out those locks? I’ll see you back in the office later.”
Tim agreed and turned to walk back to the police station. He then broke into a trot as he attempted to catch up with someone else walking his way.
“Now, are you going to tell me what this was all about?” Bill asked, toothpick bobbing up and down like a Maestro’s baton.
I was caught off guard.
“Can you do it right now?” Bill mocked. “We’re not supposed to have those doors unlocked.” Bill chuckled. “Give me a break.”
“You know me too well.”
Bill turned square to me, locked out his knees, and placed his left hand on his belt and his gun hand on top of his sidearm—purely habit, but unnerving nonetheless. Then he gave me the thousand yard stare. I realized at that moment that I could have never withstood an interrogation by Bill.
“It’s not a crime to ask to speak to somebody in private,” he said. “So, what is it?”
Partly to break my nerves and partly to ensure that no one could hear our conversation, I asked him to walk with me across the ball fields toward the air terminal.
“Do you promise not to repeat what I’m about to tell you?” I asked as we reached a quiet, shady spot and stopped walking.
“No,” he responded, to my surprise.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Well, I’m not your lawyer or doctor, so there is no privilege with me. If you tell me that you’ve committed a crime, I cannot keep it to myself.”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“I’ll keep your secret if I can.”
I started with the least objectionable part first.
“I’m leaving.”
Bill didn’t even flinch. He just stared at me, his face expressionless.
“Can the Commander really stop me?” I asked.
“You’re a civilian, so technically no.”
Bill reminded me that the base was essentially shut down, and the Commander had closed all forms of transport to and from the island.
“He’s closed all the ones he controls.” I corrected as we began walking again.
Bill thought for a moment, and then just as I could tell that our plan was unfolding in his mind, I continued.
“Private boat owners can come and go. Maybe we forget to file a float plan and just keep on going?”
“Then we’d be out looking for you, eventually, when you turned up missing. We would be obligated to do S&R (he meant Search and Rescue) until we confirmed your safety, or”—he paused—“let’s say whereabouts.” He meant our bodies.
“So you don’t find us and we’re presumed dead? Big deal.”
“I guess you could get away with that, but I’m sure you’d become persona-non-grata here.”
“Oh well. I couldn’t care less at this point.”
Bill conceded that point with a nod.
As we neared the air terminal, we stopped under a particularly dense grove of palm trees. The shade and breeze off the ocean less than twenty yards away felt refreshing. Nevertheless, I began to pers
pire. A knot formed in the pit of my stomach. I feared opening Pandora’s Box. Was Bill my friend more than a cop? I doubted it. I considered what it would be like never to see my family again. I glanced at Bill’s gun and wondered if after he put me in jail he’d let me borrow it to put myself out of my misery. Bill noticed as I glanced at his gun.
Suddenly confronted with a feeling of fight or flight, I chose flight.
“This was a bad idea,” I said as I turned to leave. “I’ll see you later.”
“Hey, hold on. I know we’re all freaked out about all this shit, but you’ve got me worried about you. Just tell me. Maybe I can help.”
Sensing my vulnerability, Bill softened his stare and put his hand on my shoulder.
“We need weapons,” I stated bluntly.
I scanned Bill’s face for any hint of a reaction and found none.
“I see. And obviously you think I can get them for you.”
“I was hoping so, yes.”
“Well, I’m afraid not. There aren’t any personal firearms on this base—at least that they know about. And a person could get in a heap of trouble if anyone found out that there were.”
“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. The 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 30TH, 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, a
nd 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.