There are a half-dozen of us, 13-year-old boys draped over the gunwales
of an old World War II landing craft as it clears the reef-enclosed harbor
and heads for open water. We are a group of Sea Scouts, sons of U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency officers stationed at a super-secret training base on
the island of Saipan in the Marianas, and on this Saturday morning in 1956
we are headed for the island of Tinian, ten miles to the south.
The two adults accompanying us are CIA personnel, founders and supervisors
of our Scout chapter, each of them expert in small boat handling, an expertise
they put to use weekdays training Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist guerrillas
for sabotage missions on the Chinese mainland.
* * *
My friends and I are aware of the incongruity in our lives: This 12-by-5-mile
island thousands of miles from anywhere, inhabited by an indigenous Saipanese
population of spearfishermen and subsistence farmers. And in the middle
of this landscape, atop the island's highest mountain, a ready-made American
suburb with carefully-planned streets with sidewalks and streetlights, 2-
and-3 bedroom homes and a modern shopping center.
Mere steps from the edges of this unlikely compound was the jungle. All
but the restricted area on the island's northern end where the guerrillas
trained was available to us, and much of our free time was spent cutting
machete swaths through the brush or following narrow dirt roads through
overgrown inland valleys. Where a year before I and my young comrades would
have been spending our after-school hours on the ballfields of Washington
D.C.'s bedroom communities, the terrain we now visited introduced us to
more problematic contests. The detritus of the World War II battle for the
island was everywhere. We clambered into burned-out tanks and crashed aircraft,
discovered pillboxes and caves, speculating like archaeologists about the
remains of soldiers' bones and equipment we found, our reedy adolescent
voices solemn with our first reflections about death in the afternoon.
* * *
Each boy gets a turn at the helm. I steer as we thread the channel through
the Tinian reef and then glide across the glassy lagoon and drop the bow
ramp onto the beach.
We've ferried a jeep over, and before we set out a Coast Guardsman from
the island's loran station directs us to some nearby prehistoric ruins.
We soon reach a clearing of large, capstoned pyramidical pillars set in
a dozen double rows and standing at least 12 feet high. Remnants of the
House of Taga, probably dating from around 1500 B.C.,
the guardsman had said; the dwelling of a legendary Chamorran king who ruled
over the Marianas and was said to have been 10 feet tall.
We sit quietly for a long time in the soft grass and depart reluctantly.
Throughout the morning one of the men has talked about the World War II
Tinian air base. Suddenly we are upon it, a deserted plain of limitless
and gleaming coral runways, eroded at their edges by the ever-encroaching
jungle vegetation.
We hurtle the runways at top speed. One of my friends insists he knows how
to drive, and the men let him. We jerk and careen for miles, howling with
laughter at this diminutive maniac behind the wheel.
As we pull up to a small, lone wooden building at the airfield's boundary,
one of the men says flatly, "This is it." We fall silent and stare
at the bare floors and barn-high ceilings, the room yielding no evidence
of what had occurred here 11 years earlier. I try to imagine it, and have
a sense of its aftermath, remembering what I had seen some months before
on a family vacation to Japan: long stretches of dusty Tokyo lots, still
barren from firebombings a decade ago. I reread the inscription on a plaque
nailed to the wall outside. It mentions nothing other than the names of
the military units and aircraft, and the dates upon which the atom bombs
assembled here were flown to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
* * *
We sail up to the narrow end of the lagoon and anchor. Above us 25-foot
limestone cliffs drop abruptly to the water. Off the bow a small cove bisects
the cliffs, with a pristine patch of beach at its base.
We tumble naked over the side. None of us has seen water this clear and
dazzling anyplace in the islands, and as we snorkel we practice the technique
the Saipanese fishermen use: Be still, a part of your surroundings; become
fish yourselves.
Later we find footholds in a cliff wall and gain access a ledge six feet
from the top.We dive off it for hours, arching into caressing skies and
plummeting through to welcoming depths. Occasionally I look toward the men
on the boat, these colleagues of our fathers, men in the business of overthrowing
governments, and I wonder what they're thinking about.
The boy who had earlier driven the jeep scrambles up for one last dive before
we sail home. He begins clawing the remaining cliff face and manages to
crest the bluff, thrusts out his chest, spreads his arms wide and bellows,
"I am Taga, goddammit, invincible ruler over this domain!" He
runs the entire length of the cliffs, directly along the edge, flapping
his arms and shouting. We loudly cheer him on, certain, as is he, that any
misstep will be cushioned by a forgiving sea.
two mornings fifty years apart
a Fat Man fell
one day's dew rolled away to fear and darkness
the other's to song and light
so long, Jerry, the ride was brief
the solos echo long and sweet