TWO ALASKA TO THAILAND: THE ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE Pacific Ocean, Autumn 2004
While the American military was building a new system of personalized, bilateral relationships with African armies, in the Pacific it was refitting a constellation of bases that had been the legacy of the Philippine War, World War II, and the Korean conflict. The object in both cases was a global footprint that was deliberately shallower on the ground, even as it was faster on the move. Witnessing its fitful emergence meant traveling from the world’s greatest desert to its greatest ocean.
Generally speaking, while Africa represented the unconventional challenges posed by anarchy and weak states, the Pacific represented the more conventional challenges posed by rising powers and rogue states.
As suggestive as the Pacific was of the caressing tropics, Alaska represented some of the region’s most vital military real estate. I headed there first, arriving in Anchorage at midnight, November 1, 2004. I carried a single backpack stuffed with winter gear for the coming days and summer gear for the rest of the journey. In this trip with the American military, I would be hopping planes from the Arctic Circle to the equator, and from North America to Southeast Asia. Rather than form a personal relationship with a battalion, a platoon, or a lone officer, as in my previous journeys, this time I was after a broad, ground-level view of the world’s most developing military theater.
On the Pentagon’s map of geographic “area” commands, Alaska appeared as the most interesting place on earth. While every other dry-land region was covered in one solid color, denoting which command it fell under, Alaska bore blue and green stripes: blue for NORTHCOM (Northern Command) and green for PACOM (Pacific Command). As part of mainland North America, Alaska belonged to NORTHCOM, whose mission—aligned with that of the newly created Department of Homeland Security—was to protect the continental United States from attack, particularly from incoming missiles. In reality, though, this, the largest of the fifty states, was part of PACOM. Alaska’s strategic utility as a boreal lookout and forward base against the Russian Far East, in addition to points along the Pacific Rim, could not be overestimated. Item: Alaska included the Aleutians, a chain of seventy fog-strewn and volcanic islands constituting the northern wall of the Pacific Ocean that stretched across the International Date Line to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
Formally known as “Russian North America,” Alaska had been acquired from Czar Alexander II as a result of an 1867 treaty negotiated by William Henry Seward, President Andrew Johnson’s secretary of state. Derided as “Seward’s Folly,” this territorial acquisition would turn out to be anything but that, of course. The U.S. Army opened up Alaska beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, putting in the roads and ports and doing the early mapping, as well as policing the territory during the unruly gold rush days. Alaska boomed in the early 1940s, when it became a base for protecting the U.S. mainland against a Japanese attack, as well as the principal node for delivering aircraft to the Soviet Union via Siberia under the Lend-Lease Act, to help Stalin fight Hitler.
The economic and emotional ties between the U.S. military and Alaska never wavered. By the early twenty-first century, one-fifth of Alaska’s population was either active-duty soldiers and airmen, members of the Reserve and National Guard, veterans who had been stationed in Alaska and decided to retire here for the hunting and fishing, or civilians who worked for the military. The Department of Defense remained the state’s main employer. In the archetypal ideological division of “red” and “blue” America, Alaska was no less “red” (Republican) than Massachusetts was “blue” (Democrat).
The Air Force loved Alaska every bit as much as the Army did. Airmen saw the state as one vast training space and make-believe war zone, featuring great distances and with relatively few low-level noise restrictions. Military pilots could do almost anything they wanted here.
“Welcome to the Banana Belt,” said Army Maj. Kirk Gohlke of Frankenmuth, Michigan, as I stepped into several inches of snow and fifteen-degree temperature outside Anchorage airport. Maj. Gohlke wasn’t kidding. Because of its proximity to the ocean, Anchorage’s climate was mild compared to much of the rest of the state. Because he had lived farther north in Alaska, Maj. Gohlke saw the state’s biggest city as a bit too temperate climatically and, perhaps, with too many sophisticated airs culturally.
I spent the first night at Fort Richardson, outside Anchorage, named for Brig. Gen. Wilds Richardson, a native Texan who had commanded troops on the Yukon River a hundred years earlier. An Army outpost, Fort Richardson was adjacent to Elmendorf Air Force Base.[7] This would be the pattern throughout the Pacific. The Army operated as a forward presence thanks to the Air Force, which provided the transportation lift.
Fort Richardson was headquarters for USARAK (U.S. Army, Alaska). USARAK was dominated by the 172nd Separate Infantry Brigade, which was about to become the Army’s third Stryker Brigade Combat Team. The change in nomenclature carried momentous implications. Let me explain:
The Stryker was an eight-wheeled light-armored vehicle with an MK-19 grenade launcher and a .50-caliber machine gun that could transport eleven soldiers—a two-man crew and nine-man assault squad—at 60 miles per hour for 330 miles without refueling. Thus, the vehicle represented a lighter and more lethal regular Army suited for an unconventional battlefield, able to send small units great distances over rough terrain in relative comfort. The Stryker was named for Stuart Stryker and Robert Stryker, two unrelated Army noncommissioned officers killed under heroic circumstances: the former in Germany in 1945, the latter in Vietnam in 1967.[8]
The Stryker’s real significance for Alaska was that, for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War, the 172nd—to be the bulk of USARAK—would be a deployable, war-fighting force in fact as well as theory, with rail, port, and pallet facilities soon to be constructed and upgraded, in order to ship men and equipment anywhere around the globe in days and hours instead of months.
The ability to deploy large numbers of troops around the world at a moment’s notice had been a Pentagon priority for years. Now that the Air Force was increasingly able to fly large numbers of soldiers over the North Pole, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo were only five thousand miles away from Alaska, not much farther than Korea and the Philippines. Alaskan military bases were closer to the Middle East than any bases in the lower forty-eight states. The 172nd would be headed to Iraq, where I would link up with it the following year.
“Between the end of the Vietnam War and 9/11 we were basically a hunting and fishing brigade in the far north, it was real demoralizing,” one soldier told me. “Post 9/11, the Air Force in Alaska has become a tip of the spear for GWOT [the Global War on Terrorism]. And with the Stryker, we’re becoming the spear itself.”
Dawn on November 2, 2004—Election Day—did not arrive in Alaska until 9:30 a.m. By four in the afternoon it would be getting dark. But winters this far north were not nearly as depressing as the facts suggested; because sunlight spilled over the pole, it created an ethereal twilight that arrived long before dawn and lingered long after dusk. After sunup I went to the Stryker factory to inspect the vehicle and drive it.
The Stryker looked not much different than other infantry carrier vehicles, but it made a lot less noise, was constructed of metal composites that did not give off magnetic signals to lurking mines, and rode as though over a cushion of air. After being rattled around in the dusty interior of a Humvee and in the back of a seven-ton truck in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found the Stryker a pleasure to ride in. The interior, filled with computer screens for remote control of the guns, was like a roomy airplane with its own heating and cooling system. There was an infrared sight for locating enemy troops as far as twenty miles away, and even a microwave for heating MREs. The bottom line: the Stryker could deliver nine well-rested and decently fed grunts a great distance, ready to fight.
To observe the training of Stryker and other units I had to travel farther north. Thus, I went to nearby Elmendorf air base, where an Air National Guard crew flew Maj. Gohlke and me in a small plane to the army post of Fort Wainwright, outside Fairbanks. The flight from southern to central Alaska lasted forty-five minutes. Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, lay partially hidden in gunmetal fog, even as a lid of clouds was cracking open to reveal a lava red band on the western horizon. As the sun set in the late afternoon, the moon was already high in the sky.
Directly below, between masses of black spruce, the snow already had a faded February look. The Arctic tundra was a ragged death shroud of vegetation embedded in ice. It was a landscape of abstract brutality. Finally, Fairbanks and nearby Fort Wainwright appeared, meager grid-works in the snowy twilight. Fort Wainwright, where most of the 172nd Stryker Brigade was based, was named for Army Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, a defender of Bataan and Corregidor in the early days of World War II in the Philippines. In an example of the unlimited amount of space available to the U.S. military in Alaska, Fort Wainwright boasted access to no less than 10 percent of all the land controlled by the Army throughout the entire United States.
Maj. Gohlke, who had lived in Fairbanks, adored the area. Normally a quiet, taciturn guy, he lit up while talking about the summer solstice, when the first minor league pitch was thrown at midnight without the need for artificial lighting. “They’ll put on a local production of The Nut-cracker, and people with overalls who arrived in a flatbed truck will be sitting next to people in evening dress. In summer,” he continued, “you can practically walk across the rivers on the backs of beavers. The salmon run twelve hundred miles from the ocean to here. They haven’t eaten since leaving the salt water and are almost dead, yet they still put up a fight.”
Central Alaska near the Yukon River brought to mind, like no other place, the poetry of Robert W. Service and the prose of Jack London, two literary naturals and picaresque balladeers who had rollicking adventures to relate because their education had consisted not of the classroom, but of the school of hard knocks. London’s adventure stories, like Service’s Kiplingesque poetry, were inspired by the Alaskan gold rush: a last-ditch attempt to forge a new frontier in an increasingly crowded and recently industrialized America.1 London, an American, and Service, a Canadian, had both come of age in the first years of the twentieth century; thus their writing is unaffected by the literary modernism that came in the wake of World War I. Both had been vagabonds in search of gold in the far north. London wrote a story and Service a poem each entitled “The Call of the Wild.” Both were attracted to the brutal mountainscapes and fifty-below, starlit, wolf-howling nights of what Service called the “Great Alone.”2 London was more explicit: “In the Klondike…I found myself. There nobody talks.”3
Truly, Fairbanks was small, very quiet, and more rough-hewn than Anchorage, a Middle American counterpart to the latter’s Seattlesque cosmopolitanism. At a restaurant-bar in Fairbanks with a real Klondike feel frequented by locals and off-duty servicemen I learned the results of the 2004 elections between President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry. I was in the midst of a discussion with a lieutenant colonel about the demons of Pentagon bureaucracy when the energy level at the nearby tables suddenly intensified. I looked up at two TV screens whose audio I could not make out, because of the noise around me. On one screen Fox News commentators William Kristol and Fred Barnes were bobbing up and down in their seats with jocular expressions; on the other CBS News anchorman Dan Rather had an ashen, funereal look. The body language alone indicated the result. By the time we left, Bush was one electoral vote short of reelection and smiles and cheers lit up the place. The next morning I was eating breakfast in a local hangout when two young, very hip-looking women started high-fiving each other and shouting, “Bush won, Bush won!” I was a long way from my home in Massachusetts.
Fort Wainwright, around which life in Fairbanks revolved, was an illustration of what Bush’s foreign policy meant for infantry line units. Spread out for miles in the surrounding tundra, where the trees only looked dead because of the permafrost, the 172nd Stryker Brigade had turned this part of Alaska into a make-believe Iraq. In a blizzard-strewn forest clearing, I found the 4th Battalion of the 11th Field Artillery of the 172nd bivouacked in heated tents and manning a TCP (traffic control point), set up like so many I had seen the previous spring in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, with oil drums and concertina wire arranged in obstacle-course fashion. The commanding officer had had his men react to eighty-seven theoretical events over the past forty-eight hours—a pregnant woman demanding medical help, a kid hiding plastic explosives, a nervous local police chief ready to flip to the side of the insurgents, an IED (improvised explosive device) that had gone off, and so on.
All these incidents represented exactly what I had experienced with the Marines in Iraq the previous spring. The essential reality of Iraq had been communicated successfully down the chain of command to this battalion in Alaska: a field artillery unit in an unconventional environment faced many challenges that had nothing to do with field artillery.
The Arctic, rather than being unrealistic of Iraq, was good preparation for it. War fighting, particularly in the high-tech twenty-first century, relied on logistics: making sure there were enough MREs, enough battery chargers for intra-squad radios and night-vision goggles, enough ammunition, and so on. The Arctic was an intensification of this burden. In the heat, if you didn’t bring enough socks or underwear, you were uncomfortable, but you weren’t disabled. In the Arctic, if you didn’t pack perfectly you got frostbite, or worse. In the Arctic, every little detail, like zeroing your gunsight, was more difficult because you had to do it with gloves on. In the Arctic, you simply had more things to remember—more clothes to bring, more requirements for protecting your electronic equipment. I remembered what Army Col. Tom Wilhelm, a veteran of the Cold War Arctic infantry, had told me eighteen months earlier in Mongolia: in the Arctic every movement had to be planned minutely since you couldn’t afford to break a sweat, because once you stopped sweating you’d turn into a Popsicle.
Since extremely cold weather demanded more planning, it developed leadership. If even one private touched a piece of metal with a bare, frostbitten finger, it could tear some skin off and end the career of his immediate commander. And Iraq, among many other things, was about the effectiveness of platoon-level commanders. Though Green Berets could be very critical of the rest of the Army, they often made an exception for the units in Alaska. There was something about the severe cold, they had told me, that bred good soldiers.
I wandered into the battalion TOC (tactical operations center) and reentered Iraq. There was a beehive of activity under a large canvas tent, with laptops and Blue Force Trackers (satellite-based tracking and communication systems), and separate huddles taking place about the latest incident. The only difference was the vapor-barrier boots that everyone wore against the cold. Elsewhere in the tundra I found a mock Iraqi village with the Islamic prayer call blasting over loudspeakers, and cruddy cement blockhouses, like so many I had seen in Iraq, which, when you entered them, revealed a chaos of cheesy furniture and the Arabic language screams of children coming through hidden speakers.
Deploying soldiers to Iraq was a typical task for PACOM, which traditionally supplied many of the troops with which CENTCOM (Central Command) fought its Middle Eastern wars. But to see the NORTHCOM homeland security element of the U.S. military in Alaska, I had to journey for several hours southeast from Fort Wainwright to Fort Greely, past a section of the Alaskan pipeline, through the morbid virginity of ice-curdled streams and unyielding birch forests. Fort Greely, named for Army Maj. Gen. Adolphus Greely, an early-twentieth-century Arctic explorer, was a key component of President Bush’s emerging missile defense program. For the nearby town of Delta Junction, which boasted a couple of auto parts stores, one liquor store, and ten churches, the missile base represented the only economic hope.
The missile site was in a quasi-state of activation. Many of the underground silos were filled with interceptor missiles; others waited to be filled. The system was being tested and had yet to be turned on for actual deployment. The key acronym here was FCS (fire control system), insipid bureaucratic dialect for “killing,” or intercepting, an incoming missile from a rogue state like North Korea. “It’s a surface-to-air system on steroids,” explained Army Lt. Col. Greg Bowen of Grand Forks, North Dakota, the local commander. The kill would take place in “mid-course,” that is, when the incoming missile was at the highest point of its trajectory a hundred miles above earth, allowing the defender missile time to adjust its own course.
Many serious questions remained about the effectiveness of such a system, designed not to protect against a barrage of incoming missiles from a superpower like the Soviet Union, but against a single projectile fired by a relatively poor and radicalized country. Because such a country could not afford an arms race, this system, however imperfect and untested, might be able, it was claimed, to deter simply because of its existence. As for the threat posed by an emerging superpower, such as China, well, in such a hypothetical situation, other systems would have to be built. Fort Greely was but one “layer” of a growing missile defense network that would soon feature giant, offshore radar platforms floating off the most distant of the Aleutian Islands, close to East Asia.
The untested technology did not interest me as much as other things here. Responsibility for the entire facility rested with two hundred Alaskan national guardsmen commanded by Lt. Col. Bowen. Because they lived locally and had been assigned to Fort Greely for a decade already, they had developed an occupational expertise that you rarely encountered in the regular Army, where everyone was constantly being moved around. They reminded me of the Texas and Florida national guardsmen in Army Special Forces with whom I had been embedded the year before on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The Texans and Floridians were cops and state troopers in private life, whose community policing skills were vital in dealing with teenagers in Afghan border villages. National guardsmen—often a network of “good old boys”—were inching their way toward the front lines for both the exterior War on Terrorism and the interior function of homeland security. The guardsmen here interacted fine with the private contractors at the heart of missile defense; it was the active-duty military that was missing, for the missile defense system at Fort Greely was built and maintained by Boeing. The “industrial” part of the “military-industrial complex” had always been private. It was witnessing the tangible reality that made me realize just how inextricable the two parts of that concept were.
Another interesting facet about Greely was that it looked like nothing; it was a bunch of flat-roofed concrete-block facilities, almost Soviet in their ugliness, on a grubby white Arctic desert haunted by caribou, and filled with tractors, forklifts, and shipping containers. The only indication of the actual underground missile site, which included miles of tunnels, was the candy-cane-shaped aluminum air vents sticking out of the ground, reminiscent of any residential septic field. In the distance were granite peaks painted with ice and snow, standing between the Alaska and Brooks ranges.
The biggest social event at Fort Greely was the square dances at the base MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) facility. It certainly was a bleak landscape, both culturally and geologically. But as missile technology went forward, along with the Air Force’s ability to transport troops over the pole, the Arctic was destined to play a large role in America’s military future, one that had not gone away with the passing of the Cold War, with its polar trajectories for nuclear missiles and its submarine sorties in the marginal ice.
On the way back to Fort Wainwright, I spotted a moose with her calf in the deep snow. Twenty-four hours later, a series of military and commercial flights brought me from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer—to Honolulu, where a tropical rainstorm was in progress.
Honolulu, halfway across the Pacific, was the headquarters of PACOM. Here my Pacific odyssey would start in earnest, as would my introduction to the world of the Navy and Air Force, after two years with Army Special Forces and the Marines. I had stopped at PACOM in the summer of 2003, en route to embedding with the Army’s 1st Special Forces Group in the southern Philippines, and I had been back several times since.[9] It being the weekend, I went to two hallowed sites I had missed on previous visits.
The first was the national military cemetery at the Pouwaina (“Hill of Sacrifice”), where the indigenous Hawaiians had sacrificed offenders of certain kapas (taboos) to the pagan gods. In Section D, Grave 109, beside a banyan tree, among the other flat markers level with the ground, lay the remains of Ernie Taylor Pyle. An Indiana native, Pyle was killed at the age of forty-four in April 1945 during the Battle of Okinawa. He was a newspaper correspondent who had lived with the troops and wrote from their point of view. Like his fellow World War II correspondents in the Pacific, including Robert Sherrod and Richard Tregaskis, Pyle was sympathetic to his fellow Americans in uniform, demonstrated by the use of “we” and “our” in his narratives. Standing beside his grave, located between two unknowns, I thought of my late editor at The Atlantic Monthly, Michael Kelly, killed at a similar age while covering Operation Iraqi Freedom in April 2003. Kelly, like Pyle, manifested an honest, working-class punch in his sympathetic narratives about American soldiers.
The second hallowed spot was the USS Missouri, anchored off Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. Christened during World War II by then-senator Harry Truman’s daughter, Margaret, the Missouri saw action in the last months of the war, at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was struck by a kamikaze at the latter battle. Each of its nine main guns weighed as much as the space shuttle: 239,000 pounds. On September 2, 1945, while the Missouri lay anchored in Tokyo Bay, the Instrument of Formal Surrender ending World War II was signed on its teakwood deck, next to an American flag brought to Japan in 1853 by Commodore Matthew Perry. Upon the last Japanese signature, 450 propeller-driven Allied aircraft buzzed the battleship. One sailor described it as a sound that shook the world. At a time when China, Japan, and Western Europe lay in ruins, and when the Soviet Union had yet to develop an atomic bomb, that moment aboard this ship represented the climax of American power. The American volunteer military, enjoying the soldiering life for its own sake, and occupied with its train-and-equip missions worldwide, might have been in an imperial-like situation, but it was doubtful that even after the Soviet Union collapsed, at the height of our unipolar power, we dominated the world as much as we did back then.
In the mid-1950s the Missouri was decommissioned. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan, against the advice of naval experts, recommissioned the ship out of mothballs, refitted it, and sent it on a world tour, the first time such a thing was done since President Theodore Roosevelt had sent the “Great White Fleet” on a world tour eight decades earlier. Reagan might not have understood naval technology, but he understood national myth.
At the rechristening ceremony, his defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, charged the assembled sailors: “Listen for the footsteps of those who have gone before you. They speak to you of honor and the importance of duty. They remind you of your own traditions.”[10]
As I had been observing for some years, it was still such traditions adjoined to patriotic myth that constituted a hidden hand impelling the U.S. military forward.
In fact, even under George Bush, a president with a unilateral foreign policy relative to previous presidents, the U.S. military was trying to construct a system of multilateral security relationships, with pivotal political and economic implications. The Pacific was the best place to witness this development. Here PACOM was attempting to tranform itself into a variant of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a region that stretched from East Africa to the International Date Line in the central Pacific and constituted more than half of the world’s economy. Two of the world’s most rapidly modernizing militaries (those of the United States and China) resided within the PACOM area of responsibility. By negotiating bilateral agreements with dozens of countries that had few bilateral security agreements with one another, a regional military alliance of sorts was quietly being formed here at PACOM headquarters.
Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian father of the Second Reich in continental Europe, would have recognized this emerging system. In 2002 the German journalist Josef Joffe argued, in a remarkably perceptive article, that the United States had morphed into Bismarck’s Prussia.4 Just as Britain, Russia, and Austria needed Prussia more than they needed one another—making them “spokes” to Berlin’s “hub”—the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Joffe explained, exposed a world in which America was able to forge different coalitions for each crisis, because the other powers needed America more than they needed one another.
Joffe’s insight turned out to be premature, though, because President Bush lacked the nuance and attendant self-restraint of Bismarck, who understood that such a system could endure only so long as one didn’t overwhelm it with ever greater goals and challenges. The Bush administration did just that by the clumsy, often insulting way in which it tried to build a coalition for the invasion of Iraq, so France, Germany, Russia, and China, as well as a host of lesser powers such as Turkey, Mexico, and Chile, united against America to bring down this new Bismarckian power arrangement.
It was only in the Pacific that Bismarck’s late-nineteenth-century system still survived and prospered for the United States, helped along by the pragmatism of Hawaii-based military officers five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of Washington, D.C. PACOM represented a purer version of Bismarck’s imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration created prior to invading Iraq. Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology, writes Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy.5 Bismarck’s was an amoral system that brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe, because when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided. Such a system could ease China’s inevitable reemergence as a great power, without destabilizing world politics. China was now expanding its sphere of influence in the Pacific and beyond, just as the United States had done in the nineteenth century, while carving out a mercantile, seaborne empire of its own, propelled by the economic dynamism that ensued from the industrial North’s victory in the Civil War.
China’s investment in both diesel-and nuclear-powered submarines meant that in addition to protecting its coastal shelves, it was intent on building a blue water (oceanic) navy that could project power beyond its borders. This was wholly legitimate. China’s rulers were not democrats in the literal sense, but they were seeking a liberated first-world lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people. That meant protecting sealanes for the sake of transporting oil—necessary for the consumption habits of a new middle class. Naturally, China’s rulers did not trust the navies of the United States and India to do that for them. Yet as history has demonstrated, big powers all pursuing legitimate interests occasionally come into conflict. Thus, the defining regional struggle of the first half of the twenty-first century might occur within the PACOM area of responsibility (AOR). A war with China was a very remote possibility; more likely was a series of extremely subtle, military and diplomatic standoffs. America’s complete dominance over the Pacific was over. China seemed determined to be the master of subtle, peaceful influence, something that, after all, required a military component. It was a reality with which we had to come to terms.
It is worthwhile to note here that military officers had to approach the world in the most cautious, mechanical, and utilitarian way possible, assessing and reassessing regional balances of power while leaving the values side of the political equation to the civilian leadership. This made military officers, of all government professionals, the least likely to be led astray by the raptures of what in the early twenty-first century were labeled “liberal internationalism” and “neoconservative interventionism.” The history of World War II shows the importance of this attitude. In the 1930s, the U.S. military, nervous about the growing strength of Germany and Japan, rightly lobbied for building up American forces. But in 1940 and 1941, the military (not unlike the German General Staff a few years earlier) was presciently warning of the dangers of a two-front war; and by late summer of 1944, it should have been thinking less and less about defeating Germany and more and more about containing the Soviet Union.
To wit, Air Force and Navy officers now worried about the dangers of a Taiwanese declaration of independence, because such a move could lead the United States into a war with China that it might not be in our national interest to fight. Or take Indonesia: whatever the human rights failures of the Indonesian military, PACOM assumed that a policy of nonengagement would only have opened the door to Chinese-Indonesian military cooperation in a region that represented the future of world terrorism. Or Korea: a few Pacific-based officers simply took a reunified Korean Peninsula of some sort for granted, and their main concern was whether it would be “Finlandized” by China, or would reside within an American-Japanese sphere of influence.
Certainly, a tendency toward Bismarckian thinking was true of all the area commands. But PACOM was particularly likely to have influence on foreign policy in coming years. PACOM was further removed from Washington and harder to micromanage than, say, CENTCOM. Whereas the CENTCOM headquarters at Tampa was in the eastern time zone, only two hours distant by air from the nation’s capital, Honolulu was halfway across the Pacific: farther from Washington than Europe even. PACOM was more unwieldy than CENTCOM. It had more troops under its permanent command, and more complex and numerous political-military relationships to maintain with serious powers like Japan, Australia, and India, whereas the allies of CENTCOM, in the disparaging words of a few military experts, were a bunch of “third-rate Middle Eastern armies.”
PACOM hoped to manage a rising China in hub-and-spoke Bismarckian fashion, from a geographic point of comparative isolation—the Hawaiian Islands—with spokes reaching out to major allies such as Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and India. These countries, in turn, formed secondary hubs to help manage the Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian archipelagoes, among other places, and also the Indian Ocean. The point of this arrangement was to dissuade China so subtly that over time the rising behemoth would be drawn into the PACOM alliance system without any military disruptions. Because of the vast economic and trade consequences of misjudging the power balance in East Asia, American business and military interests ran in tandem, toward a classically conservative policy of constraining China, without ever needlessly provoking it.
In the Pacific you couldn’t disentangle war fighting from diplomacy, for if the dust ever did settle in the Middle East, the reemergence of China as a great power for the first time in two hundred years loomed as the single greatest military-diplomatic challenge to the United States. China was the world’s most populous and culturally dynamic civilization, with an economy that had been growing at 10 percent yearly for over a decade. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that unlike others in history was overwhelmingly literate, authoritarian China constituted the principal counterpoint to America’s liberal imperium.
China’s mixture of authoritarianism and market economics had broad cultural appeal throughout Asia, where it was the biggest trading partner of Thailand, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. Just as stateless terrorists were filling security vacuums, the Chinese were filling economic ones. All over the world, whether it was in the troubled Pacific island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal Zone, or out-of-the-way African nations like Djibouti and Niger, the Chinese, sometimes through émigré communities, were becoming the masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. China, unlike the former Soviet Union, boasted soft as well as hard power.
Businesspeople adored China; you didn’t have to beg them to invest there, as you did in parts of Africa and many other places. Because China’s authoritarian regime was improving the material well-being of hundreds of millions of its citizens, the plight of its dissidents did not seem to have the same degree of urgency as did the plight of the Soviet Union’s Sakharovs and Sharanskys.
Alas, managing China required far greater subtlety than America’s Cold War strategy against the Kremlin. PACOM’s goal was to make military bilateral relationships throughout the region so inextricable that even China would become enmeshed in them. Peace had also to be bought by traditional balance-of-power methods. PACOM had become an instrument for improved ties with India and Vietnam—two former U.S. adversaries that remained wary of China. PACOM’s numerous unit commanders had all made visits to India as part of a burgeoning military relationship, and the U.S. Air Force was flying training sorties with its Indian counterparts. Meanwhile, the Seventh Fleet was making port calls at Saigon and Da Nang, and Vietnamese special operators were working with their American equivalents.[11] PACOM’s goal was to have similar bilateral arrangements with the Chinese themselves.
In some cases such intermingling existed on the micro as well as the macro level. Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, the commander of Marine Forces, Pacific (MARFORPAC), at the time of my visit, had embedded marines with Philippine Army battalions, and had plans to do likewise with other Asian countries. The goal, he told me, was to have U.S. troops move around permanently from one training deployment with a friendly Asian military to another. By training with the Thais, the Bangladeshis, and “the Sings” (Singaporeans), for instance, interoperability could be forged at the platoon level. The best individual example of this that I would encounter in Honolulu was in the person of Australian Army Lt. Col. Mark Probert, PACOM’s commanding officer for homeland defense—homeland defense of the United States, that is.
Nevertheless, military multilateralism in the Pacific was constrained by the technical superiority of U.S. forces; it was difficult to develop bilateral training missions with many Asian militaries that were not making the same investments in high-technology equipment that the Americans were. A classic military lesson was that technological superiority did not always confer the advantages one expected. Getting militarily so far ahead of everyone else in the world created, among other problems, a particular kind of loneliness that not even the best diplomats could alleviate.
The Pacific was a more complicated affair than poverty-wracked sub-Saharan Africa, where the American military could make significant inroads with just a platoon of marines or Green Berets here and there. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had always been more important to global stability than the United Nations; it kept the Soviet Union at bay, thus keeping the peace in Europe for decades, and boasted a military machine able to intervene anywhere, very competently. That’s why PACOM’s unstated goal was the creation of the rough equivalent of NATO in the Pacific.
The largest building blocks of such a political-military alliance were America’s bilateral relationships with Japan and Australia. The Global War on Terrorism and the military threat posed by North Korea had given the Japanese government the impetus to further remilitarize—a necessary if ironic development for peace in half the globe. Australia owned a vast training space in its northern desert that was to become the tropical equivalent of Alaska for PACOM and its allies. Its political leadership was comfortable with a fighting military that intervened in expeditionary style throughout the terrorist-rich “crescent of instability” from Indonesia to Micronesia, thereby taking some of the burden off the Americans.
PACOM, like any effective peacekeeper, had to transmit to any potential adversary the willingness to fight and kill at a moment’s notice. And post-9/11, what was happening in Alaska—converting the U.S. Army there into a fast-deployable combat strike force—was starting to happen throughout the Pacific. Notably, the headquarters of the Army’s I Corps was in the process of permanently forward-deploying from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Japan, in order to form the backbone of PACOM’s Joint Forces Command—the equivalent of an enlarged Stryker Brigade for fighting on contested littorals.
PACOM was, to a significant degree, Big Navy incarnate. It was no accident that many of PACOM’s combatant commanders had been Navy admirals. The U.S. Navy was an obvious instrument for the delicate management of growing Chinese power. To a degree not quite true of armies or marines, navies had been instruments of soft state power, and as such were defined less by their war-fighting abilities than was the case with land forces. Peacetime navies suppressed slavery and protected merchant ships, even as they were a traditional means of one state applying discreet pressure on another. Sea power had been a more useful means of realpolitik than land power. It allowed for a substantial military presence in areas geographically remote from the homeland, without the homeland in question appearing belligerent. Navies, combined with air forces, allowed for global access—a need that was constant—whereas the need for army insertions on land was intermittent.6
Freedom has had a tendency to follow the shores of the oceans, so a reliance on naval power was more friendly to democracy than a reliance on land power.7 Navies made port visits, armies invaded. Thus, naval imperialism was not usually recognized as imperialism. Because ships took so long to get somewhere, and were less threatening than actual troops on the ground, naval forces allowed diplomats to ratchet up pressure in a responsible way during a crisis—in a way that was reversible.8 Navies made one truly aware of the link between military might and diplomatic influence. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. As the British expert H. P. Willmott writes, “The use of naval power by the Americans was the least dangerous option that presented itself, and the slowness with which events unfolded at sea gave time for both sides to conceive and implement a rational response to a highly dangerous situation.”[12]
Submarines have been an exception to this rule. Because of their ability to hide in great oceans and outrun surface warships, plus the fact that their weapons during the Cold War years were often aimed at civilian targets, submarines have been the ultimate stealthy tool of violence. The Battle of the Atlantic, in the middle of World War II, saw the initial relative decline of submarines, though, as their effectiveness decreased with the improved ability to detect them through sonar. But as I would learn at sea in the coming months, sailing both on the surface and below it, submarine warfare was experiencing a resurgence. It wasn’t just that the Chinese were investing heavily in subs. In an age of media intrusiveness, submarines were an attractive option. Their ability to operate both literally and figuratively below the surface, completely off the media radar screen, allowed a government to be militarily aggressive, particularly in the field of espionage, without offending the sensibilities of its citizenry. To wit, Sweden’s neutrality was a hard-won luxury bought by its own aggressive submarine fleet, so it did not require NATO protection—a fact of life that many idealistic Swedes were incompletely aware of.
Modern navies, in addition to the ability to fight from below the surface, had to fight from above it: through the projection of airpower from carrier decks.9 The development of the aircraft carrier was gradual. The realization of its use for offensive as well as defensive operations had to wait until fighter planes themselves could increase their speed and range. Another complication was that a carrier had to travel fast—up to thirty-four knots—to create high winds across its deck for the launching and recovering of aircraft.[13] Because battleships traveled at least ten knots slower than carriers through the 1930s, they could not accompany them. It wasn’t until the Iowa class of battleships, which included the USS Missouri, came on line that fleets and carrier strike groups, as we currently know them, emerged.
The aircraft carrier’s apotheosis came at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, when all the losses were inflicted by carrier-based planes. But the really big news to come out of the Pacific Theater in World War II was less the effectiveness of the carrier than the emergence of the American long-haul navy. As Willmott explains, effective fighting ranges for fleets were assumed to be no more than two thousand miles from their home bases. But the Americans staged landings at Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands and Saipan in the Marianas, which were 2,500 miles and 3,700 miles, respectively, from Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. They were also victorious at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and off the coast of New Guinea, at distances of 4,500 miles and more. This was due to the immense number of tugs, repair ships, fast oilers, cargo and salvage vessels, and hospital boats the Americans were able to deploy close to their sea battles. “Statistics almost become meaningless in trying to convey the sheer size of the American effort,” Willmott writes.10
At the end of World War II, the combination of air and sea power allowed the United States to dominate the world’s oceans to a degree not seen since the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, when the British Royal Navy had three times as many ships as its nearest rival, the French, and boasted ironclads, destroyers, torpedo boats, and other ships with names like Thunderer, Devastation, Boomerang, and Gossamer—“the names that Kipling loved.” As it passed its prime, the Royal Navy considered its job less the fighting of battles than the safeguarding of law and order and of civilization worldwide: by protecting merchant fleets and putting out the fires of onshore rebellions.[14]
The U.S. Navy at the turn of the twenty-first century now had a similar role, with which I was later to become intimately familiar.
The U.S. Navy also had a homeland defense responsibility. To see this firsthand, one morning I drove from my quarters at Hickam Air Force Base[15] near Pearl Harbor to the Marine air base at Kaneohe Bay, where I boarded a Navy P-3 surveillance plane for the short flight to the Navy’s Barking Sands missile range. Hawaiian highways began and ended at these bases. The original Cold War intent of President Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system in the 1950s had been to link military bases throughout the mainland United States. That point was lost on the public because the highways linked everything else, too. But here on the island of Oahu, Eisenhower’s purpose was visually more tangible.
I was familiar with the P-3 surveillance plane from my visits to Colombia and the southern Philippines in 2003, where it was employed to track movements of narco-terrorists and Abu Sayyaf guerrillas slipping in and out of jungles and small harbors. The P-3 was an old cargo plane packed with the latest electronic surveillance equipment, originally designed to hunt Soviet submarines. Flying in such rattling and austere gray metal crates, which had been converted and reconverted from one purpose to another, and considering other decades-long standbys such as the A-10 and the B-52, I realized that despite the obvious truth about financial waste in the military, another side of the tale was the stingy resourcefulness of the Navy and Air Force, which kept these old planes in the sky.
The missile range was located on the westernmost beach of the westernmost of the populated Hawaiian Islands, Kauai. The International Date Line was relatively close by. There were few other places farther west you could visit. The beach and the area around it were closed to the public. Not surprisingly, a more beautiful beach was hard to imagine, with no footprints on the sand except for those made by turtles.
While the missiles at Fort Greely in Alaska could shoot down incoming projectiles in mid-course, at the edge of outer space, the missiles soon to arrive at Barking Sands represented another layer of protection, designed to kill rogue projectiles during ballistic reentry. Fort Greely was an Army base; Barking Sands a Navy base. But the difference meant little. The missiles here would be managed by the Army and civilian contractors from Lockheed. And the oceanic testing area that this Navy base operated—as large as the United States west of the Missouri River—was used often by the Marines and Air Force. “Jointness,” as it was called in the military, was slowly breaking down borders between the still-hostile services.
Yet the most interesting people at Barking Sands were civilians: un-pretentious locals from sleepy hamlets around the island, who, like the Alaska national guardsmen at Fort Greely, were the ones ultimately responsible for testing President Bush’s missile defense program. Take Aubrey Kunihige, Pat Alvarez, and Averiet Soto, three jacks-of-all-trades who served as program managers and technical specialists for the launch sequences. The sons of sugarcane farmers, Kunihige was an ethnic Japanese, Alvarez an ethnic Filipino, and Soto an ethnic Portuguese. All were military veterans, with children currently in the service. They had worked at Barking Sands for decades.
Kunihige and Soto had been on a temporary duty assignment in the naval annex beside the Pentagon on 9/11, and felt the whoosh of the incoming plane. When I asked how it had affected them, they just said that it added “resolve” to their work here. They had nothing more to say. They were quiet, unassuming men, content to work twelve hours daily hammering away at their keyboards in this hectic, anal environment where few people talked, so evocative of the space program. As space itself became militarized—driven, among many other things, by the competition between the United States and China—men like these represented the future of war; or at least the technological aspect of it.
From Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, I flew west across the Pacific to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.[16] My plane was a KC-135 Stratotanker, a forty-five-year-old all-purpose air-to-air refueler, used mainly for B-52s. Flying military air was a crapshoot. Whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Hawaii, you were usually delayed not by hours but by days. Two C-5 cargo planes destined for Guam had both developed technical difficulties, and the KC-135 represented my third attempt in twenty-four hours to leave Honolulu. But I wasn’t complaining—all the flights were free. They were provided by the Air Mobility Command, a branch of the Air Force that coordinated departures and arrivals of military aircraft between bases all over the world. Because Air Force planes usually had extra space on board for passengers, military families regularly utilized them, trading comfort and reliability for the chance to see loved ones at zero expense.
I took my place alongside smiling adults and small children, as we settled down on hard canvas seats facing inward on the plane’s shabby interior, cluttered with exposed pipes and wires. The suffocating heat did not cease until we were airborne. Before boarding, we had all purchased box lunches consisting of processed ham and cheese sandwiches, along with milk and cookies, from Air Force Food Services at $3.30 apiece. It was Veterans Day. Inside the Air Force departure terminal everyone had been watching in rapt silence the official commemorations at Arlington National Cemetery, interspersed with commentary from the latest fighting in Al-Fallujah on Fox News. CNN had been covering the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Nobody had wanted to watch that. “Get that communist shit off,” one retired sailor had shouted. All this was part of a common experience that separated the military—down to the youngest dependent—from the rest of society.
Because of the noise in the fuselage and the need for earplugs, passengers on military flights never talked. As the plane took off, I contemplated the 3,284 nautical miles to Guam: eight hours of flying over nothing but water, merely to get from the central to the western Pacific. The Pacific Ocean was the central organizing principle of the earth’s surface, occupying nearly a third of it, larger than the entire dry land area of the planet. Double the size of the Atlantic, at its widest point, from the coast of Colombia to the Malay Peninsula, it covered half the circumference of the earth. The Pacific’s mean depth was over 14,000 feet; and at the Mariana Trench it was much deeper than Mount Everest was high, reaching down 36,201 feet, close to seven miles. The very scale of this hydrosphere suggests the inhuman dimensions of the heavens overhead.
The sea and the sky represented the purest and most abstract landscapes of war and strategy, in which the peculiarities of culture and terrain played little role. This was especially true when one considered that navies and air forces were primarily transport systems—particularly in a navy’s case, because buoyancy has been cheap compared to aerodynamic lift.[17] Writes British naval expert Eric Grove: the United States, as a “semi-island continent, must go to sea” to exert military power. Yet sea power was indivisible from airpower, because, as Grove continues, “Seaborne platforms provide some of the most flexible, and least vulnerable ways of deploying…aircraft or missiles.”11
The watery void below me was deceptive, though, for in the aftermath of the Cold War, with dirty little ethnic struggles proliferating across vast Pacific archipelagoes, Navy and Air Force planners had to concentrate on dry-land terrains to an unprecedented degree: 70 percent of the world’s population lived in such coastal areas. This would have to translate into a Navy with a larger number of ships that were increasingly smaller in size. With an enemy now defined by many small clusters of combatants, not just the Army and Marines, but the Navy, too, had to morph down to the unit size of the adversary. Smaller, more numerous ships meant an increase in the complexity of the Pacific’s battle and maneuver space.
Concomitantly, the Navy and Air Force—whose strategic planning was now inseparable—knew that their services still had to defend immense sections of the planet’s watery and dry-land surface through old-fashioned, conventional means, thereby allowing Army Special Forces and the Marines to focus on the unconventional edges of the battlefield. So complex were the challenges that when I had mentioned the threat of piracy in the Pacific to a Navy futurist back in Washington, he scoffed and told me piracy was just part of the noise.
The only land directly in our midst during the flight was Wake Island and Johnston Atoll, both U.S. possessions. To the south, sprinkled like fairy dust across the ocean, lay the Gilbert, Marshall, and Caroline islands, among other archipelagoes. The fourteen independent island states that encompassed Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia were symptomatic of the new century’s diplomatic and security complexities. While small in population, Oceania constituted a significant voting bloc in the United Nations, and lay claim to immense maritime resources. In particular, Melanesia had become a zone of violent internal conflict and ethnic strife in places such as Tonga, Fiji, East Timor, and the Solomon Islands. Such crumbling states were shadowy conduits for money laundering and weapons smuggling that abetted international terrorism. Their internal weaknesses were providing an opening for the Chinese, who naturally were increasingly active with new embassies in all of these places.12
Halfway into the flight we crossed the International Date Line and moved our clocks ahead twenty-three hours, putting Veterans Day behind us. The experience made me think of the days of the Pan Am Clipper service of the mid-twentieth century, fondly recalled to me by Pacific military veterans of a certain age. The Pan Am plane would island hop from Honolulu to Midway, then to Wake and Guam en route to Manila in the Philippines, chasing the sunset all the way.
Eight hours after takeoff, bumpily descending through the tropical rain clouds, for a moment we saw nothing, then, suddenly, the co-pilot exclaimed, “Holy shit, look at that! Land Ho,” as a big green monster of an island came into view. Landing at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam’s northern tip, bordered on three sides by six-hundred-foot cliffs dropping sheer into the ocean, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F-18 Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among a plethora of other military aircraft. A crew member pointed to a reinforced-concrete, typhoon-proof hangar under construction for B-1 bombers. “That’s for protection against our friends across the Sea of Japan,” he said, referring to the North Koreans. I noticed a truck filled with cruise missiles on one of the runways.
In an era of constant jet travel, airports, even military ones, weren’t particularly interesting to look at. But if one considered a few facts about Andersen, and where it was located, it was worth several days of awe at least. Andersen was nothing less than the most potent platform anywhere for projecting American military power at great distances, for it was the future that Andersen represented for U.S. strategy in the Pacific that had brought me to Guam. Massive circular tanks held sixty-six million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stored as much weaponry: 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Its 10,500-foot runways could handle any plane in the Air Force’s arsenal, as well as the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing in the midst of the Pacific. The runway and taxiway sprawl was so vast that I barely noticed a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make from its home port in Japan.
All this was significant because of “location, location, location,” Maj. Gen. Dennis Larsen of San Antonio, Texas, the commander of the 13th Air Force at the time of my visit, told me. Whereas the West Coast of the United States was thirteen hours’ flying time from North Korea, Guam was four. From Guam, the 13th Air Force—the equivalent of a Marine or Army division—covered almost all of the PACOM area of responsibility. That meant sixteen of the twenty-four time zones, from the strategic Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia (the departure point for some of the U.S. planes bombing Afghanistan and Iraq) to the coast of Mexico, and including China and Taiwan. In coming months, the headquarters of the 13th Air Force would be relocated to Honolulu, even as the 13th itself would later be disbanded. This was part of a reorganization whose purpose was to centralize control over the Pacific at PACOM headquarters in Honolulu, without diminishing Guam’s importance as a forward operating base.
Some of the heaviest bombing runs against North Vietnam, including the “Christmas bombing” of 1972, originated here, when 154 B-52s packed these runways. In April 2001, when the Chinese released the crew members of the Navy EP-3 surveillance plane they had detained, they were flown here.
Maj. Gen. Larsen said, “This is not like Okinawa. This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory. We can do what we want here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out.” Indeed, what struck me about Andersen, while staring out from the top of the control tower, was how much space there was for expansion to the south and west of the current perimeters, even before reaching the cliffs. Property prices were zooming. Hundreds of millions of dollars of construction funds were being allocated. What Germany, close to the Soviet Union, had been for the U.S. military during the Cold War decades, this little island close to China was on its way to becoming for the early twenty-first century: the spoke in the wheel of a constellation of bases that would move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia.
By making Guam the Hawaii of the western Pacific, the Americans might ironically make it simple for Chinese military planners, by giving them just one problem to solve—how to threaten or intimidate Guam. Therefore, some felt that the way to counter the Chinese was not by concentration, but by dispersion. How might the United States prevent Guam from becoming too big? Well, for one thing, it could build up Palau, an island of twenty thousand inhabitants in the western Pacific, between Mindanao in the Philippines and the Federated States of Micronesia. Palau’s financial aid was contingent on a defense arrangement with Washington. In any case, as much as the military adapted to the rise of China, it was clear that keeping the Pacific an American lake—patrolled with impunity by the Seventh Fleet as it had been for decades—was probably not history’s final say on the matter.
A house overlooking a golf course, furnished in magnificent Japanese style, with fine carpets and ceramics, constituted my living quarters at Andersen. It was nicer even than the split-level furnished apartment I had had at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. For a traveler, to go from the Marine Corps to the Air Force was like going from a slum to a fancy resort. The Air Force didn’t have barracks, it had “dorms,” which, even for the enlisted ranks, looked like apartments in a singles’ community. In the chow halls, which were comparable to upscale chain restaurants, you left your tray on the table for a waitress to pick up. There were lawn police to ensure that officers maintained the surroundings assigned to them. Hickam, with its art deco buildings, and Andersen, with its manicured, palm-patterned greenery, resembled gated communities and office parks. Inside headquarters buildings, airmen in dull green jumpsuits occupied workplaces as elegant as many in the private sector. Many marines I knew had never experienced such luxury in their whole lives, even on vacation.
There was no scandal in this. Just as spartan conditions were part of the Marine Corps mystique, as well as a psychological tool in maintaining the leathernecks’ sheer aggressiveness for house-to-house fighting in places like Al-Fallujah, a comfortable lifestyle accomplished something similar for the Air Force.[18]
The Air Force, even more so than the Navy, was the technical service of the armed forces—the executive arm of the coming militarization of outer space. Not only pilots and navigators, but much of the ground staff, too, required years of specialized training. And because the air was a zero-defect environment, where the slightest lapse could result in catastrophic consequences, the Air Force required the most competent, fastidious, and driven people—the kind of people who could draw good salaries in the business world. To keep such people in the service, after investing so much money in their training, the Air Force gave them the sort of lifestyle—complete with career-enhancement programs and family services—that the other branches of the military couldn’t match. The Marine Corps wanted its ranks filled with young, hungry, high-testosterone men, relatively few of whom were expected to reenlist. The Air Force wanted you for your entire career. The “corporate Air Force” was what they called it, because it was like working for IBM.
Yet, the War on Terrorism was slowly making the Air Force more expeditionary, more like the Marines and other services, taking it back to its roots as a branch of the Signal Corps, which helped the Army chase down Pancho Villa in Mexico prior to America’s entry into World War I. The cushy nine-to-five existence for airmen had ended on 9/11; many of them now spent long periods away from home in rough conditions, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Air Force had always been the only service where the officers—the pilots—took the greatest physical risk. But since 9/11 the expeditionary nature of unconventional warfare was placing greater emphasis on the fighting skills of enlisted men. For example, the Army Special Forces teams that had taken down the Taliban in Afghanistan had Air Force embeds with them for close air support—grid-marking targets for the AC-130s with the 150 pounds of radio equipment that they carried on their backs in the field. Moreover, the quick deployment of the Army’s new Stryker brigades gave unprecedented importance to cargo planes like the C-130 and C-17, which could land without lights on short dirt runways—a task requiring the placement of noncommissioned airmen in hellholes throughout the world for ground support.
The Air Force was a branch of the Army called the Army Air Forces until 1947, when it became a separate service. Those Army roots were manifested in how fighter pilots still saw themselves—as the Cavalry coming to the rescue, whether in an AC-130, a B-52 bomber, or a stealthy jet fighter. When I had asked Col. Mark Tapper of Westlake Village, California, a Hickam-based F-16 pilot, about unmanned planes making airmen like himself obsolete, he replied, “It won’t happen, because it’s not chivalrous. We’re the knights—the officers who take personal risk. That’s part of our identity.”
When you scratched the surface of airmen’s emotions, you learned that they, too, like Marine and Army grunts, saw the pre-9/11 period as a bad dream—a time when, even during the air campaigns in the Balkans, risk was not tolerated in the way it was now.
I spent part of my time at Andersen hanging out with the B-52 flight crews, on deployment from Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana.[19] The giant, 150-foot-long B-52 was a flying gas tank stuffed with forty-five individual five-hundred-pound bombs. It was the Air Force’s hall-of-fame heavy bomber, around since 1954. The B-52s at Andersen had all been built in 1961 and 1962. They were much older than their crews.
You somehow expected B-52 pilots and navigators to be big, strapping guys, but they weren’t. They were of average build, and often short, an advantage in the plane’s cramped quarters where you couldn’t stand upright. The B-52 was like a sub: the ultimate instrument of mass violence. Almost all of its vast space was for fuel and weaponry, with the human beings crouching in a tiny maze filled with flaking old pipes and wires. As one of the last slide-rule-developed aircraft, the B-52 cockpit was a veritable grainy, black-and-white backdrop for a World War II movie. While the image of the Air Force was high-tech, the aesthetic environment in so many of its most commonly used planes harked back to the industrial age. The antediluvian ambience influenced the personalities of the crew members, who were, to a man, self-consciously the cliché image of true blue flyboys, carousing at night in bars just like in the movies.
The B-52s—direct descendants of the B-29s—revived thoughts of World War II. Indeed, like the bases in Germany, those in Guam had been paid for in blood—in Guam’s case, the blood of U.S. marines.
For sailors and marines, the fight against Japan in the Pacific was the dominant drama of the Second World War. World War II occupied your thoughts in the Pacific in a way that it simply didn’t in Europe, because the sites of sixty-year-old battles were often the only visual expressions of history that these islands had. Yet, because of the region’s random configurations of atolls, making narrative sense of World War II here was more difficult than it was in Europe.
The story of the Pacific war became comprehensible only when one realized that the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was merely the start of a broad-based Japanese offensive that also saw the bombardments of the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, and Burma, so by the end of February 1942 the Japanese controlled virtually the entire Pacific Rim from Manchuria in the north to near Australia in the south. Within a few weeks of Pearl Harbor, many islands across the western half of the Pacific Ocean also fell to the Japanese. The effect was a grim and heroic saga of Navy-assisted Marine landings on small islands in Micronesia, which set the stage for the recapture of the Philippines, Burma, and the screen of Japanese-held archipelagoes threatening Australia. The process began with the securing of Midway Island, close to Hawaii, in June 1942, and culminated in 1945 with the taking of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, close to the Japanese mainland. Guam was typical: a nightmarish mass graveyard for marines, characterized by heat, malaria, and hand-to-hand combat. The Omaha Beach scenario of storming ashore under a wall of fire from enemy pillboxes was actually far more common in the Pacific than in Europe. Let me set the historical stage:
Guam’s first contact with the West had been the landing in 1521 at Asan Beach of Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese mariner who sailed for Spain. The Spanish then killed and converted the native Chamorros, a Filipino people who spoke a related Tagalog language. In 1668, Spanish missionaries rechristened Guam and the other islands in the archipelago the Marianas, in honor of Queen Maria Anna of Spain. The Americans acquired Guam in 1898 as a consequence of the Spanish-American War.
In December 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, over five thousand Japanese troops forced a few hundred members of the American garrison off this 212-square-mile island. The Marines took back Guam in late July 1944.13 The Navy had shelled the island for thirteen straight days. Then to the sound of “The Marines’ Hymn,” played over the ships’ loudspeakers, the leathernecks climbed down into the landing crafts. By the time the fighting was over eight days later on July 29, the campaign to retake Guam had cost 1,744 American dead and 6,540 wounded, in addition to thousands of Japanese lives.
From the hillside where Japanese defensive positions had been located, I gazed down at Asan Beach where the Marines (and Magellan) had landed, and imagined the scene in its bloody awfulness. The Japanese had been here for three years waiting for the attack. They had deforested the hillsides to make it impossible for invaders to hide while trudging uphill. Because most of the island was bordered by high cliffs dropping sheer into the sea, there were only a few places to land. Like Asan, the beaches all had long coral tables extending far out into the water; thus an invasion had to come at high tide. Surprise was never an option. No matter what the technological advantage of one side, as another generation of Americans would learn in Iraqi cities, in war some tasks were just tough.
Besides an air base, the Marines bequeathed to their country one of the best deepwater ports between Pearl Harbor and Manila Bay. Apra Harbor, next door to Asan Beach, was home to a forward-deployed submarine squadron—a squadron with which I was to become closely acquainted in the coming months. As at the air base, expansion was imminent here. Capt. David Boone, an intense, dark-haired, and boyish-looking naval officer who had grown up all over the Pacific Rim, told me that while the U.S. military “may have moved beyond the Cold War, its infrastructure still hadn’t.” During the Cold War, the Navy had a specific infrastructure for a specific threat. Now the threat was multiple and uncertain: from a conventional war against North Korea to an unconventional counterinsurgency against a Chinese-backed rogue island-state. Being more agile, Capt. Boone explained to me, meant leveraging services out to the civilian community on Guam, so that the Navy here could concentrate on military matters only. Concomitantly, he was planning to expand the waterfront, build more bachelor quarters, and harden the electric power system by putting it underground. “The fact that we have lots of space today is meaningless,” he went on. “The question is, how would we handle the surge requirement necessitated by a full-scale war?”
Again, I was reminded that while amateurs discussed strategy, professionals discussed logistics. Logistics was the elephantine component of military reality to which civilians were generally blind, like the part of an iceberg below the surface. But only to the uninitiated did logistics seem dull, as I learned off the nearby island of Saipan.
Early one morning on Guam, I boarded a Navy MH-60 Knighthawk helicopter—the equivalent of the Army’s Black Hawk—and flew to Saipan, in the Northern Marianas chain. The pilots were Lts. Junior Grade Tom Neill, Jr., of Cullman, Alabama, and John Schein of Chama, New Mexico. I would never forget them because of the thrill they allowed me.[20] They flew five hundred feet off the water during the entire 130-mile journey northeast. Strapped loosely in the seat, I was practically hanging out the open side window, facing eastward on the central Pacific; on the way back, I would watch the sunset over the Philippine Sea to the west. In the course of the forty-five-minute flight I was soaked by several rain showers. But the equatorial sun would unfailingly come out, and within minutes I was dry again—that is, until vertical columns of vapor reaching to the top of the sky, like new worlds in creation, would beat up another storm. The sea was an interminable panel of pearly welts through the cloudy sunlight. I could almost smell the rain clouds. The attraction of Navy flying was visceral in these broad ocean reaches, where the water below might as well have been the gaseous void of a distant planet. Eastward to the horizon, the ocean floor quickly descended 36,000 feet to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a much steeper drop than the Himalayas. The Pacific offered a demonstration of infinity. It was the next best thing to space travel.
A reptilian green planet soon appeared, floating in the watery curvature of the great ocean. Like Guam, Tinian was ringed by massive cliffs against which waves exploded, bearing all the energy built up on their journey south from the Aleutians. Like Guam, Tinian had few beachheads, making it a nightmare for World War II planners and for the marines whom they sent to assault them. Near Tinian’s northern tip, I spotted a pair of runways for B-29 Superfortresses, on which the jungle was now infiltrating. Beside the old runways were two pits that had once held the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, a lone B-29, the Enola Gay, piloted by Army Air Forces Col. Paul Tibbets of Quincy, Illinois, had taken off for Hiroshima from the jungle below me.
Saipan, bigger than Tinian, was another limestone and coral cap peeking out of the sea, another nightmare of cliff walls with few landing spots. On its idyllic beaches, braided with coconut palms and Norfolk pines, the 4th Marine Division came ashore a week after D-day in Europe. In its bloody crawl through sugarcane plantations and raggedy jungle, toward the enemy command center on Mount Tapotchau, 3,500 marines and soldiers died, as well as 28,000 Japanese defenders—more American dead than at Omaha Beach.
Touring the PACOM area of responsibility provided me the privilege of following the course of these island struggles: places, unlike Normandy, where few American tourists got to. Arriving on Saipan, I drove to the U.S. War Memorial that commemorated the battles of Saipan and the Philippine Sea, the second of which took place days later in nearby waters. (A failed attempt by the Japanese Imperial Navy to reverse the American conquest of the Marianas, the Philippine Sea would turn out to be the last great carrier battle of World War II.)
Battlefields were the most silent places I have ever been, as though to eternally compensate for the mayhem that once transpired on the same soil. At the north of Saipan there was a line of dizzyingly high cliffs bearing a pathetic hodgepodge of memorials: to Japanese civilians—mothers holding their babies—who had jumped hundreds of feet into the cavity of a crashing sea, rather than be taken prisoner by American marines and soldiers who they were convinced were going to torture them.
Like Guam, Saipan was a U.S. territory, and PACOM had been taking advantage of this fact. My guide on Saipan was Navy Capt. Conrad Divis of Bayport, New York. Whereas Army, Air Force, and Marine ranks are vaguely similar to one another, Navy ranks are somewhat different, and thus disorienting at first. A Navy captain is the equivalent of a colonel in the other services; just as a Navy commander is the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel, and a lieutenant commander the equivalent of a major. Because Capt. Divis was the commanding officer of more than one ship, he was referred to by his men as “the commodore,” a wonderful operatic title that provided me with my first hint of how the Navy, more than the other services, is the true American heir to the European military tradition of pomp and circumstance.
Capt. Divis was an awkwardly quiet man, and I worried at first how the day would turn out. “You are interested in logistics?” he asked me, after we had seen the World War II sites.
“Yes,” I said.
“Fine, I’ll show you some things.”
At the port, he nudged me aboard a crew boat that bumped out over the waves of the Philippine Sea at eighteen knots, a speed which on a small craft like this one felt like flying. “I command three MPSes [maritime pre-positioning ships],” he told me. “I’m taking you to one of them.” I didn’t know what he meant by a pre-positioning ship.
About five miles out to sea, we came upon what looked like an oil tanker or civilian cargo ship. There seemed nothing military about it. I was confused. Emblazoned on its hull was the name Jack Lummus. Lummus was a Marine first lieutenant from Ennis, Texas, who had died on Iwo Jima, and like the other men for whom MPSes were named, was a Medal of Honor recipient.
The crew boat crept up to the giant stern of the eleven-story-tall ship. In the heaving sea, we jumped onto a ladder and climbed up two levels onto a platform. Because of the sunlight and the white coral and sand at the bottom, the sea had a chemical blue Kool-Aid color. Walking inside the ship I came upon a vast garage space in which about six hundred M1A1 Abrams tanks, Humvees, armored bulldozers, amphibious assault vehicles, Seabee earth movers, seven-ton trucks, and the rest of the rolling stock for an entire MEB (Marine Expeditionary Brigade) of fifteen thousand leathernecks was jammed bumper to bumper. An adjacent part of the cavernous ship held vast stores of ammunition.
The Jack Lummus was a floating military base—a larger one than most of those I had seen in Iraq or Afghanistan. If it had to, the Jack Lummus had room, fresh water, and food stores to sustain fifteen battalions of marines and sailors for thirty days, yet only about three dozen personnel were required to operate it, half of whom were civilian merchant mariners.
“You should see the handful of eighteen-to-nineteen-year-old Marine NCOs who come aboard to supervise the order of the loading,” Capt. Divis remarked, “so that not one inch of space is wasted and no vehicle has to be moved around a second time to make way for another. These marines have organized it all on a computer-generated diagram. They’ve got this intense combat-ready look as they work.”
Navy Capt. Divis was enmeshed in a world of marines and civilian seamen. “As I’m sure you’ve heard already,” he told me, “we’re all joint—all purple—these days.” He meant that operations usually involved all four services, and private contractors, too.
The fifteen merchant seamen on board were from the Boston area: burly, Irish, and delightful, as they showed me the generators, sewage pumps, steam engines, water purification systems, and myriad other equipment that they maintained and were qualified to repair at a moment’s notice. Like Capt. Divis’s sailors, they were away from their families for a year at a time. The beauty of civilians was this: had the Navy done the job, the government being the government, and the military being the military, it would have required a hundred men on board, rather than the fifteen that were quite sufficient to do it. As I had seen with Kellogg, Brown & Root at military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with DynCorp in the Philippines and Colombia, both of whose employees were at once physically brave and technically efficient, the privatization of militaries wasn’t always the nefarious process that outsiders believed. It might even be the only practical way forward in an age of war when individual expertise and initiative often mattered more than sheer manpower numbers, mass infantry invasions aside.
It was the tugs, hospital boats, and other support ships so far from their home ports, as much as the subs and carriers, that had composed America’s victorious long-haul Navy in World War II. Likewise, this civilian-looking ship was key to the force projection required for fighting North Korea, or any insurgency in the South Seas.
“Because we can move around from island to island, we’re less vulnerable,” Divis explained.
The pre-positioning concept, as I had seen it illustrated on Saipan, grew out of President Jimmy Carter’s Rapid Deployment Force, which, in turn, was a consequence of the Iranian hostage crisis. As with many such ideas, it began when one political party was in power and continued under another: the Jack Lummus was built by General Dynamics during the Reagan years. Moreover, the ship represented the very epitome of the more light and lethal, Asia-oriented basing footprint that would be a hallmark of the Bush administration’s military transformation strategy; a strategy that had originated with civil servants in the Defense Department of President Bill Clinton. America’s military was so vast and multi-layered that it was a product of continuity over ideologically diverse administrations.
The pre-positioning ships were one piece of a taut webwork designed to move troops and equipment around forward bases in an oceanic environment defined by what military planners called “the tyranny of distance.” I flew to Okinawa, 1,500 miles to the northwest, to see another aspect of that webwork.
At a U.S. port in Okinawa, I went aboard a large car ferry called the WestPac Express, built by an Australia-based company. Like the Jack Lummus, it had a crew of fifteen American merchant mariners. It was a type of ferry familiar to European holiday makers, who used them regularly to travel within the Mediterranean. For U.S. Marines in the Pacific, it was becoming an icon of expeditionary warfare.
Just a few years before, it had taken seventeen trips on a C-130 or C-17 to move a battalion of marines from one place in the Pacific to another. Because of mechanical and weather-related delays, that meant the better part of a month. This car ferry, essentially a diesel-powered catamaran with water jets that moved at a thundering thirty-three knots, could handle a whole Marine battalion with its equipment, and get them from Okinawa, at the southern tip of Japanese territory, to mainland Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, or Thailand in just a few hours or days. Its cargo hold was as big as twenty C-17s, with lots of space for helicopters. A few WestPac ferries made for a seaborne Stryker brigade. With beefed-up communications, you could set up a command-and-control cell for a three-star general aboard.
And it was run by civilians. The civilian captain (a master seaman) ran the ship, on which the marines were the passengers. The Marines or other armed services could never keep someone in a job long enough, or pay him enough, to develop the skills that a master seaman in the Merchant Marine had.
“Who thought up the idea of using car ferries to get marines to a combat zone and then link up with pre-positioning ships?” I asked a Marine chief warrant officer. “No one at the Pentagon. Just a bunch of guys brainstorming here,” the chief replied.
Okinawa, 1,400 miles across more ocean from Guam, brought back unsettling memories of Greece and the Balkans, where I had lived and traveled in the 1980s. Like the urban areas of mainland Greece, Okinawa was an ugly, yellowy-white splatter of crummy concrete and squat, functional buildings that smothered all available space on the bumpy landscape in the south of the island. There was no room to breathe. The American military bases rammed up against compressed and crowded civilian areas, so the bases were disliked for environmental, to say nothing of historical, reasons. During the Cold War, Greeks had been humiliated by the presence of American bases, just as they had been dependent upon them; it was the same with Okinawans. The very defacement of the historical landscape by nonstop construction appeared to have intensified the bitterest memories on both the Japanese and American sides.
“Returning to Okinawa,” William Manchester wrote in 1978, after having fought here as a marine in 1945, “is like watching a naked priest celebrate mass…. The greatest of the island battlefields, more precious than Gettysburg—or at any rate more expensive in American blood—at first glance appears to be covered with used-car lots, junkyards, stereo shops, pinball-machine emporiums, and vendors of McDonald’s fast food.”14
History here, as in some places in the Balkans, was the more overpowering because it no longer had a visual reference. Okinawa was the place where I had the most intense and darkest conversations. It magnified for me just how horrible war had been, and could yet be in Asia.
Nobody was happy. The Americans had built aesthetically pleasing noise barriers against the roar of F-15 Eagles, and had put stringent restrictions on its marines. Yet every time a fighter jet screamed overhead, or every time a local girl was raped, no matter how statistically rare the incident in both absolute and relative terms, it led, as one should expect, to deep and lingering resentment. Kadena Air Force Base, which accounted for 75 percent of the acreage of the American military on the island, was also home to numerous sacred sites of local ancestor worship. The Americans and the Okinawans were literally stuck with each other.
I say “Okinawans” because the island’s inhabitants were not strictly Japanese. The moment I had arrived from Guam, I was struck by the racial variety: the faces in the street bore the influences of Taiwan, China, the Philippines, and Malaysia, as well as of Japan. The turtle-back ancestor tombs, swathed in creepers inside Kadena Air Base, bore the architectural influence of tombs in Fukien, in China. They were remnants of the intense contact between China and this small island in the southern Ryukus, a distant 350 miles south of the Japanese mainland, and independent for much of its history.
Okinawa was not closed off to the world as Japan had been for long periods. The eclectic influences upon it emanated from as far away as Southeast Asia, though, ultimately, its people were members of the Japanese cultural and ethnic family. Okinawa’s equidistance from Japan, Taiwan, China, and the Korean Peninsula made it a nerve center for American military projection in the Pacific. That was partly why the American military had stormed it in the first place.
“Okinawa,” writes military historian Victor Davis Hanson, “was the summation of all the macabre elements of a barbarous three years of island fighting. It was not just the last battle of the Pacific war, but the murderous aggregate of all that had gone on before.” The Battle of Okinawa lasted from April 1 to July 2, 1945—long after V-E Day. The large-scale use of kamikaze pilots had made Okinawa a veritable “laboratory of suicide” bombers.15 By the end of the campaign, 12,520 American ground and naval troops had been killed, and another 33,631 were wounded or missing. The Japanese military suffered 110,000 dead. As many as 100,000 civilians might have died, too.
It was the gargantuan cost of taking this one island—sixty-five miles long and only seven miles wide—that, more than any other factor, led to the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because of the ferocity with which a cornered Japanese military had fought on Okinawa, American war planners could make only the most dire of predictions regarding the human cost of invading the dense population centers on Honshu and the other mainland islands. Okinawa was the closest thing that World War II offered to the World War I battlefields of Verdun and Passchendaele, Manchester writes, with “two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke…locked together in unimaginable agony.”16
As for the Okinawans, they were caught between two imperial powers. The island had been fortified by Tokyo, only so that the Japanese military could sacrifice it in a failed attempt to force the Americans to the negotiating table. The Americans ruled here directly until 1972, making it the last vestige of the occupation of Japan and Germany stemming from World War II. But the departure of an American high commissioner merely changed the goal of local politics from terminating the occupation to terminating the base leases. The issue was aggravated by the fact of democracy itself. Elsewhere in Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party completely dominated politics and snuffed out many debates, whereas in Okinawa, the reformist coalition put unceasing pressure on the local government to be tough on the American military.
In the mid-1990s, after a much publicized kidnapping and rape of a twelve-year-old local girl by two marines and a sailor, tens of thousands of Okinawans demonstrated against the bases and it seemed the bases’ future was in doubt. The incident resulted in the consolidation of some of the bases, and the decision to move thousands of marines from here to Guam, compensated for by the building of a $10 billion offshore American military facility. But because of the ongoing expansion of Chinese military power (a Chinese nuclear submarine penetrated the Sea of Japan the week of my visit), as well as a growing threat from North Korea, a newly hawkish political climate throughout Japan was emerging. The American bases on Okinawa, of which the immense Air Force facility at Kadena was but one, might well be here for a long time, though in a reduced capacity.
The American military, particularly the Marines, who had borne many of the casualties in the spring of 1945, got just as emotional about Okinawa as the local population. “The fighting on Okinawa was more significant than that on Iwo Jima,” explained Marine Lt. Col. Phil Ridderhof of Fredericksburg, Virginia, a graduate of the Virginia Military Academy and the chief planner for the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force. “But the battlefield here has been overrun by urbanization, while Iwo Jima is full of military imagery, especially that stirring photo of the flag raising. And Iwo Jima is a place where you can make a pilgrimage.”
The Marine museum on Okinawa wasn’t so much a museum as a shrine—a humble set of rooms in an office at Camp Albert Kinser.[21] The artifacts had been amassed over the decades by Dave Davenport, a retired airman who had moved the stuff all over the world with him in the course of his deployments, including war-torn Vietnam. In 1992 he brought the collection here. Recently, his obsession with the Battle of Okinawa had been passed on to a young protégé, Christopher Majewski, a former marine from southern Nevada. It was Majewski, wearing a purple ball cap over his high-and-tight, who gave me the standard tour.
“This museum is not part of the military museum system—they could break the collection up, and we’re not going to let that happen,” he told me vehemently, pacing back and forth, working off what he said was a sugar high from a chocolate bar. “The first thing you have to remember is that our intelligence was extremely, extremely poor. We thought there were 45,000 enemy troops on Okinawa. The real number was 116,488.
“The Japanese thought we were weak, and in a way we were,” Majewski continued. “The war in Europe was over, and many Americans couldn’t understand why we were still taking high casualties in places in the Pacific with names they couldn’t pronounce. The system of war rations was getting old, then the media stepped in with photos of dead marines. The Japanese figured that if we couldn’t handle just one percent of what it would be like fighting on the mainland, they’d be okay. Remember, for the Japanese, Okinawa didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was a high number of American casualties. Okinawa was Vietnam before its time,” he told me, still marching back and forth as if talking to himself, pointing to an old map.
With its bad paintings, faded newspaper clippings, and haversacks and uniforms eaten away by moths and time, all thrown together in corroded glass cabinets, this shrine had an impoverished nature that was painfully and beautifully apparent. There was a Japanese bolt-action rifle so rusted that it looked as if it had been at the bottom of the sea for a hundred years. In one cabinet was a Japanese flag removed from Shuri Castle following its capture. The flag had been taken down by Marine Lt. Don Sinn, the commander of Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment. I told Majewski that in Iraq, the previous spring, I had been with the current commander of Alpha Company of 1/5. He savored that.[22] He told me that Lt. Sinn did not have an American flag available to fly, but one of the other marines did have a Confederate rebel flag, which they flew for three days before a proper flag arrived.
Majewski knelt on his knees to demonstrate how Japanese Lt. Gens. Ushijima Mitsuru and Cho Isamu must have committed ritual suicide following the battle: holding knives against their guts and dragging them sideways through their bellies. “Their real bodies were likely never found. They never found their medals.” He showed me all the books he had collected about the fighting on Okinawa. This young former marine was determined to preserve the memory of it. Iwo Jima had its memorial. Okinawa made due with this museum.
The other conversations I had in Okinawa were just as intense, even as they were dreary. My interlocutors were full of authentic intellectual passion. The fact that, as the decades bore on in the new century, the Pacific loomed as the principal danger to peace was for them an issue they had to tackle in nuts-and-bolts terms. Marine Lt. Col. Ridderhof told me: “If Korea went off, it could be the most horrific conflict the world has seen since 1945. And by the way, there would be nothing sanitized or futuristic about it. Like in the first Korean War, we’d have to get out of our vehicles and fight.” The phrase “first Korean War” was used a lot in Okinawa in reference to the 1950–53 conflict, implying the possibility of a second.
“When you face an Asian foe like the North Koreans,” another planner told me, “it won’t be like fighting your typical third-rate Middle Eastern army. They’re driven, and have been brainwashed for decades. They don’t just have dumb infantry troops, they’ve got SOF [special operations forces] that regularly penetrate South Korean lines. They’d use chemical weapons, and would rain artillery on Seoul,” referring to the South Korean capital near the DMZ (demilitarized zone). “Seoul would be soup artillery-wise. I wouldn’t even want to be a cockroach there.”
The Cold War never really ended here. Okinawa was like West Germany in the dark decades of the 1950s through 1970s. The North Koreans had 170 divisions, 60 of which were near the DMZ. The chance of a mass infantry cataclysm unlike any other was certainly remote. But the consequences were so catastrophic that military thinkers had to forever bear down on the problem.
“And how do you tactically prepare for a major war?” I asked one general.
“Like eating an elephant, one bite at a time.” From nine to five in Okinawa, people thought the unthinkable.
Okinawa clarified for me the delicate hierarchy between the Navy and the Air Force. The Pacific was an ocean, and politicians loved oceans because they could use navies to advance right up to the battlefield without being too provocative, while still being able to pull back. It was the oceanic nature of PACOM that made it the most amenable area command from the viewpoint of the State Department. But while 70 percent of PACOM’s area of responsibility was ocean, 100 percent was air, and “air can get there faster,” as I kept hearing. Even as the world of twenty-first-century combat was increasingly purple (the color of jointness), Air Force blue was becoming increasingly prominent in the American military color scheme.
If any service was going to mitigate the need to saturate the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan with mass infantry, it would be the Air Force: through attacks on command and control centers, enemy computer systems, and so on. Because of air-to-air refueling, the Air Force no longer needed a big footprint. The Air Force required less on the ground to do more in the air. Of all the services, it had the greatest potential to be light and lethal.
Thailand was important as an example of how the Pentagon was recon-figuring the pattern of Air Force and Navy bases worldwide. The process had started toward the end of the Cold War. In 1985 the United States had a cluster of large, fully developed bases dubbed “Little Americas” in Europe and the Far East, with 385,000 personnel in Germany and its environs, and 125,000 in the Korean Peninsula. By 9/11, though, sixteen years later, the number of personnel in Europe had dropped to 118,000 and in East Asia to 89,000. Then, in 2004, the Pentagon unveiled plans to bring home an additional 70,000 troops from those fixed-in-place garrisons, even as it planned to expand a network of bare-bones sites in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to support rotational rather than permanently stationed forces.17 In short, the future promised no fighting in place. Everything would be expeditionary, in order to handle any eventuality in a chaotic world. Forward operating sites and even more austere “cooperative security locations”—a tucked-away corner of a host country airport, for instance—would be established in obscure and exotic locales such as Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Uganda, the West African island state of São Tomé and Príncipe, and Honduras.
In Thailand, the Pentagon had its eye on two bases for cooperative security locations, CSLs in the hottest new Defense Department lingo.
I had not been to Bangkok for some years, and walking the streets at night after my arrival I was startled by the driven, buzzing intensity of an Asian mega-city: an anxious cacophony of intricate dynamism that worked at a higher RPM level than urban centers of other cultures. Whereas African cities were victims of globalization, with explosions of crime and social breakdown, Asians had taken advantage of globalization. Because military activity could reflect the sum total of social and economic development, the very frenzy of Bangkok—from its rapid-fire strip-joint transactions to its late-night highway construction—further convinced me that the Pacific Rim would ultimately determine the fate of war and peace in the twenty-first century. This was the most dynamic region of the globe. If geopolitics had a regional pivot, it was here.
Another thing about Bangkok: it was the first place in my Pacific travels where I had to use local currency. Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan were all U.S. states or territories, while the U.S. bases on Okinawa were large, self-contained worlds where the dollar rather than the Japanese yen was circulated. Air Mobility Command could get you all over the Pacific, from the American mainland to the Asian rim, albeit with delays and inconvenience. The landings and interventions of the U.S. Navy and Marines in the latter decades of the nineteenth century in search of a mercantile seaborne empire, aided by victory in World War II, had provided America with a sovereign bridge of sorts that extended all the way across the Pacific to Southeast Asia.
Thailand had always been a little-noticed and yet critical military ally of the United States. Cobra Gold, PACOM’s biggest annual military exercise (involving twenty thousand armed personnel), took place in Thailand. Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs trained year-round and ran joint maneuvers at the platoon level with their Thai counterparts. An Islamic insurgency had begun in the extreme south of the country, in three former Malay sultanates, in an area by the Gulf of Siam where an American company was drilling for oil. The result was more special operations training missions between U.S. and Thai forces.
But what the Americans truly had their eye on were two bases a few hours by car southeast of Bangkok, Utapao Naval Air Station and the adjacent Sattahip Naval Base. Utapao, like Andersen in Guam, had been a B-52 hub during the Vietnam War. It was remembered fondly by a whole generation of American airmen because of the wall-to-wall strip joints in the nearby town of Pattaya. The Thais shut down U.S. military operations at Utapao in 1975, after reports that the base had been used secretly for military action against Cambodia, in the wake of the Khmer Rouge seizure of the American merchant vessel SS Mayagüez. Particularly after 9/11, Utapao was again being used by U.S. airmen. It was all low-key, however.
I drove to Utapao to see what a cooperative security location, or austere forward operating base, actually looked like. It was a concept with which I was familiar from a visit to Kenya ten months earlier. I had been embedded with an Army civil affairs team on the Indian Ocean island of Lamu, deployed on a humanitarian mission to improve America’s image in a part of Kenya where the Kenyan military was upgrading the strategically located Manda Bay Naval Air Station, close to the Somali border. The United States wanted it to remain a Kenyan base, from where Kenya could project power. But if the political and diplomatic context was right, the U.S. would have access to its facilities. The humanitarian mission was an element in creating that context.
Utapao, like Manda Bay, was a beautiful setup. It was big, with an 11,500-foot runway—longer than the ones at Guam even—with endless taxi space and lots of green area for expansion. And it was far enough from the town of Pattaya to remain discreet. But the best thing about Utapao, from the standpoint of U.S. interests, was Dan Generette, the chief operating officer of Delta Golf Global. Dan was a private contractor. He could make anything happen on Utapao. “Dan’s the man,” one American military source told me. “He’s the mayor of Utapao. Forget the site survey teams that they send out from PACOM in Honolulu. They don’t know nothing. All they know is what Dan tells them.”
Dan Generette was an African American from Walterboro, South Carolina, who had grown up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. A retired Air Force master sergeant, with twenty-four years experience as a maintenance expert for the Guam-based 13th Air Force, he had been stationed at Utapao as a young man during the bad old Vietnam days (or the good old Vietnam days, depending upon how some looked at it). Dan’s sidekick, Roger Coe of Springfield, Ohio, was another retired Air Force master sergeant, also with twenty-four years of military maintenance experience. In fact, all of Dan’s efficient little staff, who worked out of a two-room office next to the runway, were—with the exception of the Thai secretaries—American ex-military.
Dan, a tall, imposing man with a jet-black complexion, a tropical shirt, and a soft voice, who lifted his eyelids to make a point didactically, described himself to me as the “buffer” between the American and Thai militaries. “Everything here is transparent,” he told me. “I do not work for the Americans or the Thais. I run a for-profit enterprise. I pay rent to the RTN [Royal Thai Navy] and make my income from the fees I charge incoming U.S. military aircraft for the services I provide them. The pilots come with their credit cards ready. They know the drill.
“Look,” he went on, “this place ain’t Kansas. When a crew of young American airmen arrive, they don’t know anything, they can’t communicate with the Thais at planeside about their maintenance problems. They don’t know where to go for meals, ice, water. They don’t know where to find a hotel for the night within their per diem allotment, where to go for fun. My people allay their concerns, immediately. We level with them about what can and can’t be done here. I can’t tell you how happy they are to see someone like me.
“As for the Thais,” he continued, “they’d rather deal with me than with some loud and upset ugly American running around their base, complaining. I know the culture, the language. I’m kind and pleasant.”
Because of Dan, the Thais could help the Americans without the political baggage that went with a formal status-of-forces agreement for Utapao. Because of Delta Golf Global, the U.S. military was here, but it was not here. After all, the Thais did no business with the U.S. Air Force. They dealt only with a private contractor.
Dan had retired from the Air Force in 1996 and began working out of his car at the base. He then decided to retire here. Thank heavens that when 9/11 happened, the U.S. had someone like Dan Generette on the ground at Utapao, to take care of the extra jet fuel, mineral water, and all the other mundane paraphernalia without which the U.S. would not have been able to transfer its B-52s from the PACOM area of responsibility to CENTCOM’s.
Utapao was a conduit for aircraft headed to Diego Garcia and the Persian Gulf, from where bombing runs were launched on Afghanistan and later Iraq. At the moment, Dan was facilitating the movement of six hundred American military aircraft annually through Utapao: necessary for the forty-three annual exercises between the Royal Thai Navy and the U.S. military, including Cobra Gold, and for troops going to and from the war zones of the Middle East.
Dan’s tour of Utapao began in his compound. He had a plush lounge for resting flight crews—complete with male and female shower facilities—a command-and-control room for emergency operations, luxury vans with karaoke machines for transferring flight crews to their hotels, and storage space for pallets and spare parts. We jumped into his car and drove around. The taxiways were endless, with vast grassy fields perfect for drop zones, and long, weedy cul-de-sacs that ended with galvanized metal revetments that had once been used for North Vietnam–bound B-52s. You could hide a lot here, I thought.
“Yeah, nostalgia for the Vietnam days,” Dan said. He showed me more Vietnam ghosts: a broken-down PX and bowling alley, an abandoned NCO club, and a line of 1960s-vintage Dodge and Chevys that had still not been taken for scrap metal. An old MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) facility gave out onto a beach where the pastel blue Bight of Bangkok met the Gulf of Siam. There was, too, the once luxurious, now gone-to-seed Swan Lake Hotel, where American aircrews had once stayed. With a somewhat neglected yet still lovely garden, it was a cliché out of a Graham Greene novel.
JPAC (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command) missions, which searched for American servicemen’s remains in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, often left from Utapao. The supplies for those flights gave the U.S. military a raison d’être for warehouses here. Dan also took me to a state-of-the-art facility hidden in the forest, with an open space for tents, used during Cobra Gold and for any emergency that might crop up.
Dan Generette was a symbol of the ground-level reality that official Washington overlooked. He was out of the official chain of command, but in a crisis he would be more necessary than anyone in the chain of command. He was another demonstration of why the privatization of American military activity could be a good thing. Neither the U.S. nor Thai governments could shoulder Dan’s responsibilities as efficiently and unobtrusively as he did, for the essence of an austere forward base was not the facilities, but the human relationships on the ground.
It was the beautiful women and other aesthetic attractions of Asia that, ultimately, were responsible for luring Dan, his staff, and the American military officers I met in Thailand to either retire or do multiple tours here, building up language skills and area expertise in the process. Quite a few had married locally. They constituted proof that you could serve your country best by loving the indigenous culture most. When I mentioned his name to a Special Forces officer a week later at a bar in Manila, the officer replied, with no intended irony, “Dan Generette, a truly great American.”
Because of him, what the United States wanted at Utapao it already had: a cooperative security location that belonged to the host country, with no permanent American troops, but in the event of a crisis could be used by American troops. Indeed, Utapao, a few weeks after my visit, would become a U.S. military hub for tsunami relief in Indonesia—something that never could have happened as efficiently as it did without a private contractor like Dan.
The same low-key arrangement also held at nearby Sattahip, where American frigates and destroyers stopped en route to the Persian Gulf, and where American and Thai SEALs trained together in a shoot house built by the Americans. The worst thing that the Pentagon could do, I thought, was to officialize and otherwise make a big, public deal about such austere bases, for the brilliance of the concept relied on its quiet informality.
The American-Thai military relationship was so multifaceted that it necessitated a bureaucratic entity of its own, the kind of which existed in only a few places in the world. It was called by its acronym, “JUSMAG” (the Joint United States Military Assistance Group). JUSMAG was definitely not part of the United States Embassy in Thailand. Whereas the embassy was a marble and stone palace where people walked around in suits and ties as in Washington, JUSMAG, located on Thai military property, was a series of dilapidated offices with low ceilings and fluorescent lights that gave onto a dusty garden of palms and banana leaves. The fifty American officers here wore polo or short-sleeve shirts to work. JUSMAG felt like the real Thailand. It even had a bar with wicker-backed chairs. Some at JUSMAG had been in-country for two decades, on and off. The compound was said to be haunted by ghosts from the Vietnam era, when body bags had been among the items stored here in large numbers.
The head of JUSMAG-Thailand was Army Col. Jack Dibrell, a descendant of the Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest. Colonel Dibrell was born at Fort Hood, Texas; grew up in Japan, where his dad had served in Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s occupation force; and was soon to retire to Savannah, Georgia. He had a passion for military history and collected World War II–era motorcycles: MMTs, he called them, Male Menopause Toys. One day he and his assistant, Army Maj. Tom Weaver of Rockport, Texas, drove me to the Thai-Burmese border to see the remains of a World War II railway built by British, Australian, Dutch, and American prisoners of war of the Japanese.
It was a two-hour drive in which I listened to the two men’s stories. Both Dibrell’s and Weaver’s dads had served in Vietnam: Maj. Weaver’s was killed there in 1969. Both men had roots in the South. “I went to the University of Alabama and Tom went to the University of Mississippi, and between the two of us maybe we have one college education,” Dibrell joked. As I had learned over and over again, it was no use denying the strong role played by the Confederate military tradition in the esprit de corps of the twenty-first-century American military. If you frowned on it, or you denied it, you missed a significant element of what accounted for the fighting tradition of this all-volunteer force. With the end of the draft, the influence of the Old South had gained ground in military circles, if only because of the geographical origins of so many who had joined.[23]
The subject was relevant to our destination. An obscure theater of World War II for Americans, for the Australians the POW experience in the Thai-Burmese border area was central to their national patriotic myth. The fact that Australia and America had become inseparable military allies was partly the result of how dormant military traditions in both countries had, against some odds, resurfaced at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Laterite soil, tapioca fields, and dusty limestone hills protruding out of the earth like sword points marked the border region of western Thailand. The scenery got Col. Dibrell going about U.S. servicemen still missing in action in Burma from World War II. Some casualties were Army airmen lost “flying the hump” over the Himalayas, from the British-held Asian subcontinent to areas held by the anti-Japanese resistance in China. Because the military regime in Burma had kept that country in a lockdown for decades, Dibrell explained that the sites of possible POW remains there had not been pillaged to the extent that they had been in Laos and Vietnam. The search for remains might offer a humanitarian approach to opening up links between the American and Burmese militaries, he thought. “Hey, they’ve been in power since 1962. Rather than bash them to no avail as Madeleine Albright did in the mid-1990s, shouldn’t we quietly infiltrate them to find out what makes them tick? What better way to have influence.”
Dibrell, a former member of Delta Force (the elite outfit of Special Operations Command), had lived in Asia for much of his life. He was particularly knowledgeable about Burma because Army Special Forces had some of its roots there, helping Kachin tribesmen against the Japanese. Dibrell was just as much the area specialist as any diplomat or academic, in love with the regional culture and geography. And like many area specialists, he was supremely practical about what could and could not be achieved.
Dibrell’s love of local and military history came together with the Railway of Death, which the Japanese had built with the slave labor of POWs. The railway went from a Burmese port on the Andaman Sea, southeast through mountains and thick jungle, to a point in Thailand near the Gulf of Siam. With their sea-lanes vulnerable to Allied attacks, the Japanese needed the railway to supply their forces fighting the British in the Indian subcontinent. Of the 60,000 Allied POWs who worked on the railway, 12,399, or 20 percent, died, in addition to 80,000 civilian laborers. This saga in World War II history was the subject of the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai.
On ANZAC Day, April 25, 1998, the Australian government opened a memorial museum on the site of Hellfire Pass, a limestone and granite formation through which POWs cut with picks and shovels, creating an entire canyon in twelve weeks during the summer monsoon of 1943. The Japanese guards had forced the prisoners to work eighteen-hour shifts. Sixty men were beaten to death for not keeping pace. The POWs had no clothes except for scanty loincloths called “Jap happys.” The name “Hellfire Pass” came from the way it was lit with torches during the nighttime toil. In the words of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who spoke at the dawn prayer service for the museum’s opening, the survivors owed their lives to their “mateship” with one another, and to the doctors and medics among them, particularly Edward “Weary” Dunlop, whose ashes would later be scattered at the site.[24]
The museum and the pass below was a site of great beauty and sadness, as if the spirits of the men who had died here hovered about still, in order to have their story told. Col. Dibrell, Maj. Weaver, and I went for a hike around the pass with Bill Slape, the museum manager, a retired warrant officer in the Australian Army. Slape showed us a fine prospect of the Kwai River valley with the burnt, gray-brown ridgelines of Burma in the background, matted with taro trees. Slape worked daily to build culverts and propagate bamboo on the ridges atop Hellfire Pass, in order to anchor the rocks in the monsoon and thus preserve the landscape as the POWs had experienced it. “See that clearing?” He pointed. “That’s where the prisoners walked to work.”[25] We walked beside the original “sleepers” (wooden rails) that jutted out through the dirt, as though in the early stages of transformation to fossils. Observing the chemistry between Slape and the two American Army officers, I thought of the similar road that Australian and American societies had traveled in the latter part of the twentieth century.
It was the fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the western edge of Asia Minor in World War I, with its horrific casualties suffered by soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), that established the grand narrative of Australia as a warrior, expeditionary nation. The death railway, with its theme of mateship, became incorporated into that narrative. Because Vietnam was the first war in which Australia had sent conscripts chosen by lottery to fight overseas, it was highly unpopular in Australia, and thus ANZAC Day took a battering in the process. Yet the end of the Cold War, because it occurred at the same time as the deaths of the last Gallipoli survivors and the bicentennial of Australia’s founding as a nation, brought about a return of historical memory that would correct the amnesia of the 1960s’ youth rebellion in Australia. The reaffirmation of the ANZAC tradition, in the words of Australian historian Joan Beaumont, was fortified further by the need for “some kind of spirituality in an increasingly secular society.”[26] It was certainly an element in the string of Conservative governments at the turn of the twenty-first century led by John Howard, who forged an alliance with George Bush that brought the two countries’ militaries closer together.
Next we went to the war cemetery at nearby Kanchanaburi, the site of thousands of Commonwealth and Dutch graves. In third-world Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with its ancient Buddhist temples and soulless modernity—where, unlike in Europe, Western visitors found no architectural accumulation of history that they could call their own—the memory of World War II achieved a particular poignancy. It was the exotic nightmare that old Asia hands in the American military grasped on to, in order to link themselves with their Australian brothers, and to fortify morale for what might lie ahead in these parts.
In a few days I was looking down another massive, two-mile-long runway that could handle any aircraft in any military arsenal, with unlimited MOG (maximum on ground) space hidden away in the weeds of an immense, mountain-ringed plain. You could fit the whole Pacific Air Force in this place. I was at Clark Field, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, the very base whose loss in 1991 had helped the Department of Defense to embrace the concept of cooperative security locations in the first place.[27]
In the wake of the Gulf War of 1991, with Saudi Arabia extremely uneasy about American servicemen on its soil, the United States saw how even after victory there were basing problems with the very country it had defended. But it was the forcible closure by the Philippine government of Clark Air Force Base and nearby Subic Bay Naval Station that truly rattled the American military brass. Clark and Subic were heirlooms of the Philippine War of the turn of the twentieth century. They had been occupied by the Japanese in World War II, and subsequently liberated with significant loss of life. They were the massive, storied Air Force and Navy equivalents of the Army bases in western Germany; here airmen and sailors had married local girls and retired in numbers unrivaled by soldiers in Europe. Then it all ended. The upshot was a period of introspection by defense officials that led, in turn, to the realization that U.S. bases almost anywhere outside U.S. territory were a risky investment. One solution was to have access to foreign bases through well-developed personal relationships.
That was already happening. In one part of Clark, amid villas with collapsed roofs and lawns reclaimed by the jungle (where American Air Force officers and their families had once lived), I found Charlie 1-1, the elite combat unit of the 1st Battalion of the Army’s 1st Special Forces Group. It was here training a Philippine light reaction company in urban warfare. “Where did you go for Thanksgiving?” I asked the warrant officer in charge of the training. He told me that the team had paid a restaurant owner in nearby Angeles City to prepare a turkey dinner for them.
Angeles City boasted miles of the world’s most outrageous restaurants, bars, and nightclubs (“A Beer and a Blow-job for $9”), which had grown up around the American air base in the post–World War II decades. Counter to expectations, they were still thriving thirteen years after the last permanently stationed U.S. troops had left. Waitresses wore laminated hygiene cards indicating the date of their last blood test for sexually transmitted diseases. Business nowadays came from elderly Australian and American “sexpatriots,” some looking as old as George Burns and in motorized wheelchairs, led around by slinky young Filipinas. The notorious KSM—Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, 9/11 mastermind and number three in al-Qaeda—had caroused in places like this, using bar girls to help him set up a business network in the Philippines.[28] “Everyone thought it was the Americans who brought the mosquitoes,” explained one American Army officer, referring to the prostitutes who buzzed around. “It wasn’t,” he went on. “It was poverty and a particularly aggressive service mentality” applied to the bodily function of sex—another cultural indicator of Asian economic dynamism.
Pentagon officials were also keen on an airport on the small island of Mactan, in the central Philippines, for a cooperative security location. I went there the next day. I was met by Larry Johansen, a crusty, retired Air Force staff sergeant from Dallas, with reddish blond hair and a wry expression. If Larry didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth, he looked as if he should have. Larry had married a Filipina, spoke fluent Tagalog, and was the rough equivalent of Dan Generette at Utapao.
Larry had served at Clark as an eighteen-year-old in the 1970s, when Angeles City was especially wild. In 1986, when the Air Force offered him a position in Little Rock, Arkansas, he said the proverbial fuck that, and did not reenlist. Instead, he went to work for Lockheed and then Boeing, which got him to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for eleven straight years: a great deal, because he got sixty days’ paid vacation annually, which he spent in Thailand and the Philippines. “Let’s go have breakfast,” he said. “There’s this French-type place. It’s got, I don’t know, French shit.”
Larry was the ultimate mechanic-trainer. He oversaw logistics and maintenance for the Philippine Air Force at Mactan. He was the U.S. military’s eyes and ears here. But he was a private contractor. He explained that his salary was paid by TeKontrol, a Florida-based firm hired by the Security Assistance Technical Management Office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at the behest of JUSMAG-Philippines. And because JUSMAG-Philippines, like JUSMAG-Thailand, came under the umbrella of security assistance provided by one government to another, Larry’s chain of command ultimately ended with the diplomats at the State Department. There were plans for more Larrys at Mactan.
Larry, who was in his mid-forties and looked a decade older—the result of hard, fun living—had an office that was the nerve center for C-130 and other fixed-wing and helicopter maintenance, with neat flowcharts on the walls showing the status of each aircraft. The reality indicated by the charts was grim. When the U.S. military had Clark and Subic, it took care of maintenance for the Philippine Air Force—not officially, but that’s how the dependent, colonial-style relationship worked. When the Filipinos asserted sovereignty, aircraft maintenance went into a death spiral.
If a U.S. Air Force plane needed a spare part that had to be taken from another plane, a requisition order had to be filed to guarantee that the second plane would have its part replaced immediately. This was known as controlled cannibalization. The Philippine Air Force practiced uncontrolled cannibalization, so that once-operable C-130s were stripped like old cars. Maintenance was the traditional responsibility of noncommissioned officers, and the Philippine military, like almost all those in the third world, had a weak NCO corps.
A half-dozen C-130s sat on the ground at Mactan, rusting and ready for the scrap heap. Of the other half dozen, one was operational. Larry’s goal was to have four operational. He couldn’t just reintroduce controlled cannibalization, for that meant other reforms, such as bringing back a tool-control program from the pre-1992 era, so that missing tools would not hamper repairs. It was a cultural challenge as much as a logistical one, meaning it was a seven-day-a-week job. Every time a plane landed with a problem, Larry was there instructing, mentoring.
Larry took me everywhere on Mactan, an interminable rash of corrugated shacks and sagging clotheslines that met the dappled, turquoise mirror of the Camotes Sea. On a cruddy Mactan inlet filled with beggars stood a weather-stained monument with weeds growing from its crevices. It was erected in 1866 by the Spanish occupiers to honor the navigator Ferdinand Magellan, cut down on this beach as he and his men came ashore on April 27, 1521, and were attacked by indigenous natives led by the petty chieftain Lapulapu. Magellan’s arrival in the Philippines, after the discovery of a strait near Cape Horn that forever bears his name, followed by a nightmarish 12,600-mile journey across the Pacific, brought Europeans to Asia for the first time via a western route, thereby establishing in fact what had been known in theory: that the earth was a sphere. Thus ended the medieval ages.
Yet the earth was still vast, vaster than many in Washington supposed. And Larry Johansen knew this wild and strategic corner of it better than anyone else. On the nearby island of Cebu, where guerrillas of the New People’s Army lurked in the mountains, he knew which nightclubs were safe and which weren’t, whom to go to in order to get something built or to get something through customs. Larry wasn’t a saint. But he was—boiled down to an individual—the shallow footprint that the Pentagon needed, whether it knew it or not.
Nor did he want to leave. As Larry’s friend, another American military contractor, put it to me over lunch, “I don’t want to die warehoused in some senior citizens home in the States, surrounded by other old people smelling like vitamins. I’d rather retire here, or in Thailand, taken care of in a village by my wife’s relatives.” Such motives were crucial if the U.S. was going to project power subtly by, through, and with host-country militaries in Asia.
The Philippines constituted the ultimate litmus test for the competition between the United States and China in the Pacific.18 The Philippines was where ungovernability met great power conflict. If, despite a century of American economic aid and American blood, China would ultimately emerge on these islands as the most influential power, that indicated a dire prospect for the U.S. in the Pacific.
Everywhere I had been in the PACOM area of responsibility, people were concerned that all the money was going down the shit hole of P. I.—the acronym used by the American military for the Philippine Islands. “Is P. I. a black hole or an important historical legacy?” one of my dinner hosts at Thanksgiving asked rhetorically. “The answer is both.” Said another at the table: “P. I. is like an old house. Whenever you peek inside the walls or under the floor to inspect a problem, you find so many others.”
Because this time I had arrived from Thailand, another developing country, the dysfunctional nature of the Philippines was more apparent than it had been in 2003, when I had come from Hawaii and saw merely a poor and populous country lacking any measure of comparison with the United States. Now I gasped at how dicier, rattier, and more perverse Manila was in relation to Bangkok, and how much starker the slums and wealth disparities were. In 2003, I had learned how Army Special Forces had helped the Filipinos clear Islamic terrorists from parts of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. But as Philippine troops relocated to the south of the country to consolidate those gains, fresh pockets of ungovernability emerged in the north, as other insurgent groups swarmed out of the forest woodwork in remote parts of Luzon.
The U.S. had been in Iraq only a few years, and it was questionable if an appetite existed for a long-term presence. But the U.S. had invaded the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, fought a costly war here that descended into an interminable struggle against insurgents, then built the country’s entire infrastructure only to see it occupied by the Japanese. After liberation in 1945, the U.S. maintained, right up through the present, a deep and abiding involvement with the Filipino political-military establishment, buttressed by massive aid packages. But with China investing heavily here and signing economic and military agreements, Manila might provide a surer vantage point than Baghdad for espying the ultimate destiny of American power.
For example, in late July 2004 the Philippine government pulled its troops out of Iraq with great fanfare, one month before the deployment was due to expire anyway, in order to obtain the release of a Filipino truck driver kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents. The Chinese, sensing an opening, offered the Philippine government a defense pact that featured an intelligence-sharing agreement. That elicited a U.S. threat to cut military assistance across the board.
The intelligence agreement went unsigned, and now the U.S. was embarking on a $30 million program to reform the Philippine military from the ground up, using a model employed by NATO for reforming the militaries of Eastern Europe. Angry as it was at Manila, Washington knew that with China rising and this unruly archipelago-nation so close to Taiwan, after a hundred years of effort it still had no choice than to mount yet another rescue attempt of this imperial legacy.
One night in the Philippines, I ate dinner with nine American military personnel, including six Navy SEALs here on a training mission. We occupied a table on a steamy, humid street. The food was great and two bottles of Jack Daniels were ordered. The conversation flew from subject to subject. The SEAL next to me talked about his time in Iraq when he had done nodal analysis of terrorist ratlines coming through the western desert from Syria. “All roads led to Fallujah,” he declared. Across the table sat a ruddy-complexioned Army officer in a tropical shirt, who had grown up in Georgia and Alaska as a military brat, and had a lifetime of experience in Asia. “Here’s the difference between Thailand and P. I.,” he told me. “If you go to a driving range in Thailand, there are automated ball dispensers, good food, bar girls, and massages. If you go to a driving range here, there is just one guy clumping up mud in his hands for ball mounds. Thais have no principles, but they never compromise, so they have high standards of efficiency.”
I thought of Colombia.
“Thai mafias are disciplined,” he went on. “They provide some order and useful intelligence. In the Philippines, the government is the mafia, a poorly run one.” The corruption here, they all agreed, was a perfect fit with China’s, whose own criminal networks couldn’t wait to extract Filipino girls for prostitution and set up local methamphetamine rings.
Still, this Army officer was full of cautious optimism. He outlined for me how JUSMAG was going to reform the Philippine military, by creating new bureaucratic structures that squeezed out opportunities for corruption and cronyism. Duty tours would end in three years, so that people wouldn’t be able to entrench themselves. Tours would be staggered so that generals wouldn’t take their whole entourages with them on each assignment. That way the careers of others did not rise and fall with that of the general, thereby busting up patriarchal systems. There would be retirement incentives so that an “up and out” system could take root. If you weren’t promoted, you left the service, as in the U.S.
“We’re bringing in a Marine sergeant-major to work NCO development,” he told me: the kind of bullying noncommissioned officer that, as I knew from my own experience with marines, was like a Chihuahua on crack, full of energy and aggression. “There’s no better time to attempt this,” he said in a dogged, gravelly voice. “We can’t fail here.”
A week later, at the end of November 2004, following a typhoon, U.S. marines from Okinawa landed in the Philippines to provide humanitarian relief.
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