We’ve been on station off Wake Island for nearly three days. Looking at the island, it is no different from Midway of which we departed from a week ago. We made the trek from Midway, after dropping off scientists from Kure, to Wake Island. The maritime route the Japanese were to use if they had won that World War Two battle and occupied Midway Atoll. Wake Island was to be a jumping point for cargo aircraft and merchant ships ferrying fuels and supplies to Emperor’s soldiers, sailors and airman whose primary goal was to intimidate the Americans in Hawaii. There are no marquees or historical markers indicating its significance. It looks like any other part of the North Pacific Ocean.
This is my fifth trip to Wake Island. You always hear about this place on news broadcasts (I’m still an old radio romanticist) on New Year’s Eve. This is the first territory where New Years comes to America. The news reporters will go to the club and interview one or two employees who live here. My first trip to Wake was due to engine failure on a prop aircraft carrying military personnel and their dependents from the United States to Japan. I recall seeing a few pictures of me as a toddler standing next to debris left over from World War Two. I still recall aircraft engines lying on the beach. It’s difficult to remember vivid details from that age but recollect the Quonset type huts we lived in. There was the screen door that kept tapping against the frame and the view of the beach beyond that screen when I looked out.
My second trip to Wake was in 1969, New Year’s Morning at 01:30. We were on a flight from Japan back to the United States. We left Japan on December 31, 1968. It seems my life is always full of goodbyes and saying farewell to relatives in Japan was always excruciating. I never knew when I was going to see them again and I spent a fare amount of my childhood there so fond memories retain. Many Japanese customs, practices and way of life stayed with me and still part of me today. But we had to say goodbye because we were going to my father’s last duty station in Albuquerque, New Mexico before his retirement from the Air Force. When we landed at Wake an Air Force sergeant came aboard to wish us a Happy New Year (big deal as we were asleep) and that it was 1969! We disembarked from the plane into the air terminal. I recall that a World War Two museum was inside and that caught my eye. It wasn’t a big museum but a small room with relics from the Battle of Wake Island. Of course if you ever see this island and its geographical location, you wonder what the reason for the fighting and dying was. I know the Japanese troops who occupied this atoll for four years thought the same and suffered from homesickness as well. In fact I wonder how in the hell can you put that many people on this island. The same can be said of any other islands in the Pacific that were battlegrounds from Iwo Jima to Midway and to Palmyra and Jarvis islands in the South Pacific.
My third and fourth time stopping at Wake Island was when I went on a detachment to Atsugi, Japan in 1996 with my Naval Reserve squadron, VR-55 out of Moffett Field at the time. We were the relief crew so we flew to Japan on a C-20 Gulfstream. We stopped to refuel after we left Hawaii from Moffett and beer at the Wake terminal was 50 cents a can and yes, I saw the old museum again that I visited in 1969 as I had walked back into time. When my detachment was over, we had to fly to Guam to meet up with our plane that had engine trouble. The squadron flew a C-130 from California to Guam with the spare engine. We took the plane that brought the engine to Guam back to California and left a handful of crewmembers behind to replace the broken engine. From Guam, seven hours later, we stopped at; you guessed it, Wake Island! So here I am again, 15 years later and my first comment! Gosh, it looks like Midway! On Sunday I will go ashore for a visit and can say I set foot here on this remote atoll west of the International Date Line in the Pacific for the fifth time!
I finished three books since I came to Hawaii to start the season. Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. My current read is Clarence Darrow a Sentimental Rebel by Arthur and Lila Weinberg. I do read fiction but I prefer the classics rather than the pop culture fast food novels occupying the top 20 bestsellers list. I did read in the past Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and The Digital Fortress. I went back to classics after reading Dan Brown’s books. I find that his stories are predictable and couldn’t figure out the wrangling over the Da Vinci Code. It’s only a novel and treated it as such. My fiction for this cruise is QBVII by Leon Uris and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.
After Sunday we pack up and sail for Saipan. I don’t know about the radiation issue from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan or how it will affect us. In fact I am so unsure of what is going to happen that I have yet to purchase tickets to get my stepson in Samoa. I may ask my wife to do it because if it isn’t radiation from the nuclear plant in Japan, it is the possibility of a government shutdown due to ideologues in Congress. I am dismayed by their actions and how money is put ahead of people. But they are only representative of a repulsive element of the American psyche. Having spent a younger portion of my life in “old” Japan (new Japan is a facsimile of America), I grew up in a nation that has no resources. Many Asian countries, their only resource is people. That is what made Japan an industrial power she was two decades ago, Korea after that and China today. In America people are not considered resources to strengthen the nation or society but a liability. Examples include the fiasco in Wisconsin as well as personal verbal attacks on federal employees made by Republicans in congress in their attempt to absolve themselves for creating this mess.
Japan has declined quite a bit since her leaders succumb to American demands and even adopted some it’s 1980’s ideals. Seeing how the Japanese government handled the Fukushima Nuclear disaster reminds me of Hurricane Katrina FEMA response in 2005. I must say that the post boom Japanese society has learned and adopted American habits quite well.
Goodnight from Wake Island.
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