The America That Americans Forget – The New York Times

When Roy returned to Guam in 2008, he got a job in sales and rose through the ranks to become a manager, but it was hard to adjust to civilian life. His greatest struggle was with mental health. Roy’s thoughts scared him. Ideas of harming others would just pop into his mind out of the blue. He could be having a perfectly fine day and a thought would come in, like, “Hey, there’s this stupid dude on the side of the road, I could just run him over with my damn truck.” He didn’t know what to do.

Roy’s unit lost 16 men during their deployments, but they lost more to suicide after they came home. Roy would check their Facebook groups and see their unit crest with a black stripe across it and immediately he knew. Who did we lose today? Why did we lose them today? Roy had been older than many of them — kids who were just starting to figure out their lives used as cannon fodder for the broader goals of empire Roy couldn’t even rationalize anymore. He flew to all the funerals.

In 2010, mental-health care on Guam for PTSD was nonexistent. The closest Veterans Affairs Medical Center was in Hawaii, 4,000 miles away, so getting set up for services and receiving specialized care was a nightmare. It took a few months for Roy even to get a referral for treatment. When he saw his first V.A. psychologist, it was on a videoconference call with someone in Hawaii. It was too impersonal, too weird, and Roy never called back.

The disproportionate lack of V.A. services in the territories is well documented. In 2020, the Center for a New American Security found that while the average state offered 36 distinct benefits to veterans and military families (and the highest offered 60), Guam offered 14. Together, the territories averaged 11 benefits. “Veterans in the U.S. territories are a largely forgotten and unsupported population, despite high rates of service that outpace many U.S. states,” the report’s authors wrote.

“We’ve had many veterans from Guam leave their homeland because they’ve heard stories of, ‘It’s better in California, it’s better in Washington, it’s better in Texas,’” Roy explained. It’s not just dearth of services; Guam’s V.A. system is also wracked with delays. A week after Roy had a heart attack, the community-based outpatient system still hadn’t processed his referral to a cardiologist in Hawaii. He didn’t want to wait, so he paid for his own ticket to get there. Many other veterans would not be able to afford the expensive flight.

At the airport in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Marianas, my bags and I were weighed together on a giant scale and cleared to fly 15.5 miles to Tinian, the first location of the Pentagon’s plan to expand infrastructure on U.S.-affiliated islands across the Pacific to become “forward operating sites” — which contain pre-positioned supplies for war fighting but which the U.S. government doesn’t technically classify as a base.

The present-day Northern Marianas were conquered first by the Spanish, who sold them to the Germans, who lost them to the Japanese. On Dec. 7, 1941, just hours after bombing Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes taking off from Saipan bombed Guam. (Because the Northern Marianas and Guam are over the international date line, the date was Dec. 8 there.) When Guam capitulated two days later, the Japanese administered the island with the help of Chamorro translators from Saipan and a neighboring island called Rota. As a result, a rift opened within the Indigenous group that continues to cleave them today. (Though they are the same people, CHamoru on Guam and Chamorro in the Northern Mariana Islands spell the same word differently.)

After Allied victory, Japan’s entire Pacific Island empire was placed into a trust of roughly 100 inhabited islands spread out over an area the size of the contiguous United States to be administered by Washington, which was charged “to promote the development of the inhabitants of the Trust Territory toward self-government or independence.” (This included the present-day Northern Marianas, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau.) Saipan eventually became the headquarters of the Trust, which was administered first by the Navy and then the Department of the Interior, and which arbitrarily divided the islands into six districts, with each one voting to decide its fate.

The commonwealth’s founding fathers, as the group of legislators are known, wrote the Covenant, a governing document that outlined the archipelago’s right to control its internal matters while granting the U.S. federal government sovereignty over the Northern Marianas’ foreign affairs and defense. The Covenant specified which articles of the U.S. Constitution applied, and fundamental changes to the document can be made only by mutual consent between the Northern Marianas and Congress. The Northern Marianas have the right to call for direct negotiations with the federal government on specific issues. This arrangement was made possible by the Insular Cases.

In 1975, 75 percent of Northern Marianas residents voted to adopt the document. (They also voted repeatedly to integrate with Guam, but Guam rejected the proposal.) Northern Marianas residents are now U.S. citizens without federal voting rights. They serve in the U.S. armed forces, but do not have their own V.A. office.

As part of the negotiations, the U.S. government leased two-thirds of the land on Tinian for 50 years to build a military base, saying that it would provide a boost to the economy, and also promising to build a school and provide medical services. Residents are still waiting. Today the 40-square-mile island, home to 2,000 people, has no hospital or dentist, one gas station, one semifunctional A.T.M. and a few small grocery stores. The main employer is the mayor’s office. In a 2010 census, 44 percent of the households on Tinian fell below the poverty line.

When the American military took Tinian from the Japanese during World War II, they laid out roads in the same manner as Manhattan — with Broadway, Wall Street, 86th, 42nd and so on. That morning, Fleming took me to North Field, where American service members built the largest airport in the world at the time, from which planes took off every three minutes during the last year of the war. We drove up Broadway to the two bombing pits that were used to load nuclear weapons into planes, now encased in glass like a mausoleum of the grotesque. Atomic Bomb Pit No. 1 loaded the five-ton uranium bomb, Little Boy, that killed over 100,000 people in one morning explosion. Atomic Bomb Pit No. 2 contained the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, that instantly killed 40,000 people in Nagasaki. Standing at the glass, the duality of past destruction — overlaid with the prospect of the future decimation that would require use of the Divert Airfield — felt like vertigo.

But as the United States takes renewed interest in the region, the realities of the poverty there — and America’s direct culpability in it — are inescapable. Both the Marshall Islands and Micronesia are poor, aid-dependent economies. They rank in the bottom third of all the countries on the U.N.’s human-development index. (Palau, held up by many I met in the Pacific to be the success case of the region, ranks significantly higher on all counts.) Corruption is rampant. Transparency International polling found that 61 percent of people in Micronesia using a public service have paid a bribe; 58 percent have been offered money in exchange for their vote.

It was not supposed to be this way. These countries were in the same U.S.-administered Pacific Trust Territory as the Northern Marianas. After nearly four decades of American stewardship, all three voted for the status of “freely associated states” — a term that created a political arrangement that did not previously exist. The compacts signed by each newly established country included a round of economic assistance, initially set to expire in 2003, that was extended for another 20 years. The second, and supposedly final, round created trust funds intended to be built up through joint contributions that would provide future government revenue.

For years, the countries cautioned they needed a third round of funding, but successive U.S. administrations brushed them off. That changed abruptly in 2019, when Beijing announced something that it had never done before — it gave a $2 million contribution to the Micronesian Compact Trust Fund. Three weeks later, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state at the time, announced Washington was ready to negotiate.

New schools were built with similar ignorance of daily realities in the region — with, for instance, air-conditioning hookups instead of traditional slatted window louvers. “It’s like somebody said, This is a hot place, you’re going to use air-conditioning all the time,” Finnen explained. “But the education department can’t afford to pay for the A.C.”

“Competition with China is the lens that we look at the region through, but that’s not the lens that a lot of Pacific Islanders want to solely look at their own engagement with the U.S. through,” said Michael Walsh, a researcher at Georgetown University who served as the chair of the Asian and Pacific Security Affairs subcommittee of the Biden campaign during the 2020 presidential election. “They understand what our motivation is in increasing engagement with the region, and they’re willing to instrumentalize that, but the problem with all of this is, it’s not responding to the needs of the people. It hasn’t over decades.”

The Biden administration’s September 2022 Pacific Partnership Strategy promised to appoint the first U.S. envoy to the Pacific Island Forum (a regional bloc), increase economic support and help combat climate change — a crucial area of concern given the delicate ecology and rising sea levels affecting the region.

A frenzy of diplomatic overtures preceded the announcement. In February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Fiji, the first such visit in three decades. In April, the Solomon Islands signed a security agreement with Beijing, and Washington expressed concerns that China would open a base there. In July, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a virtual address at the PIF in which she announced plans to open new embassies, return the Peace Corps and increase funding to the Forum Fisheries Agency. Finally, in September, President Biden hosted the leaders of Pacific Island countries for a first-ever White House summit.

In May 2023, Biden canceled what would have been a much-anticipated historic first U.S. presidential visit to the region to deal with the debt-ceiling crisis, but invited the PIF countries back for a second White House summit later in the year. Blinken went to Papua New Guinea in Biden’s place, and witnessed the signing of the third round of COFA funding with Palau. Micronesia signed the next day.

“The ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ is like this new paradigmatic shift against China,” Kenneth Gofigan Kuper, a professor of political science at the University of Guam, told me. “All geopolitical roads in this region lead to Guam — we’re the Rome of the Pacific. We are the price of a ‘free and open Pacific,’ but Guam is not free.”

In two referendums in 1982, the people of Guam voted to become a U.S. commonwealth — like the Northern Marianas — but legislation to change the status stalled in Congress. In 1997, the Guam Legislature passed a law that established the Guam Commission on Decolonization and called for another plebiscite. The choices were: statehood, independence or free association. Voting was restricted to the “Chamorro people,” who were defined as “all inhabitants of Guam in 1898 and their descendants.” (“Chamorro” is the spelling Guam adhered to before 2018.) Three years later, the plebiscite law was amended to replace “Chamorro” with “native inhabitants of Guam” to avoid accusations of racial discrimination. But in 2017, the Ninth District court ruled that since the new law referred to a statute that had previously stated “Chamorro,” it still violated the 15th Amendment, and struck down the law. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

The question of who would vote in the plebiscite was complicated, and how it was phrased was contentious. Over centuries of migration, the CHamoru have become a minority on the island. In the 2020 census, 36 percent of the population identified as Asian alone, with 29 percent of self-identifying as Filipino. There were also debates as to whether any of the options on the ballot were truly realistic — was Guam technically too small to be a state, too entwined with the United States to be freely associated and too reliant on American passports to be independent? Would they lose their security or gain a say over it?

Still, the circuit court’s rejection of Guam’s appeal in 2019 inspired the largest public protest on the island in recent memory. It also left Guam’s government nervous about trying again — Democratic legislators want to ensure any new law is unassailable before announcing it. But no matter how and which way people believe the status discussion should be decided, there is an overall acknowledgment that colonialism is an anachronism — that territorial status should be modernized.

“The absolute, immense power that Congress has in the instance of the Insular Cases is unfair, unconstitutional and un-American, but on the other hand, it gives them immense power to create a different relationship with an entity like Guam,” Robert Underwood, Guam’s representative in the House from 1993 to 2003, told me. “That could be independence, free association or, if arranged in a certain way, it could be unique legislation just for Guam.”

The base-visiting system on Guam is an impenetrable labyrinth. Each base is under the control of a different commander, who sets different regulations on who can come inside and how. During my time on the island, I visited all of the large bases run by different branches or subservices — Andersen Air Force Base, Naval Base Guam and Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz. I also saw the THAAD missile-defense battery operated and controlled by the Army, but to make matters more confusing, I was escorted there by a public-affairs officer from the Air Force. The THAAD also happens to be a place where the Guam National Armed Guard is on active duty. (If you’re confused about who is in charge of what, so are they.)

Leevin T. Camacho, Guam’s outgoing attorney general, took me through Andersen Air Force Base to visit his family’s land. There are about a dozen family plots inside Andersen, so, somewhat confusingly, CHamoru families could still visit their tracts, but because they were inside the base and therefore not connected to power or sewage, they could not live on them. As we stood in line in the equatorial sun to get into the small visitor building, we chatted with an older veteran with a cane waiting with his wife. They had to renew her visitor pass every three days — anytime they wanted to get gas, go to the grocery store or eat at the reduced-price chains. After an hour in the heat, we were the second-to-last visitors let into the checkpoint before they closed for the day at 2 p.m. The 20 people who had been standing and sweating behind us had to come back again tomorrow. Inside, a harried young airman muttered frantically, reminding herself of the steps she had to complete to process everyone in line. I wrote my Social Security number on a plastic card for a background check and left my fingerprint in some kind of electronic system. After over an hour and a half of waiting, we were allowed to get into Camacho’s car and go to his family’s land.

Naval Base Guam was significantly easier to get onto, paradoxically because unescorted visitors were not allowed at all. The P.A.O. drove me through the armed checkpoint without any problems. We pulled up to a small, neat cemetery, all that remains of the largest historic CHamoru village pre-contact, where we waited for Roy to arrive.

There was an eeriness to it, being on a large geopolitical target that resembled a tropical paradise in the middle of the Pacific — a sense of foreboding that was both ever-present and yet somehow totally absent. Many people I spoke to, including Roy, had friends who relocated to the continental United States just because of the danger of a North Korean or Chinese nuclear-missile strike. “I’m not ashamed to say I think of it once in a while,” Roy had told me. “OK, if a nuke hit, there really is nothing anybody can do. Guam is about 30 miles long. If you don’t get hit in the blast, there’s the fallout.”

When we were finally able to sit down together to talk about status, Roy told me he had thought a lot about it and elaborated that he believed the plebiscite should happen and, as all the CHamoru I spoke to told me, only those with CHamoru lineage should vote. “We have a huge target on our back,” he told me, “and that’s because of who we affiliate ourselves with, who’s in charge of our land and being the largest gas station, largest supply line in the Pacific.”