J. Maarten Troost - The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Johnston Atoll is the vilest place on Earth. In the 1960s the United States used the island for atmospheric nuclear tests, which is a definite no-no in most neighborhoods. Not content to merely nuke the atoll, the U.S. then decided to poison it. This is where America stores and disposes of such wonders from the laboratory as the nerve gas Sarin and other clever agents for delivering disease and death. There are two bleak processing plants and they sit at either end of the runway, steadily burning canister after canister of poison. Between the plants are military barracks with satellite dishes protruding from their roofs, receiving signals from a world that seems very far away. There is nothing else on Johnston Atoll. Now and then, there are little accidents, leakages, small oopsies , and the hapless soldiers assigned here don their gas masks.

It is tempting to dash off a page or two and expound upon the philosophical implications of Johnston Atoll. The physical manifestations of humanity’s capacity for great evil reside here, and for writers more ambitious than I this would be like catnip. However, sitting in an airplane watching one passenger, a civilian who had made a peculiar career choice, disembark, I was not struck by any profound ruminations. My thoughts were more along the lines of Could someone please close the fucking door before we all turn into mutants? Armed soldiers guarded the airplane and I just knew that they were sporting fish gills, and while I felt deeply sorry for them and their offspring, I just wished that someone would close the door and let us breathe airplane air again, which is only slightly less toxic, but still. And then someone did just that, and we were back in the air, scanning the water closely, searching for signs of Godzilla.

So maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Johnston Atoll is the transitory island in the Pacific. The illusion-buster. The island that announces to travelers that they should cast aside their naivete, their glossy presumptions, and realize that the Pacific is a big place, a big empty place, and that some may find the emptiness useful. True, Johnston Atoll is just a rock, barren and about as distant from settlement as one can be, and so if one must nuke an island, and gas it too, Johnston Atoll does all right, never mind the fishies. Not so the Marshall Islands. Here, after ever more hours spent hurtling across the Pacific, we arrived, exhausted and crabby, accustomed to movement, and not at all prepared, after all that flying, to find ourselves in a spookily familiar place, as though we were inside a forgotten episode of The Twilight Zone , the one where Dr. Strangelove descends upon the set of South Pacific . We were on Majuro, the capital atoll of the Marshall Islands, a grim island group deemed useful by the United States. It is, frankly, not so good to be found useful by a superpower, particularly one interested in exploring the nuances of the hydrogen bomb.

It was in the Marshall Islands where scientists finally discovered what, in fact, constitutes a coral atoll. A coral atoll is the crest of a dying volcano. Like many explanations this one derives from Charles Darwin, building upon the work of previous naturalists. Coral only thrives until about 150 feet below the surface, but rather than assume that the coral is steadily rising atop an expanding underwater volcano, which was the belief at the time, Darwin theorized that coral replenishes itself by matching the rate of a sea volcano’s dissolution. As the land far below the water surface steadily recedes into the depths, coral polyps grow from its slopes, seeking the sun, rising first to become a barrier reef, and then, as the volcano continues to disintegrate, slowly inching toward its base, an atoll is formed, the living crest balanced atop layers of dead coral and far below, the volcano itself.

Of course, it took some time to prove this theory, since one had to dig awfully deep to find the volcano below. Attempts were made, but it was not until 1952, more than a hundred years after Darwin first proposed his theory, when a drill bit was pushed 4,610 feet into Eneewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands and struck volcanic rock, that Darwin’s theory was proved correct. It was incidental, however, to the purpose of the drilling. Enwetak was being canvassed as a sight for testing the hydrogen bomb and the drilling indicated that the atoll was suitable for obliteration. Shortly after dawn on November 1, 1952, a bomb called Mike was detonated, and an island, a home, an ecosystem was blown up, irradiated, and poisoned, leading many to wonder what is the point of having Nevada.

This was hardly the only apocalyptic event in the Marshalls. I just happen to enjoy the weird symbiosis between discovering the nature of an atoll and blowing it up. Dozens of tests occurred in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s and one would think that nuking the Marshall Islands over and over again would be enough punishment to inflict on the country for one epoch, but the U.S. Department of Defense thinks otherwise. Every year, the United States targets the Marshall Islands with its intercontinental ballistic missiles. These weapons are fired from California, using missiles randomly selected to ensure that if the green light for Armageddon is ever given, what follows will go smoothly. The ICBMs are aimed at Kwajalein Atoll, the catcher’s mitt, where research is also conducted on several missile defense systems, including for some years the Strategic Defense Initiative, and more recently, a humbler defense system (THAAD—Theater High Altitude Defense) that requires missiles to be fired from two other atolls in the Marshalls. Access to two-thirds of Kwajalein is restricted to American soldiers and those who supply them with their weaponry, which in addition to the four islands already poisoned by radiation—Bikini, Eneewetak, Rongelap, and Utrik—results in five islands lost to the U.S. defense industry. With the Bush (II) administration’s decision to discard the ABM Treaty, even more testing will be conducted in the Marshall Islands. For a country with a total area of less than 120 square miles, the loss of five islands is not insignificant. And so payments must be made.

The Marshall Islands had received $800 million of American “aid” over the previous ten years, which amounted to $14,300 for every man, woman, and child in the country. The vast majority of this money was sent directly to the government of the Marshall Islands, which, of course, is the best possible way to instill corruption, inefficiency, and a dependency mentality in Third World governments everywhere. Not only did all this aid fail to significantly improve the health and welfare of the Marshallese, it introduced new afflictions. Hypertension, diabetes, and high blood pressure are now serious problems as a result of the local diet being supplanted by food imported from the United States. Alcoholism and suicide, particularly among the young, have taken root in a society no longer held together by traditional bonds. And Majuro, an atoll not more than two hundred yards wide, is besieged by traffic jams, mountains of garbage, aimless youth fashionable in their East L.A. ghetto wear, and a population as a whole that has already moved beyond despair and settled into a glazed ennui. It is a miserable place where coconut palm trees have disappeared, replaced by concrete and tin.

And there are cockroaches. Enormous cockroaches. I began to wonder. What precisely had caused the cockroaches on Majuro to become so enormous? They trolled like sinister remnants of the Pleistocene era, when everything was bigger, meaner, and just generally more voracious (or was that the Cambrian era?), and because I was fairly well informed about the activities of a certain superpower on these islands I immediately began to think about radioactive fallout and where, exactly, did it all go? Which way was the wind blowing in the 1940s, and the 1950s, and the 1960s, because there are some scary cockroaches on Majuro. In the back of a taxi, they scurried across our feet. They emerged from every nook and cranny in our hotel room. In a restaurant, they rushed across the table and asked, really, if we were going to eat that.