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| Kwajalein Atoll. |
With the lights low, on a clear night, anyone in a
30-mile radius of Lompoc, California, can witness the miracle of rocket
science, spearing the wee-hour sky with white-hot intensity, thrusting up, then
over and out, high across the Pacific.
One summer night several years
ago, camped illegally on a remote beach of Vandenberg Air Force Base (Welcome to Space Country), I saw my
first missile-launch as I rubbed my eyes, tentless and shivering next to
rotting kelp at the base of a low, dusty bluff.
In deep sleep I heard the launch’s
muted rumble, an aural oddity blending with the south swell cracking off the
reef I would surf come sunrise, risking military arrest. Coyotes howled at the
thin, bright line arcing across black sky, addressing the disturbance along
this otherwise serene yet high-tech coast.
I later learned that the missile
was fired from a launch pad near Point Sal, 25 miles north. But where
was that missile going, and why?
A week later, brunching in a sunny
downtown bistro, I found a coffee-stained Santa
Barbara News-Press dated from the day of the launch:
VANDENBERG AFB—An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) was successfully launched from North Vandenberg at
1:03 a.m. PDT today.
The mission was part of the Force
Development Evaluation Program, which tests the reliability and accuracy of the
weapon system.
The missile’s two unarmed re-entry
vehicles traveled approximately 4,200 miles in about 30 minutes, hitting
pre-determined targets at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the western chain of
the Marshall Islands.
That evening, I fished online and found a comprehensive website for the U.S. Army’s Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on
Kwajalein, the world’s largest atoll, in the Marshall Islands, rented for $11
million annually by the U.S. for a very specific purpose:
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| VAFB. |
The Reagan Test Site (RTS) is a premiere asset within the
Department of Defense Major Range and Test Facility Base. The unquestioned
value of RTS is based upon its strategic geographical location, unique
instrumentation, and unsurpassed capability to support ballistic missile
testing and space operations. With nearly 40 years of successful support, RTS
provides a vital role in the research, development, test and evaluation effort
of America’s missile defense and space programs.
The Marshall Islands, in the middle of the equatorial
Pacific, are a Micronesian republic of 29 atolls and five individual
islands, nearly all of them inhabited and swell-blessed. As far as I knew, the
only surfers there were some Americans who worked for the U.S. government.
Intelligence about Marshallese surf potential was scant, limited mainly to what
the expats occasionally surfed on Kwajalein and Majuro atolls.
Months after my Vandenberg camping
trip, on a breezy, rainbowy morning in paradise, my friend Lance deposited me
curbside at Honolulu International Airport, the Marshall Islands a five-hour
flight west.
There’s gotta be waves, brah,”
Lance said before pulling away from the curb. “You might be the first to surf
some reef pass.”
Kwajalein Atoll eluded me (“Sorry,
sir,” drawled an official from the U.S. Army Space & Missile Defense
Command headquarters in Alabama, “but journalists just ain’t allowed on
Kwajalein.”), though my flight landed at the military base on Kwajalein Island,
en route to Majuro, to offload a few government workers and contractors. The
terminal was drab, unwelcoming, with rust and flaky paint—like a prison, not a
gateway—with ominous armed guards prowling its perimeter, eyeing my jet.
Five weeks prior, within one
minute of landing here, New Mexico-based documentarian Adam Horowitz was
arrested (“It’s a shame nobody got that
on video,” he said) for filming the terminal from the plane’s stairway. He was
revisiting the Marshalls to create a sequel to his “Home on the Range”
documentary, aired several years ago on PBS, detailing the relocation of
Marshallese from Kwajalein Island to adjacent Ebeye Island, referred in National Geographic as "the slum of
the Pacific.”
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| Kwaj potential. |
Wearing handcuffs while the jet
full of Majuro-bound civilians sat on the tarmac, Horowitz argued with the base
commander.
“What’s your idea of good
journalism?” Horowitz asked. “Fox News?”
“Fox News is good journalism.”
“What about Oliver North?”
“Oliver North is a good American.”
“He subverted the Constitution.”
Red-faced, the commander finally
protested, “You’re not a journalist! You’re a damned loaded gun!”
In “Home on the Range,” Horowitz
declassified Kwajalein Atoll’s conversion into a top-secret U.S. missile and
“Star Wars” test site, flecked with radar dishes, highlighting the squalor of
Ebeye and its displaced population’s mission to regain their Kwajalein Island
turf.
Three thousand Americans live on
900-acre Kwajalein Island; 12,000 Marshallese live on
80-acre Ebeye, described in my guidebook as having “the harsh, parched look
of a Sonoran desert barrio that was picked up and dropped here so that Kwaj
could have a supply of cheap labor.”
Horowitz, thin and pale,
piercingly blue-eyed and hawkish, with a head of kinky black hair, was an
archetype of his ilk, like a paparazzo or war correspondent—abrasive, edgy,
focused, intelligent, cynical, stopping at nothing to gain what he needs to
produce what some would define as controversial and unpatriotic. To the U.S.
Army, of course, Horowitz is a parasite, out to expose impurities within the
system.
“My first film made the military
look pretty bad, which is easy to do,” he confided over beers one night in the
crowded restaurant above my Majuro hotel. “Americans took all the best land,
and the native owners live in the slum next door. Yet on Kwajalein Island, you
have swimming pools, playing fields, professional landscaping, a bowling alley,
golf courses, a Safeway, fresh produce, fresh meat. I hope my films will help
the Marshallese gain some of the justice and basic human rights denied them by
the U.S. for the sake of its weapons programs. If the American public really
knew what we have done, and are continuing to do over there, they’d be outraged
and ashamed.”
I said, “I’ve heard it described
as a rich American suburb stuck in middle of the Pacific.”
“That’s exactly what it is.”
Japan ruled Kwajalein after taking
it from Germany in 1914, during World War I, heeding a 1920 mandate from the
League of Nations to govern all of Micronesia. More than 20 years later,
during World War II, the U.S. Navy seized Kwajalein from Japan, and in 1947 the
Marshalls were added to the U.S.’s Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands,
which ultimately led to America’s infamous 11-year nuclear testing program.
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| VAFB. |
Until 1958, Kwajalein was used to
support the tests, which, after 66 detonations, had ruined Bikini and
Enewetak atolls, westernmost of the Marshalls, vaporizing various islands and
irradiating natives. (Despite relocation of their residents and millions of
dollars in decontamination efforts, both atolls remain somewhat radioactive;
Bikini has become an elite dive destination, while Enewetak has a bomb crater
full of radioactive waste, capped with two feet of cement.)
When 1963’s Limited Test Ban
Treaty banished open-air nuclear testing (France quickly took it underground in
Polynesia’s surf-rich Tuamotu Archipelago), the U.S. established the Pacific
Missile Range on Kwajalein Atoll. Today, Kwajalein monitors satellites and is
the blue-water catcher’s mitt for measuring splashdown accuracy of rockets
fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base, another militarized fetch of obscure
waves, armed guards, and spooky white radar dishes.