The Sex Lives of Cannibals (25 page)

CHAPTER
18

In which the Author recounts the Battle of Tarawa, which is now forgotten in America, because America is a Today kind of country, sometimes a Tomorrow kind of country, but rarely a Yesterday kind of country, and it does not linger on the deaths of soldiers past, which is not possible on Tarawa.

I
t is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press. Actually, I would be impressed with that answer. The more likely response is
Who the fuck cares?

Elsewhere in the world, people are a little more knowledgeable about American history. They know, for instance, exactly what year it was when the CIA overthrew their government. In the United States, however, history is largely paved over, abandoned, and relegated to textbooks so shockingly dull that they could only have been written by politically correct creationists whose sole objective was to offend no one. And it’s not just the textbooks, of course, where history has been washed out. The land has been settled for more than ten thousand years; Europeans have been traipsing about since the fifteenth century, which by any measure, is a very long time ago. Yet, outside of Boston and—I can’t think of anyplace else—one is hard-pressed to find a building that predates the twentieth century. In Europe, every town has a memorial commemorating the townsmen who lost their lives in the two world wars. In America, every town has a Wal-Mart. Only on the Great Plains does one find the telling remnants of lives lived and lost, the abandoned homesteads that creak with forgotten stories, and the only reason those boards still stand is that the landscape is so bleak and foreboding that no one else wants to build there ever again. Frankly—and I mean no offense to the good people of North Dakota—I can’t believe you haven’t all left yet.

Even on the acres where momentous events have occurred, such as a Civil War battlefield where the outcome changed the course of history, the site has typically been gussied up, dusted off and varnished, with the result that the visitor sees nothing. At Manassas, for instance, I saw a freshly mowed field, a quaint farmhouse, a lovely stone wall, but mostly I saw a great place for a picnic. I did not see a battle that cost the lives of thousands. It was too
clean
.

Contrast this with Tarawa, where nothing is clean. Generally, this bothered me. There are few sights more dispiriting than a long seawall built with discarded junk—cars, tires, cans, oil barrels, et cetera—slicing through an emerald lagoon. This was the best that could be done with the detritus of the
I-Matang
world. On the continents, a broke-down car soon becomes a forgotten broken-down car once it is towed to someplace unseen. On Tarawa, though, nothing disappears. If nature can’t consume it, it remains on the island, most often right where its working life came to an end. This includes the relics from the Battle of Tarawa, one of the bloodiest engagements fought during World War II.

The Japanese admiral charged with defending Tarawa had predicted that a million men and a thousand years of battle would be required before his soldiers could be dislodged from the atoll. The Second Marine Division needed three days. The Battle of Tarawa was fought on the islet of Betio, which is less than one square mile in size. On November 21, 1943, the U.S. Marines approached Betio under the morning sun. They misjudged the tides and their landing vehicles could not traverse the reef and so they waded five hundred yards in the open and suffered a 70 percent casualty rate in the first wave of attack. There were 4,300 Japanese soldiers on Betio, as well as several hundred Korean laborers, and over three days all of them were killed except seventeen soldiers who surrendered because they were too injured to fight on and could not find within themselves the strength to commit suicide. The Marines lost 1,113 soldiers. Corpses are still found when new wells are dug. There is also unexploded ordnance. Now and then a bomb is discovered. Shipping containers are moved from the port and stacked high around the bomb to direct the explosion up. And then—
boom
.

The remains of this battle exist today as untended features of the land- and seascapes, devoid of the solemn pomp that usually attends war ruins. On land, laundry hangs from antiaircraft guns. The turret of a small tank lies discarded like junk in a clearing where pigs and chickens feed. Bunkers are used as trash receptacles and toilets. The Japanese big guns remain encased by sandbags, now petrified, and in their shadows volleyball is played. On the reef, the detritus of battle endures as nautical hazards. Oceanside, the reef is littered with tank traps, ammunition, the remains of a Japanese Zero, and a B-
29. Each relic marks where someone died and someone killed, and the lack of sanctity granted these vestiges of war does not allow you the distance to pretend otherwise.

If there is one indelible image from the Battle of Tarawa, it is a photo of dozens of dead Marines bobbing in the shallows just off what was called Red Beach II. I often launched my windsurfer from Red Beach II. Just twenty yards from the beach lies a rusting amtrac. At reef’s edge are the brown ribs of a ship long ago grounded, where Japanese snipers once picked off Marines wading and swimming and floating toward a beach that offered nothing better. A little farther I directed my board over the wings and fuselage of a B-
29 Liberator. Clearing the harbor entrance, I confronted the rusting carcasses of several landing vehicles. Near the beach was a Sherman tank, with children playing on the turret.

The Battle of Tarawa is an inescapable part of daily life on the island. I frequently found myself on Betio, pursuing a rumor that fresh fruit could be found at a particular store, when I would stumble across an antiaircraft gun or a cement bunker or a tank turret and I would think,
Oh that’s right, 5,500 men were killed here
. After a while, it just sort of seeps into you that Tarawa was the site of unimaginable violence and that it ought to be remembered. It bothered me that among my American friends and acquaintances only one had any knowledge of the Battle of Tarawa, and he happened to be a Marine. Perhaps it’s because I had to been to Bosnia. Once one sees a park transformed into a cemetery, one understands that battles ought to be remembered.

There are a few memorials commemorating the battle on Tarawa. In the 1960s, Navy Seabees began work on a causeway linking Betio to the rest of Tarawa. It was to commemorate the Battle of Tarawa. They never finished it. Another war arrived and they were sent to Vietnam. Instead, the Japanese finished the project and today it is called the Nippon Causeway. There are two other memorials on Betio. One is a Shinto shrine honoring the Japanese and Korean dead. Every month a Japanese worker from the port project cleans the memorial, wiping it down and clearing trash and brush. It is always meticulously clean. The other memorial sits in front of the Betio Town Council building. It is a time capsule shaped like an obelisk. No one prunes the weeds here. There is a flagpole, but there is no flag. The memorial reads:

“Follow Me”

2
nd Marine Division

USMC

Battle of Tarawa

November 20, 1943

To our fellow Marines

who gave their all!

The world is free because of you!

God rest your souls

1,113 killed                                    2,290 wounded

The Central Pacific Spearhead

To World Victory in World War II

“
Semper Fideli
”

On the other side, it reads:

Memorial to sailors, airmen,

chaplains, doctors, and especially to

Navy Corpsmen

30 killed                                    59 wounded

Sealed November 20, 1987

Camp Lejeune, N.C., U.S.A.

To be opened November 20, 2143

From our world to yours

Freedom above all

Sylvia had grown up next door to a survivor of the Battle of Tarawa. She didn’t know this at the time; he had died shortly after she left for college. It was only after Sylvia’s parents had mentioned to his widow that their daughter was now living on Tarawa that she learned that for all those years she had lived beside a veteran of the battle. No one knew. The former Marine never talked about it. His widow mentioned that in the years after they were married, he often woke in the middle of the night, screaming, terrified, haunted by the experience. But he never talked about it. Not even the survivors care to remember the Battle of Tarawa. And so all that remains of the battle are the ruins, slowly dissipating on a reef in the equatorial Pacific, just a short distance from the Nippon Causeway.

CHAPTER
19

In which the Author begins to hear rumors of Lurid Happenings in Washington, and suddenly he Regrets his Situation, his Location, and Wishes only to have access to a tabloid newspaper, a television, an Internet connection, but he is Denied.

T
he reading situation had become desperate. I’d read through every book we’d brought. I had read all of Mike’s books. I had trudged through the scraps left by previous FSP directors. I read a biography of the last days of the Romanov family. I read
Dune
. Then I read it again. I like my entertainment not too serious, not too stupid, sort of like this book.

But there are only so many times one can read a book. I am quite certain that I am the only man in the Pacific to have read
All the Pretty Horses
three times, which might be why in my own prose I found myself writing sentences that were approximately four pages long, describing the sad yet inevitable descent of a leaf. More troubling than the dearth of books, however, was the utter absence of newspapers and magazines. In Washington, I had been a certifiable news junkie. Sundays just didn’t feel complete until I had burrowed through forty pounds of newspaper. I even read
Parade
. Each weekday, I began my morning with the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and, because I respected their coverage of events in Slovenia, the
Financial Times
. From the debate on health care to the governor’s race in West Virginia to recent events in Mali, I was
informed
.

Alas, on Tarawa I lived in a state of ignorance not known to westerners since the advent of papyrus. I often found myself approach-ing other
I-Matangs
. “I’ll trade you my December 1978
Scientific American
—it’s about this new thing called computers—for your March 1986
Newsweek
. I’d like to relive Iran-Contra for a spell.” At noon, I religiously tuned in to the English-language news summary on Radio Kiribati. I had grown very fond of its opening jingle—the theme from
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
—but the news broadcast itself made for a compelling argument on the importance of a free and independent media. Inevitably, the government-controlled broadcast would begin with something like:
The recent power outages have proven to be a boon for shops selling kerosene lanterns
. And then it would cut to Radio Australia.
In Wagga Wagga today . . .

The bimonthly newspaper was no help either. It contained a World Focus page, where the government printed what it thought were the most important global news issues of the day. “Precious Rock Keeps Diana’s Name Alive” was a typical headline. The I-Kiribati might not have been aware that the Cold War had ended, or even that there was such a thing as
cold
, but thanks to the government of Kiribati they were well informed about all things Diana. I no longer cared much about Princess Diana. She’s dead. Let it go. But the government would not let it go, and so every two weeks we would learn yet another profoundly inconsequential detail about the life and times of Princess Diana.

I eventually confined my hunt for news to the shortwave radio my father had thoughtfully given to us as a parting gift when we left for Kiribati. Unfortunately, it says much about the extreme isolation of Kiribati that I couldn’t call up much beyond Radio Bhutan. Occasionally, I caught five minutes or so of the BBC before it faded into the ether, and I must have caught it on London’s night shift, since the programs I found were of the “Gardens of Wales” and “Folk Songs of Bolivia” variety. I had nearly resigned myself to living in an entirely news-free world, when I heard a snippet that suddenly made me ravenous for news and commentary and rumor, causing me to pathetically spend the small hours of the morning scanning the shortwave radio dial, wishing again that my world was occupied by CNN and
Time
and Sunday newspapers and, in particular, tabloids. I was desperate for any info regarding a woman named Monica.

I have long had a weakness for spectacle, and I’m willing to go to great lengths to consume its delights. It filled me with despair that I was missing out on the fun of a sex scandal enveloping the White House, particularly this sex scandal. The deliciousness of it. Its luridness. Its breathtaking stupidity. Now and then, in the small hours before dawn, I caught Voice of America. Inevitably, it was transmitting America’s Top Forty Countdown, confirming that America’s propaganda arm believes insipid banality to be the best way to capture hearts and minds abroad. If they must go lowbrow, I thought the Clinton sex scandal offered some opportunities. But sadly, VOA declined, preferring instead to inform the world that America can best be understood through the Backstreet Boys and Mariah Carey.

Eventually, I discovered that if I turned to a particular frequency at exactly 6
P
.
M
., I could catch approximately five and a half minutes of BBC’s
Newshour
before it faded into static. A newsreader presented a summary of the day’s happenings—revolution in Indonesia, a crashing global economy, trouble in Argentina. Do get on with it, I thought. This was followed by analysis. But even the BBC felt that the Clinton sex scandal was of sufficient global import to merit a lead story, and so for the one and a half minutes that remained until I lost reception, I listened to—and I don’t want to make too much of this, after all I am an adult, sophisticated, not at all puerile, really—a BBC correspondent by the name of, ahem, Judy Swallow, explain the day’s events.
All of America today is talking about a cigar and a stained blue dress
. . . and then there was static. What cigar? What’s so important about a cigar? What’s so significant about a blue dress? Stained with what?

It was maddening.

In an effort to obtain more information, I decided one day to subscribe to
The New Yorker
. I knew, of course, that it would be months until I saw a magazine, but I figured that if someone was putting each issue in the mail, a few would eventually reach Tarawa. I was willing to wait. True, by the time the magazines reached me, they would have been terribly dated. But it still would have been fresh for me. I knew nothing. There weren’t more than a few dozen homes on Tarawa with telephones, and we, lucky us, lived in one of them. And so I called the international subscriptions department of
The New Yorker
.

“Hi. I’d like to subscribe to
The New Yorker
, please.”

“Name?” said a faint voice through the static.

I gave her my name.

“Phone number?”

“28657,” I said.

Pause.

“I need more numbers, sir,” said the voice on the line.

“Um, I don’t have more numbers. I’m calling from a small country, a very small country.”

“The computer won’t let me continue until I fill in all the spaces.”

“How many more numbers do you need?”

“Five.”

“Then make it 28657-00000.”

“Address?”

“P.O. Box 652, Tarawa, Kiribati.”

“I need a street name, sir?”

“There are no street names. There’s only one street here.”

Pause.

“The computer won’t let me continue until I put in a street name.”

“Okay. Put in Main Road.”

“All right, sir. You said Tara-something. Is that a city?”

“It’s an island.”

“I need a city.”

“There are no cities on this island.”

“The computer won’t let me—”

“Put in Bikenibeu.”

“Bikeni-who?”

“B-I-K-E-N-I-B-E-U.”

“Okay. State?”

“Ma’am, there are no states here. There are no cities. There are no streets. There are only islands.”

“I need a state, sir. The computer won’t let me—”

“Put in T-A-R-A-W-A.”

“Country?”

“Kiribati.”

“Kiri-what, sir?”

“K-I-R-I-B-A-T-I.”

“Sir, it’s not showing up in the database.”

“It’s an independent country. It’s been a country for almost twenty years. Surely
The New Yorker
’s database of independent countries has been updated in the past twenty years.”

“It’s not showing up in the database, sir. Is there another name I could try?”

“Try Gilbert Islands.”

“I’m showing Ocean Island, Gilbert and Ellice Islands.”

“Ocean Island hasn’t been called Ocean Island in seventy years. It’s called Banaba.”

“Bana-what?”

“And the Gilbert and Ellice Islands are two separate countries now. The Gilbert Islands are part of Kiribati, and the Ellice Islands are now called Tuvalu.”

“Tuva-who?”

“Never mind. Let’s go with the colonial name.”

“All right, sir. Let me repeat the information. The address is: P.O. Box 652, The Main Road, Bikenibeu, Tarawa, Ocean Island, Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Telephone number 28657-00000. Is that correct?”

“Yes. I mean no. How much exactly is it going to cost me for you to send
The New Yorker
to the wrong island in the wrong country?”

“Let’s see. You’re not in Europe?”

“Nope.”

“And you’re not in Asia?”

“No.”

“And you’re not in Latin America.”

“No.”

“Okay. Then you’re in Other.”

She offered a chin-dropping figure. Already, the phone call alone was costing me the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Kiribati. I might have gone ahead with the subscription if I had been an English colonial officer stationed on Banaba in 1910, but I wasn’t, and I thought it imprudent to spend big bucks on a magazine that wasn’t at all confident that Kiribati existed.

Denied a magazine subscription, I turned to the other
I-Matangs
on the island. Most of them were Australian. “What have you heard?” I’d ask. “What’s with the blue dress?”

The Australians would inevitably begin “Americans are so puritanical . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I’d say. “Whatever. Now, what do you know?”

They knew nothing.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Sylvia offered. “I’m meeting with an English consultant tomorrow.” While not quite as obsessive as I was, Sylvia was notably curious about recent affairs in Washington. This was her president after all.

“Well, I asked her about the cigar,” Sylvia said the following day.

“And?” I asked, positively drooling for the lowdown.

“She wouldn’t say. But she was really blushing.”

“Blushing? You mean this is blush-worthy news? What on earth did Bill Clinton do with a cigar? This is killing me.”

I imagined what it must be like in America. The Clinton Sex Scandal 24/7 on television. Newspapers with screaming headlines. Rumors on the Internet. Magazine pieces on what it all meant for America. Salivating Republicans. How I wished I was there. Instead, I found myself at reef’s edge, under the white light of a million stars, watching the night fishermen scour the reef for octopus, as I worked the knobs of my shortwave radio, longing to hear nothing more than a Jay Leno monologue.