This Is Running for Your Life (20 page)

By the time a Vietnam casualty was chosen, in a Pearl Harbor ceremony in 1984, the ritual had taken on an indelible significance. It is said that military brass have gone so far as to suppress or destroy evidence that might identify one of the men. Rumor has it that service in the twenty-four-hour honor guard over the tombs requires a pledge to maintain both eternal sobriety and a thirty-inch waist.

It was even suggested that the Pentagon had a good idea about the Vietnam unknown's identity when he was chosen. By the spring of 1998, that kind of deception was tough to maintain; it was the first days of the Internet, and the idea was just taking shape that information, like the mediating sweat from our pores, wanted to be free. A veterans' rights activist named Ted Sampley had worked online to piece together a case for the Vietnam unknown's identity. The story was picked up by the media, and soon after that the advances in forensic science that arrived too late for the murder prosecution of a faded football hero and too early for the sitting president reached the tomb.

In June 1998 a bone fragment of the last of the unknown soldiers was tested for mitochondrial DNA and identified as the remains of twenty-four-year-old Michael Blassie, an air force first lieutenant whose plane was shot down over An Loc during the Easter Offensive of 1972. His body was returned to his family in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Vietnam tomb at Arlington has remained pointedly empty ever since.

Between 1972 and 1984, Blassie's remains were in Honolulu, home of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a majestic burial site located atop a volcanic crater. Called Puowaina, or “hill of sacrifice,” in Hawaiian, after its original, pagan function as just that, it was rechristened as the Punchbowl in English, I was told, because it looks kind of like a punch bowl. Despite a legible map and the clear instruction of the Frenchman manning a table full of his large-printed local-history texts in the vestibule of the U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii, I spent the better part of my first afternoon in Honolulu searching for the Punchbowl.

The museum, set along the cool, dark corridor of a defunct munitions battery at Fort DeRussy, was all but empty at late morning. Because it tells the story not of the island but of the United States on the island, the museum's overwhelming mood is that of a double failure. The first, made plain by the fort itself, is treated more euphemistically in a brief description of the slingshots used by the natives “before the arrival of western technology.” The second is laid out in a relic-strewn installation detailing the Japanese attack on Honolulu's Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. A few photographs are among the maps and recovered shards of metal. Seventy years later, the main emotion flowing through the museum's retelling of the story of that “peaceful” morning is still wounded surprise, as every attack on American soil is in some sense a surprise. Farther down the hall, after the Pacific war has been ended by an “overwhelming show of power” at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a certain relief is expressed about the return to conventional weapons and tactics in Korea. General “Hap” Arnold, whose remarks are posted near the images of a decimated Japan, sums it up: “Destruction has become too cheap, too easy!”

The museum's designers brought the bulk of their creativity to bear on Vietnam. The “Back to Nam” corner is accessible via a kind of disco bridge, inlaid with bamboo, where footsteps trigger flashing lights and arcade-style explosions. Nearby a vintage Coke can is spotlit beside an explanation of improvised grenades titled “It's the Real Thing.” The story of Vietnam, in case you are still wondering, ends this way: “The disengagement was honorable; United States forces had not been defeated on the battlefield. But there remain lasting scars for having paid such a price to accomplish so little.”

I was checking out the gift shop's array of four-color books about Pearl Harbor movies when I spotted Pierre Moulin, full-bellied and gray-bearded, sweating lightly through his blue linen button-down as he schooled an old-timer about a local war monument. Pierre left his native Bruyères, France—site of one of the ten most important battles in American history, he informed me, and with no movie to show for it!—for the islands almost thirty years before, and since that time he had written a book to address my every Hawaiian concern. Pierre noted my French Canadian lineage favorably, though even he had forgotten the significance of whether
Meunier
is spelled with an
i
or a
y
. Europe had offloaded its rubbish to the United States during the great migration, he confided, whereas Canada attracted a higher order of immigrant.

And who winds up on Hawaii?

*   *   *

I had but one day to burn in paradise, where the days have been burning for those who wind up here since Captain Cook crashed the Polynesians' thousand-year reign in 1778. (Pierre says the Spanish beat Cook by three centuries; he's writing a book.) And it would seem we all wind up on Hawaii, eventually. If Hawaii has learned to expect us, it is no longer with fresh lilies and dashboard-surfing beauties—we are too many to stand on that particular ceremony, though self-purchased synthetic leis are a suitable nod to it. Instead Hawaii greets its guests with the cool accommodation of algorithm, a paradise theme park with bodies to move. Somewhat late to its own game, in the fall of 2011 Disney opened its first Hawaiian resort. The Aulani, set on twenty-one acres of beachfront seventeen miles outside Honolulu, promises immersion in local culture “through Disney magic.”

The question of how you wound up on Hawaii and the desire for a sense of being
in
it are subsets of the same, so-close-yet-so-damn-far problem. It had me blotting out the mimetic shopping strips to glean the distance, leaning into the thick, misted morning air for some situating, bone-alarm frequency, tilting at the ocean for a sense of stubborn place, and typing at night to friends who would receive my words in the same form and at the same speed no matter their origin or how often I told them, or myself, that I was but a dot in the ocean, a comma between continents. For those temporary, those airborne fleas, it's easier to be Hawaii than be in it.

That first morning I had woken up with military business on my mind—a visit to the Pearl Harbor memorial, where over a thousand servicemen are still entombed in the sunken USS
Arizona.
Brochures in the lobby of my Waikiki hotel, a high-rise the same, minimally varied shade of Cheerio of all the others comprising the “10,000 bookable rooms” I see advertised throughout my stay, described
NEW
and
AMAZING
“Pearl Harbor Heroes Adventure” tours. Each tour emphasizes the visceral pleasures of re-creation, so that to choose between them means choosing whether to
relive
,
experience
, or
immerse yourself in
the moment in American history that
will live in infamy
. There is also the option of doing any one of those things
while also
exploring the island of Oahu
in all its grandeur
, but that costs a little more. Some might prefer to walk
in the exact footsteps
of America's most courageous heroes, others to
stand in their shadows
. These are things each consumer must figure out for herself.

The concierge told me that there was no point in my trying to stand in anyone's shadow at Pearl Harbor: it's the most popular tourist attraction in Hawaii. “If you get there after nine, it's a four-hour wait,” he advised. “And they close the lines at noon.” I cast my eyes back to the pamphlet trolley advertising sixty-dollar bus tours, all with a memorial-hogging pickup time of 6:00 a.m. And then resolved to find the Punchbowl—where buses can only pass through—on foot.

In theory the walk to the Punchbowl, a straight shot two miles from Waikiki, lacks intrigue. But clues to the old volcano's whereabouts are few and the craters are many. I scaled two of them, deep in Honolulu's suburbs, before pulling a local out of his home to help set me right. I was still guessing right up to the gates, which open onto a vista-skimming view of the beachfront enclave below. It was five in the afternoon, the oppressively direct sunlight had given way to a precious-metal glow, and a windward breeze was brushing grass and leaves over the grave markers of thirty-four thousand bodies. The names and the states differ, but the age—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—is almost always the same. The crater covers over a hundred acres, and I seemed to have them all to myself.

More unknown soldiers are buried in the Punchbowl than in any other American national cemetery. Its centerpiece—a court of ten marble monuments—is dedicated to the nearly thirty thousand with only a name to lay to rest. For the last decade the Pentagon has been scouring the grounds for suitable DNA candidates. Earlier this year the five bone fragments that remained of a USS
Oklahoma
casualty were the source of a successful identification. It made for a nice press item, even if the only remaining relative of Machinist Mate First Class Charles H. Swanson didn't know he had a cousin at Pearl Harbor.

Magnificent institutional structures are designed to evoke an unknown or maybe just unsuspected emotional response. I did not know, for instance, until I stood inside the balustraded arms of the Vatican, that God's perfection did in fact rule over my mortal, sinning soul. I hardly guessed, until I sat at Abraham Lincoln's massive, marble-booted feet in Washington, D.C., that the blood of a patriot could pump through my maple-syrup-sucking heart. And yet, sunk deep into the silent core of Puowaina—where President Obama's grandfather rests in mile-deep ash—moving across the vast lawns and through the engraved marble theater, gawping at the Byzantine mosaics that translate the story of the Pacific wars into cave-wall tableaux, and kneeling over a grave to pencil-rub the word
UNKNOWN
into a notebook page, I didn't feel what I was meant to. I could not seem to submit. Even at the urging of Lincoln himself, whose letter of condolence to the famously, unfathomably bereaved Lydia Bixby is quoted at the foot of an apparitional statue of Lady Columbia.

I thought only of the dead—the known dead, named and unnamed—who never imagined their bodies filling the crater of a sea-speck volcano. The dead who died anguished and light-years from home—at last I felt the distance—pleading for its safeties as the life was blasted from their bodies. I thought of the living—not the bereft, oddly, but those intent on suspending their lives at the age of these young men, who had no choice. I thought of how Lydia Bixby lost two sons in the Civil War—not five, as Lincoln was told. No one cares about that now. The truth of his words about
the solemn pride that must be yours
, the nobility of
sacrifice
, and
the altar of freedom
outweighed the truth of the situation. I thought of how often the same words are now used to jam the scales to suit political will. The way that these new wars have been shoved into the shadow of a larger monument, eroding the ground where it stands. I wondered if it's possible to memorialize a war that was itself conceived as a kind of reminder. I listened to the wind blow and all I heard was wind blowing.

“Every war is ironic,” Paul Fussell wrote in 1975, “because every war is worse than expected.” Sixteen years later, teenagers like me wrote earnest diary entries on the eve of the Gulf War. We wondered what was going to happen, what it all meant, what war
was
. In fact it seemed not at all as bad as the movies would have had us believe—a kind of inverted irony. This was tidy and precise, combat by remote control. Were the experience of war ever remotely comprehensible by those reading the papers and manning their own remote controls, digitizing and disseminating its enactment lost it to us forever. We absorbed information in seemingly comprehensive terms—even watched aerial bombings in real time—and yet the enemy had never felt quite so unknown.

Fussell called the Great War the most ironic war in human history. The gap between what the participants thought they were doing and what actually happened had never been greater. The result was mass disillusionment, and the birth of modern irony. Such illusions as lingered on toward the end of that century were sustained by a kind of artificial respiration, where we breathed in the promises of brands or passing beliefs and breathed out part of ourselves with them, choking the atmosphere with unsynthesized desire. The ideals of freedom and prosperity grew strangely dichotomous, dividing within and without. Confronting literal limits had lost its nation-defining purpose; Hawaii was as far west as we were going to go in the postnuclear age, and the space program was foundering into irrelevance. Prosperity too faded into cherished abstraction, even as the freedom to consume became the metaphor of modern life.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, as the towers were still burning, a white-haired woman stepped into my Toronto apartment building's elevator with four words—“We're going to war”—and I realized I still didn't know what they meant. But then the meaning of war was about to shift again, we were told, this time to accommodate an untraditional combatant, an enemy that seemed to come out of nowhere, out of the sky. The national self-drama of absolutes—us versus them, known and unknown, before and after—resurged just as we were settling into a sense of private omnipotence. So that when Donald Rumsfeld talked about “the unknown unknowns” at provocative large in Iraq, beyond their use as instant grist for digital chortlers, instead of forming a caution the words found their meaning as a dare.

In the chapel a guest book is filled with direct addresses to the dead. Most favor two of Lincoln's words:
freedom
and
sacrifice
. Drawing a causal connection between them was a popular choice. “It is incumbent for all of us to always remember the price we pay to fight the wars this great country has, is, and will be fighting for in the name of the precious freedom we all enjoy,” one woman wrote. “We are in an eternal debt of gratitude to all these men and women who unstintingly give their lives in the cause of freedom. God Bless America!”