The other night I watched “Oppenheimer,” an extraordinarily powerful film. It reminded me of late 1960s and early 1970s, when I spent five years living in the Marshall Islands. I spent two as a Peace Corps volunteer and three more as a teacher at Marshall Islands High School, on contract with the U.S. Department of the Interior, which exercised administrative control there.
The United States conducted 67 atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshalls between 1946 and 1958, but we were not officially made aware of that. We also didn’t know about the possible health ramifications for anyone living on these islands. The bomb tests were in the news when we were little kids. All we remembered was Cold War “duck and cover” drills in our elementary schools.
The people of Bikini and Eniwetok, the far northwestern Marshallese atolls (rings of islands), were asked by the U.S. government to give up their homelands for these tests to further the cause of world peace. The Marshallese had been freed by the U.S. military from brutal Japanese occupation before and during World War II, and they were grateful. They thought they might be able to go back to their homes someday.
The fallout from previous atomic bomb tests was blown by trade winds into the uninhabited expanse of the Pacific Ocean. But fallout from the March 1, 1954, test on Bikini — the first one to use a hydrogen bomb — fell on inhabited islands.
The people on these islands had not been evacuated nor warned about the radioactive white ash falling from the sky. They thought it was snow, until it burned their skin.
The Bikini and Eniwetok atolls are now radioactive and unsafe for human habitation for a very, very long time. The people of all the affected islands now have higher rates of cancer than any other local group in the world. But in 1973, cement blocks made with radioactive sand and water were built on the main island of Bikini by Filipino construction crews. These crews were replaced every three months.
An ex-Peace Corps friend of mine even spent two years trying to re-grow coconut trees there. Using every growing methodology known then, he never got trees to grow higher than 2 feet. Then they died.
In spring 1973, I was living in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. My Peace Corps roommate, Ron, had never left and was working with a local businessman who was developing a hotel, a restaurant and shipping business. Ron and I met one afternoon for a beer at a local bar.
A man we didn’t know came in and we asked him to join us. We found out he was Carl Mydans, an award-winning photographer during the Great Depression, now working for Life magazine.
Mydans had just returned from a flight to Bikini atoll with various Marshallese elders and U.S. officials. The U.S. was preparing the atoll for resettlement.
Mydans told us that one of the Marshallese elders was the high chief. As their plane flew over the atoll, the chief looked down, looked at a map, pointed to a spot and asked, “Where’s this island?”
The officials looked at the map and looked down. “Well, it’s gone,” one said.
The chief stared down again. “Gone? How can that be? That was my family’s island. All my ancestors were buried there.”
The officials explained that the island had been destroyed in a bomb test. The chief looked down again. Then, Carl Mydans said, this 80-something-year old man started to cry. There was no way for him to understand what had happened, and no way for anyone on that plane to explain it to a man for whom land was everything.
So here we were, two 27-year-old ex-Peace Corps volunteers, still somewhat in the throes of 1960s “save the world” idealism, sitting at a bar on a Pacific island, having a Japanese beer with Carl Mydans, who had taken pictures of combat in Europe and the Pacific. He’d been captured by the Japanese and spent a year as a prisoner of war in the Philippines. He had captured the Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri.
And here, in a nondescript bar in the Marshall Islands, he cried. And so did Ron and I.
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