Outright expulsion such as that faced by the Chagossians and other indigenous peoples has been far from the only method used by military leaders wanting to maintain control over “their” island bases after World War II. When the United States granted the Philippines independence in 1946, for instance, it did so on the condition of maintaining a ninety-nine-year rent-free lease on sixteen bases and military installations, including Subic Bay and Clark Air Base and even more bases in cases of “military necessity.” (Nationalist protest later forced revision of the agreement; in 1966, the base leases were changed to expire in 1991.) The agreement effectively continued colonial rule over the bases themselves, where the United States retained sovereignty and control over Filipino workers, criminal prosecutions, taxation, and the entire city of Olongapo, adjacent to the Subic Bay Naval Base.1 In Japan, the United States occupied and ruled Okinawa until 1972, when it allowed Japan to regain formal sovereignty but likewise ensured the long-term tenancy of U.S. bases there.
Elsewhere in the Pacific, the United States made sure it retained basing rights when the UN granted it “trusteeship” over the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which had been “mandated” to Japan after World War I. This territory included the Marshall Islands, Palau, and islands that decades later became the Federated States of Micronesia. The trusteeship gave the United States the right to establish military facilities in the islands, and until 1951, the Navy governed the territory.2 Even after the Department of the Interior became the governing authority, the arrangement still amounted to what British constitutional law expert Stanley de Smith called “de facto annexation.”3
Eventually the Trust Territory islands gained their formal independence by signing “compacts of free association” with the United States. These compacts gave responsibilities for defense to the United States, which allowed the U.S. government to retain military control over the islands.4 In addition to the nuclear testing that was carried out in the Marshall Islands over the decades, the military still uses the islands for the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site—a facility that provides a target for missiles launched from California, thousands of miles away. In Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia, the military uses islands for training and has broad base construction rights during wartime.5
At the urging of the military after the war, the government maintained its control over possessions once called colonies, including Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as “territories” of the United States. These islands have neither full independence nor the full democratic rights that would come with incorporation into the United States. They highlight how, even in the twenty-first century, our base nation still relies on the perpetuation of colonial relationships, albeit under new guises and with new vocabulary. From the military’s perspective, Guam and the other territories offer unmatched autonomy. “This is not Okinawa,” Major General Dennis Larsen told a reporter at Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base. “This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory. We can do what we want here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out.”6
A TINY FOOTNOTE … AT THE CENTER OF POWER
The ability to do whatever it wants without fear of eviction—and with greater ease than in the fifty states—is a major part of why the military likes Guam so much. Located some eight thousand miles from Washington, D.C., Guam is about one fifth the size of Rhode Island, the smallest of the fifty states. At one point, military facilities took up nearly 60 percent of the island; today, they still account for almost 30 percent. (For comparison, the military controls just over 15 percent of the military-dominated city of Norfolk, Virginia).7 Andersen Air Force Base occupies the northern part of Guam, including some of its longest and most beautiful beaches. Naval Base Guam occupies Apra Harbor, one of the largest in the western Pacific, along the southwest coast, where Guam’s second-largest village once stood. Across the island, the Air Force and Navy also control a patchwork of ordnance depots, communications facilities, housing developments, and annexes.
Both of the main bases host (or have the ability to host) the most sophisticated and powerful weaponry in the military’s arsenal, including nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, F-15s, F-22 stealth fighters, Global Hawk surveillance drones, and B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers.8 Many consider Guam among the most important military bases in the world—and tellingly, as with Okinawa, many refer to the entire island as a single base.
As the University of Guam professor Michael Bevacqua puts it, Guam has “the paradoxical nature of being [considered] a tiny, insignificant footnote to the United States” while sitting “at the center of American power.”9 Indeed, few in the fifty states ever think about this island. For the people of Guam this means dealing with daily reminders of their marginalization. When some of Guam’s politicians visited Washington, D.C., officials from the Department of the Interior—the federal department that oversees Guam—asked for their “foreign passports.”10 A student at the University of Washington told me he received a call from the registrar’s office asking about converting Guam’s currency into dollars. (Like the rest of the United States, Guam uses the U.S. dollar.) Online retailers frequently refuse to ship to Guam because it’s an “international destination.” Even seemingly trivial limitations such as being barred from voting on TV shows So You Think You Can Dance and American Idol echo more consequential exclusions: residents of Guam are also barred from voting for U.S. president, have no Senate representation, and can elect only a nonvoting member of the U.S. House. People on Guam joke that when they’re flying back to Guam from Hawaii or the continental United States, their rights vanish when they cross the International Date Line.
Chamorros, whose history on Guam and the rest of the Mariana Islands dates to between 1500 and 2000 BCE, have not enjoyed the right to self-determination in nearly five hundred years. The Spanish arrived in 1521, claiming Guam and the Marianas as a Spanish possession four decades later. Like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Chamorros were decimated by disease and violence.11 Spain ruled Guam as a colony for more than two hundred years until the U.S. Navy seized the island and its small military garrison as a prize of the 1898 war. The United States did not, however, occupy the other Spanish-controlled islands in Guam’s Mariana Islands chain. Instead, Spain sold them to Germany, dividing the Chamorros between two occupying powers.
Guam was now a U.S. colony, and the Navy designated the entire island a U.S. naval station. Technically, at that point, the whole island really was one large military base. Naval officers served as governors and generally ran Guam like a ship. Signs appeared saying ENGLISH ONLY WILL BE SPOKEN HERE. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court ruled that Guam’s people (as well as Puerto Ricans and Filipinos) were entitled to neither U.S. citizenship nor the full protection of the Constitution.12
Before its inhabitants finally became citizens, Guam became one of the only pieces of U.S. territory occupied during World War II. Two days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, thousands of Japan’s troops overwhelmed about four hundred defenders on Guam. Chamorros would have to endure not just one day but thirty-two months “which will live in infamy” during the Japanese occupation. The Japanese government changed the island’s name to Omiya Jima, introduced the yen, and forced Chamorros to learn Japanese. “You must bow to us” became the law; violence became the means of enforcement. The Japanese military put as many as twenty thousand Chamorros into concentration camps. There was rape, sexual slavery, and other forced labor. Hundreds were killed by machine gun, grenade, and sword.13
President Roosevelt’s government celebrated the Chamorros for their exceptional heroism under occupation. For two and a half years, locals hid and kept alive a member of the U.S. defense force who refused to surrender after the Japanese invasion. When the Japanese learned there was an American in hiding, Chamorros suffered torture and execution to keep his secret.14
The battle to retake Guam began in July 1944 with one of the war’s longest and largest naval bombardments.15 The bombardment, which planners designed to weaken Japanese defenses before an amphibious assault, showed little concern for the local population. Ironically, many Chamorros survived the bombing only because they were in concentration camps and not in their villages. By the time the U.S. military had regained control of Guam, some 1,170 Chamorros were dead.16
After the battle, the military seized Chamorro land to build bases that would help launch attacks on more Japanese-controlled islands as the military moved across the Pacific toward Japan. When the war ended, the land was not returned. Rather, the military seized more Chamorro land after the war, including 2,850 acres of the best land in one swoop. Guam’s agricultural economy never recovered from the fighting and the land seizures. Whereas Guam had been self-sufficient before the war, after the war it imported 90 percent of its food; Spam became a culinary staple. Some Chamorros received small amounts of compensation for their land, but money was not guaranteed.17 To this day, many feel cheated. In 1986, the federal government paid $40 million in compensation to landowners but set the payments using land values from 1940, which represented only a fraction of the land’s current value.18 Some continue to press for war reparations from the U.S. and Japanese governments for their lost land and the suffering experienced under Japanese rule.
Chamorros on Guam expected their bravery and loyalty during the war at least to be rewarded with citizenship and self-rule. The Navy thought otherwise. Adding insult to an array of injuries, it reestablished military rule, and Chamorros had to struggle for years to win U.S. citizenship. Only when State Department officials grew concerned that the policy was creating “an island of anti-American radicals,” and there were widespread acts of civil disobedience and threats of a general strike, did the Truman administration authorize the control over Guam to be transferred from the Navy to the Department of the Interior.19 In 1950, Guam became an “unincorporated territory,” giving the island limited rights to self-governance. The U.S. Congress maintained ultimate control. To this day, Guam remains one of just seventeen non-self-governing territories in the world, as tracked by the UN. (Others on the list include American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with territories like French Polynesia and Gibraltar.) In the words of the Department of the Interior, Guam became an “area in which the United States Congress has determined that only selected parts of the United States Constitution apply.”20
THE BUILDUP
Despite Guam’s marginalization, the military enjoys almost unparalleled support on the island. Enlistment rates on Guam generally top those of nearly every U.S. state and territory. This is in no small part because Guam’s unemployment and poverty rates tend to top the nation’s as well. Currently, unemployment is around 13 percent, with the poverty rate around 20 percent. At $39,000 a year, median household income is less than three quarters of the U.S. average.21 Nearly everyone on the island has a family member or close friend connected to the military in some way, whether as a member of the military, a veteran, or an employee on base or in a base-dependent industry.
In 2006, Pentagon officials announced a major multibillion-dollar buildup of new base infrastructure on Guam. The buildup would accommodate up to nine thousand marines and tens of thousands of family members and civilians moving from Okinawa in the face of continued protests against the U.S. base presence. Around the same time, the Air Force announced plans to increase its presence on the island by naming it one of four major global hubs for its strike forces, which it called “Guam Strike.” Meanwhile, the Navy made plans to expand Apra Harbor’s ability to host nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines; the Army National Guard planned new construction to accommodate its planned force expansion; and the Pentagon selected Guam as a key site for its ballistic missile defense system. The island thus became the centerpiece of the most significant transformation in the structure of U.S. forces in Asia since at least the departure from the Philippines and perhaps since the end of the war in Vietnam. Planners anticipated nearly eighty thousand people, including almost twenty thousand construction workers, moving to Guam in a four-year period.22 Since Guam’s entire population is only around 160,000, that would mean an almost 50 percent population increase.
Given the island’s high poverty and unemployment rates, there is little surprise that many on Guam expressed enthusiasm about the economic benefits anticipated from the buildup. Military representatives promised tens of millions of dollars in additional tax revenues, government aid, and infrastructure investments.23 For a time, at least, a gold rush atmosphere prevailed. Email solicitations with subject lines like “Opportunity of a Lifetime!” proclaimed, “The tiny little island of Guam is about to become a great big deal!… There’s Work to be Done and Money to be Made!”24
The Guam Chamber of Commerce, among others, trumpeted both the economic benefits of the buildup and the security rationale for the move. To provide evidence of the need for the buildup, a 2011 Chamber report outlined a long list of threats ranging from North Korean missiles and China’s cyberwar capabilities to violent extremism, transnational criminal organizations, pandemics, and natural disasters. In the face of these dangers, the business organization wrote, Guam offers “permanent sovereign facilities” to demonstrate U.S. “strength, presence, [and] engagement” in Asia, thus helping to “avoid confrontation and conflict” by deterring potential adversaries.25
Given such high levels of support for the military on Guam, many were surprised when growing numbers of people started expressing concerns about the buildup. Along with established activists, some of the most prominent voices of opposition came from young people, mostly in their twenties. They formed a group called We Are Guåhan, after the Chamorro name for the island, to monitor the buildup. As the group and others scrutinized the plan, their work seemed to reveal just how much the military takes for granted the kind of nearly unchecked power it has enjoyed on the island since Guam became a U.S. colony in 1898. We Are Guåhan and others pointed out the dangers of the planned population boom on an island with an already strained infrastructure. Guam’s public school system was expected to have its student population grow by up to 26 percent. Demand for the island’s sole public hospital was expected to increase by 20 percent.
The military’s own assessment predicted that at its height the buildup would strain and exceed the island’s wastewater treatment capacities. Given what the military called “the current poor state of the utilities infrastructure on Guam,” civilians would also face a shortage of millions of gallons of drinking water per day, requiring the military to share some of its surplus. Opponents noted that while the military hadn’t budgeted to expand Guam’s civilian facilities, the buildup plan included money to build new military schools, a new military hospital, and other base infrastructure.26 The military’s offer to share water to meet civilian needs only underlined the island’s inequalities and many locals’ feelings of being second-class citizens.
When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) looked at the buildup plan, it had many of the same concerns. In a scathing report, the agency found the buildup would likely damage “Guam’s existing substandard drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, which may result in significant adverse public health impacts.” Dredging to expand Apra Harbor would cause “unacceptable impacts” to seventy-one acres of coral reef. The EPA deemed the buildup plan “environmentally unsatisfactory,” saying it “should not proceed as proposed.”27
Many Chamorro activists were particularly upset that the Marines wanted to acquire 1,800 additional acres of Guam’s land to build a gun range on the remains of Pågat, a sacred indigenous village and burial ground dating to at least 900 CE. We Are Guåhan spokesperson Cara Flores-Mays compared the Marines’ plan for Pågat to “putting a firing range on Arlington Cemetery. You would never think to do that,” she said. “We have a lot of responsibility for our ancestors and those who came before us, and so you can understand why some people would get angry.”28
Today, one can still find the remains of the village along a secluded jungle path on Guam’s northeast coast. Beyond a trailhead nearly obscured by tall grasses, weeds, and branches, a trail lined with moss-covered rocks leads the way. The former village sits near a cliff topped by a naturally occurring stone arch overlooking a cove and the ocean beyond. Steps away there’s an entrance to an underground cave containing a large, clear pool of water. On the ground in the jungle stand lusongs—heavy stone mortars for grinding herbs and food—and latte stones, pillars topped by stones shaped like a cup. The lattes once formed the foundation of Chamorro houses and today are a powerful cultural symbol across the Marianas.
“There’s this portion of society that will make a lot of money on the buildup,” Flores-Mays said. “But I think there’s a growing number of people who are realizing that money is not everything and that there are parts of our island that we’ll lose that will be irreplaceable and that are much more valuable than money.”
Leevin Camacho, another We Are Guåhan spokesperson, noted that in addition to Pågat itself, the surrounding jungle is also important to Chamorros. “That’s our culture, to believe we have a connection to the land and the people who lived there,” Leevin told me. “Part of being Chamorro,” he said, means that “you have to ask permission” of the ancestors if you’re going to disturb anything in the jungle. “These spirits are everywhere,” Leevin said. If you ask their permission, “that’s supposed to protect you. Like a guardian angel.” And now the Marines were planning to build a firing range by clearing the jungle atop Pågat, he said. “What could be more disrespectful than bulldozing and digging up remains?”
Opposition to the buildup “doesn’t translate into hating the military,” noted Leevin, whose father has been an enlisted soldier for more than twenty years. It just means you’re “worried about your home.”
Local opinion was also inflamed when several military officials were overheard during a lunch meeting strategizing about how best to market the buildup. The group, which had gathered at the popular Mermaid Tavern in Guam’s capital, Hagåtña, included buildup spokesperson Marine Corps Major Aisha Bakkar. In an account that Bakkar later confirmed, Cara Flores-Mays heard the officials discuss plans “to ‘use’ the mayors to hold community pocket meetings where they can ‘control’ the [buildup’s] messaging,” and “to ‘use’ the stories of our man’amko”—revered elders—to attract local support. The officials laughed about an older man from the indigenous Chamorro community, mocking his accent and his degree from the University of Guam. “So, how many teeth does he have left? Three?” one official asked.29
Ultimately, We Are Guåhan, with the help of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Guam Preservation Trust, went to court to challenge the Marines’ planned Pågat shooting range. In a closed-door meeting, Major General David Bice, who headed the office trying to build support for the buildup, was reported to have told members of the National Trust and the Guam Preservation Trust that if the military didn’t get its preferred site for the shooting range, “Your children will die.”30 Undeterred, the opposition groups showed the U.S. federal district court in California that despite already controlling nearly one third of Guam, the military hadn’t considered any alternative range sites.31 The court agreed and forced the Marines to conduct another environmental impact assessment to study other locations.
Amid recent national efforts to curtail Pentagon spending and government debt, others have grown critical of the buildup’s costs and financial planning. Three influential members of the Senate Armed Services Committee called the plan “unrealistic, unworkable and unaffordable.” The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly shown that the Pentagon’s budgets for the move dramatically underestimate expenses and are simply “not reliable.” The GAO’s cost estimate of $23.8 billion is more than double the Pentagon’s $10.3 billion figure. The GAO points out that although Congress has asked for a master plan for the move, the Pentagon still doesn’t have one—almost a decade into one of the largest and costliest military transformations in history.32
“WE CAN DO WHAT WE WANT HERE”
In 2014, in the face of this growing opposition, the military finally backed down on its desire to build a shooting range at Pågat, recommending instead that it be located on Andersen Air Base. Revised buildup plans also suggested that it would no longer be necessary for the military to acquire additional land, that total population growth would be ten thousand rather than eighty thousand, and that the buildup could be slowed to spread its effects over thirteen years rather than seven. In the new plans, only five thousand marines from Okinawa would relocate to Guam, while roughly four thousand others would disperse to bases in Hawaii, Australia, and Southeast Asia.33 And though the marines from Okinawa were originally scheduled to move to Guam in 2014, in the new scheme they likely won’t arrive before 2021 (in part because of the longtime stalemate over the construction of a new base in Okinawa).
Were it not for the resistance of a small group of hardworking activists like We Are Guåhan, along with the Okinawa stalemate and Congress’s fiscal concerns, the military might have gotten its way completely on Guam. While we will see that the military’s brazenly poor planning of the buildup is far from unique to Guam, the carelessness also reflects something larger than decades of Pentagon profligacy. The major elements of the buildup that generated so much opposition—the idea of building a shooting range on sacred indigenous land without even considering an alternative; seizing 1,700 acres of additional private land; planning to increase Guam’s population by 50 percent without the civilian infrastructure to handle the growth; embarking on a major buildup without a master plan—all come back to the same root cause: for more than a century, “we can do what we want here” has been the military’s core attitude toward Guam.
As the cases of base displacement show and as other evidence will reveal, the military has frequently adopted a “we can do what we want here” attitude in Guam, Diego Garcia, Okinawa, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Panama, Greenland, and well beyond. The attitude shows us how the base nation has relied on continuing colonial relationships in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, albeit under new guises and with new terminology. After all, in the post–World War II age of decolonization, with rare exceptions, maintaining large colonies became impossible. But as the Strategic Island Concept shows, the government and a few of its European allies found ways to maintain a handful of small mostly island colonies, largely because of their strategic value as base sites. From the military’s perspective, ongoing colonial relationships have allowed officials to “do what we want” without many of the restrictions faced in the fifty states or in fully independent nations. From the perspective of the Chamorros on Guam and others trapped in similar colonial relationships today, the military’s attachment to overseas bases means that they still lack the basic democratic rights and freedoms taken for granted by most of their fellow citizens.
At a public meeting held by the military at a local public high school, We Are Guåhan’s Cara Flores-Mays pointed out that the United States was founded by people seeking freedom. Standing up, her eyes welling with tears, she asked, Where do the people of Guam go to obtain that freedom that all other Americans enjoy? Where do we go? I’m an American citizen just like any other, she said. I want constitutional rights like everyone else. Do I have to move to be a real American?
What you’re fighting for, she told the military officials, we don’t have here.
A U.S. marine training Honduran troops, Puerto Castilla, Honduras, 2011.