IN MARCH OF 1521, Magellan sights the islands. At first, his hands clawed around a telescope, he thinks Saipan to be a sleeping monster. Who else would inhabit this liquid hell where no breeze blows? The crew is starving, eating leather straps and sawdust, hunting rats through the dark, rotting carcass of the ship. They have survived fourteen months of hardship and a mutiny; here, on this sheet of glass that Magellan has called “Mar Pacifico,” they fear that they will meet their maker, or the devil himself. The crew has wondered at Magellan’s defiant health. They call him “Spawn of Satan” and point to his clubfoot as proof. For someone whose progress on land is slow and labored, Magellan has no equal on the water. He lowers his telescope and blinks, then raises the telescope to the horizon again. The pope has divided the earth in two. The East has been given to the Portuguese, the West to the Spaniards, and he, a Portuguese, is sailing in the name of Spain. He will learn that the West never stops, keeps winding round and round, and the earth belongs to whoever is strong enough to take it.
Magellan’s ships, the Trinidad and the Victoria, draw closer to Saipan.
In the distance, Magellan can make out flat white planes—triangles—shifting across the surface of the water. Could this be the sun refracting, coursing to the left, then right, drawing closer then angling quickly away? Could this be his mind, at last succumbing to his strange diet of leather and rat meat? Maybe these shifting sheets are from the past, a pleasant image heralding his death, because these are sails and the darting movements are boats gliding over the glassy surface of the sea. Sails. As a youth he had owned a small skiff. At the edge of the world, has he encountered the past? Has he wound back to 1495, when, as a youth, boats had been a joy and diversion?
The men are loud, spirited. Their joyful shouting is a strange sound. They have been silent for so long. Magellan is not being lured into the past, nor is he hallucinating. They have reached land and the sails belong to the fishing boats of Chamorro natives. Magellan closes his eyes, confident that when he opens them again he will see his sleeping monsters revealed as islands. Soon he will be navigating his way into the shallows, looking for a place to anchor.
Despite the welcome relief of food and water, there is not much to recommend Saipan. Even the Chamorros are supposed to have been stranded there on a canoe trip from Indonesia, their landing an accident of poor navigation, their decision to remain a mystery. Magellan names the islands “Islas de las Velas Latinos” because of the triangular shape of the Chamorro sails. Magellan registers Saipan in history, much as three billion years earlier, the island registered itself on the surface of the Pacific.
In the seventeenth century the islands are renamed the Marianas after an Austrian princess. The native population is all but wiped out by the Spaniards. Beyond this naming and slaying, there is nothing remarkable about the Spanish occupation of Saipan. In 1899, Spain, facing bankruptcy, sells the Marianas to Germany for four and a half million dollars. The Germans are getting a bargain. They see the value of these desolate islands strung across the Pacific, hard pebbles scrubbed by salt waves. Guam. Tinian. And Saipan. Isolated. Ignored. Saipan’s very value is that it is nowhere. Saipan interrupts. It is not the Pacific.
There is much use for something that is Not The Pacific.
Saipan is an island of foreign aggressors, warriors wanting something better, a refueling stop on the way to what is worthy of conquering. The Germans show their hand in the Great War and, after years of battering Europe, lose Saipan (a slap on the wrist), and before Saipan can be allocated to some other deserving European, Japan has claimed it. Japan, the gnat, the least worthy member of the League of Nations, is also looking to conquer. The Meiji Diet has its eyes fixed on China. As a result, in the early years of the twentieth century Saipan is outfitted with a sugar refinery and a fishing fleet staffed with Japanese and Korean labor. These two industries support a significant civilian population. Sharp spears of sugar cane bristle on the island’s back and the natives are armed with nothing more than the broad blades of industry. The fish bubble up from the depths and are netted. Women bear children. Tidy huts are erected beneath the shade of palms bordering the sandy, swept grid of streets.
In the late thirties, Japan refuses America access to the Marianas. A fortress like none that has ever been known is being constructed. One forward-thinking Japanese writer, Kinoaki Matsuo, writes, “The islands are scattered like stars across the routes of the United States Navy either perpendicularly or horizontally. It will be impossible for the U.S. Fleet to reach her destination.” One thousand islands scattered like beads across the Pacific combine to create a fortress calculated to stymie the American fleet. But what is the assumed origin of the U.S. Navy? What is the destination that will lure its shining ships through this net?
What is Japan planning?
On the first of June, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fredrick Noonan, take off from Miami, the first of many departures on their epic journey. Earhart is to be the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, the first aviator to do so at the earth’s waist. Their plane is a modified Lockheed Electra 10E. The airplane has recently been rebuilt after a botched landing on Luke Field near Pearl Harbor during her first attempt at the globe. This is an omen. Earhart has now decided to go east rather than west. She feels the need to make the trip, but admits that she hopes it is her last journey. She refers to the circumnavigation as a “stunt.” Her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam, is priming his great printing machines for the journey’s completion and has arranged for his wife to write a series of articles for the Herald Tribune to be cabled from her various destinations. Earhart perseveres. She breaks a record: first aviator to fly from the Red Sea to India. She plows on. Rangoon. Bangkok. Singapore. Bandoeng. In Bandoeng, she is forced to her bed as a result of dysentery contracted in India. She lies for days sweating, exhausted. On June 27, Earhart rises from her bed. She slides her feet into her stout moccasins, rakes her hands through her hair. The mirror reveals her as a middle-aged woman in need of a vacation, not the stout-willed aviatrix she has come to rely on. Her jacket weighs heavily on her shoulders.
In Darwin she carefully packs the parachutes to be sent back to the United States. She wryly remarks to Noonan that they will be no use over the Pacific. Noonan agrees. They need more room for fuel. Coordinates of the Pacific Islands are not reliable, nor is the weather, worrisome for Noonan. He has been groping through the skies using celestial navigation. Cloud cover confuses and extra fuel is necessary to right mistakes. Noonan announces this loudly, which amuses Earhart. She knows what the extra fuel is for, what the secondary purpose of their journey is. The Electra screams off the runway bound for Lae, New Guinea.
On Lae, Earhart writes her last article for the Herald Tribune. Pictures taken show her to be sickly and tired. These glossy pictures will be bound within Last Flight, the rotted pit at the heart of the book. The stage is set for the ill-fated leg of the journey. She has traveled twenty-two thousand miles and has seven thousand left to complete the circumnavigation. Her destination is Howland Island, a speck in the ocean, with an elevation of less than ten feet. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca is positioned off Howland Island to act as radio contact. Radio communications in the area are poor and the Itasca has been flooded with commercial radio traffic connected with the record-breaking aviatrix. At 00:00 Greenwich Mean Time, the Electra soars upward.
Earhart is cruising northward of her accepted coordinates. She has arranged with American intelligence to swing over Truk, an island on the eastern end of the Caroline chain. Reports submitted to the League of Nations reveal unprecedented supply deliveries to this desolate rock and the American navy is suspicious. What is Japan doing? Earhart plows on into unfriendly territory. She picks up her radio and nervously transmits her coordinates, which are far to the east of her true location. This is to confuse the Japanese, listening in, from knowing her true purpose. Where is she flying in the deepest night? Where does the sea separate from the sky? Where is the comfort of the line of horizon?
Aviator. Wife. Writer. Woman. Does she need also to be a spy? A soldier of intelligence? Earhart is no stranger to war. She has seen its work. She has nursed boys lying on their cots, watched new blood pumped back into thirsting veins, seen the elbows heal into smooth nubs. She has observed the boys in their wheelchairs learning to navigate the hospital corridors, trying to find their way home. Earhart knows that after conflict, there is no true restoration.
At 19:30 the Itasca receives a transmission: “KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you . . . Gas is running low . . .”
And then at 20:14: “We are on a line of position 157 degrees–337 degrees—we will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles, wait listening on 6210 kilocycles—we are running north and south.” Which puts the Electra approaching Howland from a northeasterly direction. Lae, New Guinea, lies in the southeast.
This is the last the world will hear from Earhart.
For sixteen days eight U.S. Navy ships and sixty-four aircraft comb 138,000 square miles of the Pacific at a cost of four million dollars. Nothing of the aircraft or of the pilot and navigator is ever found.
Saipan has a new resident.
Pia is ten years old when the American woman appears on the island. Pia thinks that she does not look dangerous, limping, her blunt short hair illumined around the edges by the sun. The woman has no shoes and her feet are long and narrow, not like any feet Pia has ever seen. They are white like polished stone. The woman walks between two soldiers, defeated. Pia hurries to catch up with the woman. She walks a cautious distance away, parallel with the party’s advance, whistling at the birds in the trees, her interest suddenly caught by the barking of a dog. But always watching the woman. The woman stops. She squats down and takes deep breaths. Her face is gray, not like a living person’s. She says something softly to the guards, then to Pia’s surprise, waves her over. Pia cautiously walks across the street.
She is scared of this woman. Why is she here? Why are the soldiers guarding her?
The woman smiles, but she is in pain. Pia approaches, and then she sees the burns, flaking blackened skin, the whole left side of the woman’s face puffed with fluid. There are bubbling blisters all down the woman’s left arm. Pia thinks that she is two women sewn together up the middle—one wiry and hard like the bark of a tree, the other slippery and scaly like a fish. She is scared. The woman has something in her hand that she is holding out to Pia. She nods her head, offering, offering, but the child is scared. She presents the woman with her round face, baked brown like bread. Her hair hangs heavily at her shoulders. There is something defiant to the set of her mouth.
Can she read? Earhart wonders. Does she work in the fields? Does she have toys or brothers or a dog, like some of these thin animals tied to the stilts of the houses? The ring came easily off her finger—a gift from her husband, but she has no use for rings, or fingers for that matter. In the instant that the plane plunged into the flat blue sea, she admitted her life was over and now does not know how to think of these days that are left. She knows that her wounds are infected. She knows that her dysentery is dissolving her strength. She knows that the tea and unguents that she has been given are inadequate to restore life. She holds the ring out to the child, wisely turning her head to present the half that was not burned in the crash. The child steps forward and then hustles quickly the final steps. She takes the ring—a platinum setting with a perfect pearl, round like the earth—off Earhart’s hand, hopping back to a safe distance. The child smiles, looks up at the guards, who are very serious but young and familiar. The child stammers out a few words in Japanese and the soldiers respond, but the child is not satisfied with the answer. Her thick brows come together and finally she says, “Gracias,” with the intonation of a question.
The American woman smiles and says, “De nada.”
From her final room Earhart can see workers dismantling the remains of the Electra. She sighs heavily. Her days, drifting in and out of consciousness, are spent trying to relay psychic messages through the radio lines. She imagines the radioman on the Itasca picking up the signal.
“It’s Earhart. These coordinates . . . She’s on Saipan. She says the Japanese are geared for war. Truk is plated with armor, fitted with guns. Prepare. Prepare . . .”
And then they lose the signal as Earhart drifts out of range.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bomb the American fleet where it bobs innocently in Pearl Harbor. In this action the pride of the American navy is destroyed, the remaining ships mobilized—tempted—through the string of islands. The Japanese army is suddenly everywhere. One by one the nations fall. Indonesia. Malaysia. Singapore. The Philippines. The Co-Prosperity Sphere widens, a stain tingeing the Pacific a brilliant red. Saipan now boasts troops, guns, and battleships bobbing off the coast. The civilians pack their things into rattan bags, boxes, waiting calmly for the ships that will bear them to Japan. But as the war progresses, an element of fear enters the island. The Americans, once thought to be pathetic, harmless, are now a threat. The soldiers, battle hardened and exposed, tell tales of murder, cannibalism, and rape. Mothers hold tightly to their children’s wrists, waiting to be delivered from the island, combing the horizon for the transport ship. Here on Saipan they are served up to the enemy. They sharpen bamboo spears. Machetes, once used for harvesting sugar cane, are drawn across whetstones. The song of blade and stone is heard in every house.
On June 15, 1944, American forces begin the scheduled destruction of Saipan. There are 535 ships assembled in the harbor. B-29s divide the skies, dropping bomb after bomb. The sugar refinery bursts in an explosion. Twisted steel and burning beams heat the ground. Cars are blown upward like paper ornaments. The streets are silenced in a massive boom. When the cloud of dust settles, huge craters where once houses stood are revealed. The chaos of finding children, finding husbands and wives, tallying the dead, continues late into the night. Carrying food, children, knives, the peasants move northward. There is a warren of caves carved into the rock. The Japanese army has already established itself here. Let not the mistakes of Peleliu be repeated. Give the American monsters the beach. Make them crawl the slope of rubble and debris, over fallen men—both American and Japanese—to the dark mouths of the caves. Slay them at the threshold of the redoubt.
General Saito patiently waits for reinforcement from the air. A plane can fly from Japan to Saipan and back. It is safe bombing distance. This is why the American victory here will be the end of the war. But the runways of Japan are quiet, the planes funneled elsewhere or stilled at the bottom of the sea. The Japanese pilots who are not already dead are not of the warrior class. They are humanities students from the university, teenagers, scientists, whose flying skills allow them only one final flight. They are the “Divine Wind,” which Saito wryly notes will not blow his way anytime soon.
Bushido. Bushido. The code of the warrior. Never be taken prisoner. Never shame the emperor. Saito looks with pride at the civilians camped around him, their hands poised at the base of a spear. The children collect rocks and arrange them in pyramids. They too will fight to the death. All warriors. All of them. His chest is fired with pride for these simple people and their love of the emperor. He sees in their faces the willingness to die. His words of inspiration come not from hope, but from his faith that all these people—soldiers, farmers, fishermen, mothers, sons, and daughters—are willing to die without the stain of shame. He says, “Our battle is not over. Soon, we will all have the glorious honor of dying for our emperor. Let this not be a wasted death. For each of you, kill seven of the enemy. Kill seven.”
Why seven? Why this number? Does the mystic count inspire? Saito wonders as he retires to the inner room of his redoubt. He wraps the ceremonial banner around his head and, taking the dagger in both hands, boldly restores his honor even though he knows he has failed the emperor.
In Tokyo, they receive his final message: “We deeply apologize to the emperor that we cannot do better.”
• • •
The man is screaming, but all that McGill can think of is the man’s femur protruding from his leg, the tip of the broken bone sharpened and splintered. This bone looks like a shoot pushing through earth, something you would find on the farm, something the fertile Missouri soil would will into being.
I must help this man, thinks McGill. He wishes he could fix the bone, press it back into the man’s flesh, set him up and tell him to walk back to the beach. Clearly, this soldier lying on the ground and screaming has not had a good morning. He deserves rest and maybe a stiff drink. McGill kneels by his head. The soldier pulls in breath quickly, McGill shouts in his ear, “I’m going to help you,” he says. The man’s eyes are wide and crazy. McGill has never seen so much of the whites of someone’s eyes before. McGill says, “I’m going to end the war.” He relieves the fallen man of his grenades, then scuttles past on his belly. Two men are lying dead in front of him. One is Japanese, his right hand in a death grip around a wooden club. Caveman, thinks McGill. It’s funny. He shelters himself behind these two men. He takes a grenade. He remembers the first time he threw a grenade. His sergeant was holding the collar of his shirt and the seat of his pants. Pull the pin and lob it. Keep your eye on the target. Why was the sergeant holding him like that? Should the sergeant be holding him now? McGill lobs the grenade. There is a satisfying blast. Fireworks. McGill moves forward. Why? Did the grenade accomplish something? He doesn’t know. He hopes he didn’t blow up another marine. Everyone tells him he’s good at what he does. He’s a good marine. People are proud of him. Why? Maybe because he hasn’t had his legs blown up. That would be bad. That would make him a bad marine. He crawls over more bodies. He looks up. There’s a child in the middle of the battlefield. Why? Maybe this child is an angel. Are there Japanese angels? The child’s face is streaked with tears. The child is holding a rock. Why? The child throws the rock at McGill. The rock falls just short of where he is lying. McGill doesn’t know what to do. Does he grab the child and take him back behind the line of fire? That would seem right.
“Come here,” he says, waving the child over. Bombs and grenades are exploding all over the place. There is the whistle of missiles, the stutter of guns. The child cannot hear him. “Come here,” McGill shouts. The child screams in fear. The child is bawling now. He runs away. McGill gets up on his knees, trying to see where he’s gone. There is dust everywhere—a dense cloud. There is smoke. It smells like a barbecue. No child.
And now McGill can hear loudspeakers, Japanese. And something else. More words. Some are Spanish, he knows that. Must be Chamorro. What are they saying? And now English. “There is no shame in surrender. We will not harm you. We will bring you back to Japan. Please do not be afraid.” Who will they bring back to Japan? Who are they talking to? McGill remembers the child. How do they know about the little boy? McGill feels better. They will find the boy and take him back to Japan.
McGill is moving on to Marpi Point. Marpi Point, he figures, is about two hundred meters away. He should be there in an hour and a half, if he progresses at a good clip. The bodies slow him down. Some of the Japanese men are not in uniform. Some are not wearing shoes. Is it casual dress for the defense of Saipan? McGill’s leg has caught on something. He shakes it a couple of times, but does not manage to free it. He looks over his shoulder. Eye to eye with a Japanese. Casual dress. The man is trying to bite his leg. Funny. McGill hauls his knee up and throws a kick right into the man’s teeth. Where is Marpi Point? It can’t be that far off.
He hears an American yelling, “No. Don’t jump. Don’t jump.” The loudspeakers are louder here. McGill pops up and sees the point. He knows that just past his line of vision is a cliff, a sheer drop to the Pacific and the rocks below. Civilians are crowded here together. They are surrendering. Maybe Saipan’s taken. Maybe McGill can go back to his ship. He needs a shower. His clothes are sticking to him as the blood dries. His hair has caked into clumps. Whose blood? He stands on shuddering knees (he’s been crawling a long time) and hustles to a rock, maybe six feet. He leans against it and looks back at the field of bodies he has just traveled. Amazing. No one back home will believe him. A grenade explodes twenty feet to his right and the ground quakes. He inches around to the other side of the rock.
Families. Mothers with children. Fathers. The war is over, thinks McGill. Go home. And they go, not running, but stepping over the edge of the cliff. A mother holds her fat baby and buries her face in the snug skin of the baby’s neck. That’s nice, thinks McGill. Then she jumps. Over the cliff. But they’re all doing that. All jumping. An old man raises his hands in protest. Maybe he knows more, but there’s a Jap soldier there with his bayonet—no more bullets. He urges the old man to jump too. And he does. McGill crawls forward on his stomach to where the land begins to drop. There is a shattered stump of palm. McGill hides behind it. Here he can no longer see the people jumping, but he can see the water. There’s that yelling again, “Don’t jump. Oh God. Please don’t jump.” And the loudspeakers. Japanese. On the rocks there are bodies. Children float face down in the sea. A baby is crying somewhere, but McGill can’t see it. The wailing stops and McGill strains his ears hoping to find that beautiful desperate crying again. On the rock is a woman combing her long black hair. Mermaid. Weird. She slips off the rock into the water. She disappears. More people jump. McGill can’t hear them hit the water because he can’t hear anymore. Something about that baby. He shakes his head. No sound. Just people falling, streaking by, their shadows briefly on the water—a hole—then into the hole the girls and babies fall. And then nothing. The ground is shaking beneath his feet from the pounding mortar. He can feel that shaking. He can feel that.
On July 19, U.S. marines invade Guam and on July 24 invade Tinian. The American capture of the Marianas is completed on August 8, 1944. And what of the Marianas? What now? Tinian is the stage for the end of the war.
The date is August 6, 1945. Colonel Tibbets is the pilot. The plane is the Enola Gay, named after Tibbets’s mother. The bomb is Little Boy, nestled deep in her belly. At 2:45 A.M. the B-29 superfortress roars up the runway. The plane is freed from the earth ascending at a steep rate, climbing higher and higher, flying to that height at which the earth reveals itself to be points, coordinates, gray elevations, and glossy blue depths. From this great height, who can see man? Who can remember what it is to navigate the streets in the early morning, to cook breakfast, to dress one’s children? Who can hear the broom sweeping the front doorstep or the woman in the next room brushing her hair? Who can hear the crack of eggs against the side of the pan, the sputter of oil?
On the streets of Hiroshima people are moving. Moving. Moving. Packing their belongings onto handcarts, and the wheels sing out on the streets. They are secreting their most precious belongings away from the bombs. They are listening for the sirens, which howl, then are silenced, then howl again. They are walking their children to the parade ground and then home. They are tearing down houses, plank by plank, to clear fire lanes should the bombing come to peaceful Hiroshima. They are bundling letters of dead husbands, departed sons. They are bundling letters from the Japanese army that say “Akihiro died an honorable death in Singapore,” or Guadalcanal or Manchuria or Burma. Mothers are wrapping babies in padded clothing despite the heat, because they must do something to protect their children. Mothers are yelling at their children to stop playing in the street when there is supposed to be an air raid—the biggest yet. What sound reaches the pilots and crew?
Who does not want the war to end? Does Hirohito wish to spend another spring as prisoner of his generals? Do the generals wish to keep fighting? No. They only want to win. How many more must die? What can be done?
Let us all put down our weapons.
At the count of three, we will all put down our weapons. Everyone is listening. The Enola Gay roars over Hiroshima.
“On glasses,” says Tibbets.
And the bombardier, Major Ferebree, takes his position in the plexiglass nose of the aircraft. He fixes the Aioi Bridge in his cross-wires and locks his bombsight. Now it is automatic. In fifteen seconds the bomb bay doors will open and the glowing uranium egg—the sun’s surface contained in a steel shell—will drop to earth.
At the count of fifteen, we will all put down our weapons. There’s nothing left but to count. And we start. But it is already fourteen seconds. No, twelve. We must all put down our weapons. Ten. The bomb bay doors will open. Seven. We must all put down our weapons. It is time to stop. We are all ready to stop. At the count of three, we will all put down our weapons.