The Sex Lives of Cannibals

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.

The 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