Flying Blind

“And the stars at night…” he began.

“Are big and bright? Deep in the heart of Saipan?”

“Back in ’45, every night, we’d be on our cots in our tents and Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ would come driftin’ across the camp, over the loudspeaker…. It was like he was singin’ about Saipan.”

“I doubt he was.”

“Well,” he said defensively, “I never seen the like of it. Parade of damn stars traipsin’ across the sky…. Or was I just young, and my memory’s playin’ tricks with me?”

“I ask myself that often,” I said.

Even from the air, the scars left on this island by World War II were readily apparent, violent punctuation marks in a peaceful sentence: a tank’s head poking out of the water a few hundred yards offshore; a barge marooned on the coral reef; a wrecked fuselage, half in the water, half on the beach—shimmering twisted metal in crystal-blue waters.

The DC-10 touched down at Kobler Field, near the former Aslito Haneda, aka Isley. We taxied over to a cement shed with a wooden roof emblazoned saipan in white letters; this and two Quonset-hut hangars was the Saipan airport.

“This is my fourth time here,” Buddy said coming down the deplaning steps, “and I never quite get used to how different it is from the war—no jeeps, or military trucks, no soldiers, sailors or Marines.”

The tiny airport, run by Chamorros, was a surprisingly bustling place filled with the Babel-like chatter of many languages—tourists from all over the world coming to this vacation center, Europeans, Arabs, but mostly Japanese. Buddy had told me to expect that: Saipan was a combination war shrine and honeymoon resort for the Japanese.

“Yeah, and they’re buyin’ back this island they lost,” he’d told me on the plane, “piece at a time.”

A Ford van Buddy had arranged was waiting, and we loaded our suitcases and the camera and recording gear —which was ensconced in heavy-duty flight cases—into the back. The two-man camera crew was also from Dallas; Phil was clean-cut and owned the video production company that had gone in partners with Buddy on a documentary of our visit, and Steve was a skinny, bearded, longhaired good old boy who I took for a hippie until I realized he was a Vietnam veteran—both knew their stuff. I told them I didn’t want to be on camera and they said fine, I could “grip.”

“What is a grip?” I’d seen that in the end credits of movies and always wondered.

“It means you help haul shit,” Steve said, ever-present cigarette bobbing.

Japanese machine-gun bunkers provided decorative cement touches on the road leading out of the airport. Beach Road itself, lined with flame trees, was a macadam fast track—back when the shichokan had driven me through this part of the island, the dirt road had been a glorified oxcart path. The cars outnumbered the bicycles now, but there were still plenty of the latter, often with Japanese tourists on them.

We passed through several native villages that had turned into modern little towns—Chalan Kanoa, which sported banks and a post office and a shopping district, as well as wood-frame houses and tin-roofed huts, vaguely similar to Garapan of old—and Susupe, which the army’s tent city had evolved into, where we stayed at a motel called the Sun Inn, behind a ballpark by a high school.

“Now I know you think I’m probably just bein’ a cheap bastard,” Buddy said, as we unloaded our stuff into a motel that looked like it belonged next to a strip club outside the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport. “But if we stay in one of them new fancy tourist highrises, up in Garapan, we’ll have trouble holdin’ court with the locals we need to talk to.”

The Sun Inn had a freestanding restaurant where we could sit and talk and sip coffee with our Chamorro subjects, in unintimidating surroundings.

“I’d like to bitch,” I said, “but as a veteran of a hundred thousand interviews, I agree with you. Once we get checked in, you mind if we take a spin up to Garapan?”

“Not at all,” Buddy grinned. “Kinda curious to see your old stompin’ grounds?”

“I think that’s ‘stamping grounds.’”

“Not in Texas.”

Garapan had not changed. It had gone away. This new city, called Garapan, wasn’t even on quite the same patch of earth; it was further south, its resort hotels lining white Micro Beach. Buddy took me to Sugar King Park, where the statue of Baron Matsue Haruji lorded over what was now a small botanical garden; also on display amid the palm and flame trees—and popular with Japanese children—was a little red and white locomotive, looking like the Little Engine That Could, resting on the last fragment of railroad track that once circled Saipan. It was probably the locomotive I saw at Tanapag Harbor, so very long ago.

“That statue is one of the handful of survivin’ physical remains of the original Garapan,” Buddy told me. His camera crew was catching some shots of the park, for color.

“Looks like the Baron’s got a bullet hole in his left temple,” I said, taking a closer gander.

“Yeah. Probably some jarhead, when we were occupyin’ the place, takin’ target practice…. There’s only two buildings from old Garapan still standin’—if standin’ is the word.” He nodded his head across the way, where the walls of the old hospital poked above overgrown grass. “That’s the old imperial hospital…and, not too far from here, the old Garapan Prison, which is all overgrowed. We need to get shots of that.”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

He frowned in surprise. “You don’t want to go over there to the prison with us?”

“If you don’t mind, no.”

“Well, we’ll do it another day, then. We need to get ahold of Sammy Munez, anyways.”

Munez met with us in a booth at the back of the Sun Inn coffee shop. Samuel Munez was a respected member of the community, a member of the House of Representatives of Micronesia, and had avoided previous researchers