Currently the hottest word game on the internet is Wordle. You get six tries to guess a five-letter word. Well, yesterday the wordle was “ATOLL.” I saw someone post on Facebook, “Well, I learned a new word today. Thanks, Wordle!” The word “atoll” is not new to me, however. I grew up on an atoll, 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii, in the middle of nowhere. This atoll, a ring of sandy, coral islands formed over thousands of years around an extinct volcano, has about 90 little islands, the largest of which is Kwajalein. This island was my home for five years when I was very young, and even though it was less than three miles long and half a mile wide, it was my whole world. To this day, walking or driving around Phoenix, the palm trees swaying in the wind take me immediately back to the idyllic tropical paradise of my childhood.
Kwajalein was not always idyllic, though. Twenty-four years before I first stepped foot on the island, a fierce battle raged for three days (January 31-February 2, 1944) between Japanese and American troops. During the battle, all native vegetation was blown to smithereens. In fact, in the late 1960’s the US military was still planting palm trees to make up for the devastation. When I was a child, I barely knew about the war, even though we played on ‘bunker hill’ and knew where downed Japanese planes were on neighboring islands. There was a Japanese cemetery on the island, but what I didn’t know until much later in life is that nearly 3,000 Japanese soldiers lost their lives defending this little outpost of the “outer ring of defense” for Japan. Some of those Japanese were buried on the island; most of the dead had been dumped into the sea.
The day I am writing this is Memorial Day, a day to remember those fallen in battle, in service to their country. Until today, I had never thought about the US servicemen who died on Kwajalein, penetrating the defenses of the Japanese, an act that would eventually bring about the end of WWII. The history books say that 171 American soldiers died in the Battle of Kwajalein, a stark contrast to the 3,000 Japanese. Nonetheless, each of these men who died had a name and had parents and brothers and sisters and perhaps wives back on the US mainland, waiting for their return. These lives were not only lost; they were given. One-hundred-seventy-one…gone. And this was just Kwajalein. On Tawara, the number was closer to 1,000. On Iwo Jima the number would be nearly 7,000.
My childhood was genuinely idyllic. Kwajalein was a place of peace, and as a child, I felt safe. (I knew nothing of the big planes that landed on our runway which were headed on from us to Vietnam.) I am grateful for those who gave their lives, seeking to make the world safe from the aggressive imperialism of early Shōwa Japan. My only fear as a child was of the ghost of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, which wandered the beaches at night, eternally in search of his lost button (as the story went.) Until today, I never thought about my own elementary school being built on the spot of such a horrific battle, in which thousands died. How many ghosts were there really? We seek to protect children from the world’s violence. Sometimes we succeed at this; sometimes we fail. Sometimes we bury it all beneath our feet and turn craters into playgrounds.
On this Memorial Day, I remember those who gave their lives on Kwajalein, so that children might someday frolic heedlessly in this tropical playground. I also pray that we all take on the herculean effort of creating safe places for children to go to school and to learn, heedless of the battles fought on their behalf. To paraphrase Micah 4:4,
Everyone will sit under their own hibiscus,
and under their own palm tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken.
