As tensions with China mount, the U.S. military continues to build up Guam and other Pacific territories — placing the burdens of imperial power on the nation’s most ignored and underrepresented citizens.
By Sarah A. Topol The New York Times
Photographs by Glenna Gordon
- July 7, 2023
On the weekends, when Roy Gamboa was a little boy, his grandfather woke him before dawn. He would pour some coffee into a bowl of rice, and that would be the boy’s breakfast. Roy knew better than to question anything; he sat quietly in his grandfather’s truck as they rumbled down the big hill from their village, Hågat, to Big Navy, as the U.S. Naval Base in Guam is known. They passed through the military gates, along a dirt road and onto the shore of a little cove, next to one of America’s deepest harbors, where skipjacks flipped out of the aquamarine water. The boy noodled with seashells as his grandfather cast. When his grandfather caught a fish, he would unhook it and throw it on the ground, and Roy would snatch it up and quickly stuff it, still wriggling, in the bag. If the fish weren’t biting at one spot, they packed up and moved to another. No one from the Navy ever stopped the old man and the young boy.
Some mornings, his grandfather would take Roy back across the dirt road into the jungle to pick papayas, lemons and coconuts. He would thrash a course into the thicket to collect firewood from the slender trees — tangen tangen in CHamoru, the language of the Indigenous inhabitants of Guam, which Roy’s grandmothers and grandfathers were. They would cut the logs into quarters to dry, and stack them higher than Roy could even reach. Other mornings, the man and the boy went to the same spot to cut the grass, all the way from the cove’s blue waters to the ruins of an old cemetery. “Why are we the only ones cutting the grass here?” Roy would ask.
“Boy, this was our land before the war,” his grandfather would reply, pointing to 40 acres running from the cemetery to the water to the jungle, over the road and back almost as far as their eyes could see. “We’re taking care of it because we hope, one day, in the future, our land will be returned to us.”
Roy didn’t really understand what his grandfather was talking about; it would take him years to realize it was related to Guam’s status as an “unincorporated territory” — which means the island is a possession of the United States. It was just normal that no one residing on Guam could vote for president, that the U.S. territory had no senator and only one, nonvoting, member of the House. Roy’s grandfather never spoke about how their island had been colonized for hundreds of years: first by the Spanish, beginning in 1668, and then the Americans, in 1898, until they fled in 1941, returning three years later to liberate the CHamoru people from brutal Japanese occupation.
Growing up, Roy was told that Uncle Sam had saved the CHamoru — and that in return, because their people did not have much, they gave up their sons and their daughters to military service, so others around the world could have their own freedom. “You know the saying: ‘If you can read and write, thank a teacher; if you can read and write in English, thank a veteran,’” Roy told me.
Guam, with its strategic location, quickly became home to Andersen Air Force Base, where B-52 bombers deploy on a rotational basis, and Naval Base Guam was expanded. The Guam tourism board’s slogan, Where America’s day begins!, was everywhere. The Guam Chamber of Commerce proudly proclaimed the island America in Asia! while Guam’s license plates read Guam, U.S.A.; but underneath that they also said Tano Y Chamorro — “the land of the CHamoru.”
This sense of dual identity, but also a kind of second-class status, was confusing in ways Roy couldn’t even begin to express, so Roy and his family, like many around them, just didn’t. It wasn’t really in their culture to rock the boat or talk about some of the more unpleasant things. Roy wasn’t taught that the Americans had banned the CHamoru language for decades (which is one reason Roy himself didn’t speak it well) or that the Americans had been the ones to abandon the CHamoru to the Japanese in the first place, or that upon their return, the U.S. Navy annexed the entire island, and then started carving out the best land for military use, displacing entire villages including that of his paternal and maternal grandparents. Today the military owns nearly a third of Guam’s 217 square miles (which is roughly the size of Chicago).
Since then, Guam has become a strategic node in America’s designs in the Pacific. It is commonly referred to as “the tip of the spear” — a place from which the United States can project military might across Asia, an essential conduit to the first island chain of Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan and then on to China. As geopolitical tensions rise, Guam’s importance to American military planners only increases, and so does the risk to those who live there. In every iteration of war games between the United States and China run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (C.S.I.S.), Beijing’s first strike on U.S. soil has been to bomb Guam.
Yet the island is largely forgotten by most Americans. Guam plays a central role in “homeland defense,” though it rarely shows up on maps or in textbooks about the homeland — no place tries harder to show its patriotism and gets so little recognition in return. The island is missing from many NGO and U.S. government lists — for example, a U.S.D.A. Economic Research Service poverty chart — while websites like those of Air France and the World Bank list Guam as a separate place entirely. The New York Times, like many other publications, did not include Guam or any American Pacific Island territory on the national Covid map.