Abstract
Two hours after leaving Honolulu, we begin our descent. As we turn to land, I see the reef, a line etched in the cresting surf. The water is beautiful, turquoise and sapphire, with bands of khaki and bone white where land meets sea. Then the plane banks again, and the rest of the island comes into view. To the left, an incinerator emits a plume of smoke; at right stands a cluster of stark, industrial buildings. The plane lands, and the buildings rush by. We taxi for a few moments, the plane stops, and then a few of us–those with special clearances–disembark. I have arrived on Johnston Island.
“JI,” as it is known to its inhabitants, is a tiny coral jewel, one and a half miles long and a half mile wide, on an atoll midway between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. Encrusted with the polyps of a decades-old military base and infused with the toxic legacy of twentieth-century warfare, it is the Peyton Place of the Pacific, an aquatic never-never land where 1,200 soldiers and civilians–more than two-thirds of them men–work with and play near some of the deadliest wastes in the world. JI is both a breathtaking wildlife refuge and a concrete dump for military waste.
I am here to conduct research on U.S. chemical weapons activities and to make a film about the island. On the tarmac I am met by two uniformed guards carrying automatic weapons who direct me to a small, air-conditioned office marked “New Residents.” There, I am given the safety drill–as well as a gas mask and three syringes of atropine. I am tired, but I pay careful attention to a lecture and video on how to use the mask and how to inject the nerve-gas antidote into the “meaty part of the thigh.”
Later that morning, I check into my room (which has a stunning view of the power plant), fill out countless forms, and eat lunch in the cafeteria with a group of government employees. I converse only with civilians, although the military is present in force. As part of the agreement granting me access to the island, I have promised not to talk to anyone in uniform.
After lunch, I meet Colonel B of the army, who is in charge of protecting the chemical munitions awaiting disposal and securing the incinerator, and Colonel T of the air force, who is in charge of the island. (The island is under the jurisdiction of the Defense Department, with the air force the current “owner” and all other agencies “tenants.”) Colonel T is the officer who finally approved my visit, but placed restrictions on my research.
That afternoon I have my blood drawn at the clinic so it will have a baseline on file in the event that I am exposed to nerve gas.
Suzanne, my filmmaker, arrives the next morning with our equipment. She is a 23-year-old Vietnamese-American. We quickly learn that although we are there to watch, we are also watched everywhere we go. Novelist and art critic John Berger has written that men see and women are seen. We feel this in the tingle of our skin as 800 pairs of male eyes follow us around the island.
We are particularly watched by men and women in uniform when we are near the incinerator and the squat bunkers housing the unprocessed chemical stockpile. When I make a joke about MPs, I do not yet know that there are several microphones nearby. And just as our camera attempts to document life on the island, silent electronic eyes capture our every move. Click, click, whir, whir–ours and theirs–it's a constant hum.
There is no indigenous population; everyone is here because of the weapons that must be stored or disposed of. We find no outraged activists, no concerned citizens, no public outreach office. Instead, we meet exceedingly well-paid Raytheon employees, moderately well-paid government employees, military personnel, and the under-paid Kalama Services Organization employees who perform menial base support operations. Good people all, but plagued by loneliness, racism, alcohol abuse, and broken marriages. Working on an island a thousand miles from nowhere is not for the faint of heart.
A sign near a Johnston Island beach.
With an escort, Suzanne and I can visit the incinerator as often as we like. Here, since 1990, more than 357,000 munitions (mortars, projectiles, rockets, bombs, and containers) have been processed, and nearly 3.5 million pounds of chemical agent (HD, mustard, GB, Sarin, and VX) destroyed. Approximately 55,000 munitions, almost all containing VX, remain to be incinerated.
We go every day and become used to the routines. We sling our gas masks and atropine sacks over our shoulders as nonchalantly as the employees, forgetting that we are within a few feet of massive quantities of VX. I wonder if proximity to and knowledge about nerve gas lessens fear.
I enjoy visiting the plant. Having grown up in a blue-collar family, I am comforted by the culture of the shop floor, the smell of oil and hot metal, working-class men in overalls. The men, and a few women, operate the machines, transport munitions, clean up toxic areas (for example, where rockets are drained of their chemical payloads), perform maintenance on furnaces, staff electronic stations, and generally keep things running smoothly.
I am treated as one of the guys–nicknamed “Doc”–and shown the secret nooks and crannies and told the near-miss stories. (For example, I learn that an emission of nerve gas is “counted” by the army only if it is measured by each of two air monitoring systems on the island.)
A polyvinyl spacesuit or “DPE suit” is required to enter any area of the plant that contains nerve agent. One is sealed into the suit with only an air hose to the outside; the only way out of it is to be cut out. I am almost persuaded to try it, but despite encouragement I resist being trapped in a large plastic bag. The guys good-naturedly draw little hearts on one of the projectiles containing VX, and I am oddly touched.
I discover the best places to talk to people. Nobody wears a uniform at the local watering hole, the Waikiki, so I feel free to interview whomever I want. I can always feign ignorance if called on the carpet. I buy many bottles of beer for my informants. Suzanne and I attend bingo night and Mongolian BBQ night; we snorkel, swim, and bowl; we play pool, video games, and poker; we attend a Chinese New Year's party; we take boat trips to the outer islands; and we make a Vietnamese meal for the “locals.”
The swimming pool proves to be an ethnographic gold mine. I bake in the hot Pacific sun, pondering the notion of risk as I cautiously eye the incinerator on the other side of the runway, until someone taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey Doc, so-and-so told me you'd be here.” The pool becomes my office and I begin bringing my laptop along.
I convince Colonel T to provide us with a golf cart, and Suzanne and I cover the entire island in a morning. We drive alongside the “plutonium pile,” the legacy of the atomic testing era. In 1962, two Thor missiles exploded on the launch pad, scattering plutonium all over the island and the lagoon. The debris, an unknown composite of calcium carbonate soil and plutonium, was raked into Mt. Pluto, resulting in a big pile of sand. The plutonium is ostensibly buried deeply enough under the sand to pose no threat and is covered by an organic “crust,” but the pile extends right up to the sea wall and is surrounded in its entirety only by a chain link fence dotted with hazard signs. The fence may keep people out, but it will certainly not keep molecules in. One U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service representative says he has seen “plumes coming right off” of Mt. Pluto.
We drive along Pluto Beach until we come to adjacent Agent Orange beach. In 1972, some 22,000 55-gallon drums of this noxious compound of 2,4,5-T and 2,3,7,8-TCDD were transported here from Vietnam. They were removed from the island and incinerated at sea in 1977, but not before several drums had leaked 250,000 pounds of Agent Orange into the soil. The Environmental Protection Agency and wildlife experts have studied the Agent Orange situation here, but to date little has been done to clean up the contaminated area which, like Mt. Pluto, abuts the sea wall. There is a picnic table outside the fenced Agent Orange area, and I wonder who in their right mind would eat here.
Marine biologists say the island's water is “clean enough,” and the island is a natural laboratory to a host of independent researchers funded by the Defense Department. The abundance of wildlife–more than 300 species of fish, three endangered species (the green sea turtle, the Hawaiian monk seal, and the humpback whale), and a great variety of seabirds–is cited as evidence of a thriving ecosystem. And yet, as I float in the warm, buoyant lagoon off Pluto Beach, I wonder how many radioactive particles are floating alongside me.
We stop at the monitoring lights to make sure we can safely go “down range” from the smokestack. The light is amber, which means we can go on, but must have our gas masks and atropine with us. We film the smokestack and the plant from the far side of the island, then drive around the south tip to the Red Hat Storage Area, where munitions are stored awaiting disposal. These bunkers originally housed 6.6 percent of the nation's chemical arsenal, but they now contain less than a quarter of that amount. We are forbidden by Colonel B from entering this area, but we film the bunkers from the other side of the razor-edged barbed wire.
We strike cinematic gold when we wander into a storage facility for secondary hazardous waste. This is hazardous liquid waste from incineration that has yet to be processed. It will remain in bunkers and storage sheds until the final cleanup and closure of the plant, sometime in the next few years. We come across two men loading drums onto a truck. When questioned about the material they are loading, they are evasive, but assure us that none of it is dangerous. Later, near the airport, the two men from the storage area drive by. As they round a corner, one of the drums falls off the truck; Suzanne and I cringe, but we capture the image on film.
On my last day, preparing for the next day's public outreach meeting back in Hawaii, I come across the army's “bottom line” in a brochure titled “Safely Destroying America's Stockpile of Chemical Weapons”: “Incineration is the safest and most effective method for destroying chemical weapons.” Hmm, I think, as I glance across at the ubiquitous plume of smoke billowing from the plant. The Defense Department contends that the escaping vapor contains harmless byproducts of incineration, the liquid chemical agents having been broken down into inert components. However, dioxin and furans are common products of incineration, and there have been several “incidents” at Johnston Island in which agent has been released from either the smokestack or the Red Hat Storage Area. The air monitoring systems on the island are capable of detecting chemical agents in the air at the level of parts per billion, although the released quantities were minute and supposedly posed no threat to human welfare.
Just then, one of my informants shows up with a six-pack. A former army sergeant who works for Raytheon, he tells me about the safety exercise he has just participated in.
The army routinely runs exercises in which every conceivable disaster is imagined and potentially averted. In these exercises, plant employees and army personnel are assigned roles: hostage, dead guy, saboteur, EMT, MP. Scenarios include attempts to steal VX, fires and bombs, planes crashing into the plant, hurricanes, and so on. In this particular exercise, my informant was assigned the task of smuggler, and successfully drove his truck out of the plant, through the security gate, and halfway down the road toward the airport before anybody caught up with him. In the back of the truck was an ordinary thermos, a stand-in for a container of the highly lethal VX.
As my plane ascends the next morning bound for Honolulu and the earth-toned strip of land that is JI recedes into a sea of blue, I realize that I will miss this odd little corner of the world. I learned a lot about the U.S. chemical weapons program here at this prototypical incinerator where the work of burning munitions is almost complete. I have a firmer understanding of what is involved–mechanically, logistically, financially, politically–in demilitarizing thousands of pounds of noxious nerve agents. I also have a better grasp of the complicated relationships among the military and civilian personnel who work on the project. And I have a more nuanced sense of how folks who work with and around chemical weapons understand and manage risk, uncertainty, and potential threats to their physical and emotional health.
I have just spent two weeks with a group of people passionately committed to their work, ridding the planet of deadly munitions. But Johnston is unique among stockpile sites–its closest neighbors are hundreds of miles away across an expanse of Pacific Ocean. (Even so, there was considerable opposition to the operation among Pacific Islanders.)
Next I'll be visiting sites in the continental United States, where stockpiles are next door to houses, schools, and commercial centers. Public relations at these sites constitute a much bigger part of the army budget.
But I'd also like to return to Johnston Island after the chemical munitions have been destroyed and base closure operations have begun. I would like to be there when hazardous waste is removed from concrete bunkers, and when the incinerator is dismantled and “processed” piece by piece. I want to see the atoll transformed from a military base to a national wildlife refuge. I find myself hoping that someday, in the not too distant future, the frigatebirds, shearwaters, boobies, terns, gulls, and other winged species can someday soar in the clear sky above a peaceful island.