Kwajalein, An Island Like No Other Paperback – May 18, 2014

Since my name appears on the acknowledgement page, I here admit personal acquaintance with the author and his family. What follows is really a fragment from an email reply to a question my younger sister asked about understanding the US dollar.However opportune any occasion to discuss money, I tend to experience trepidation facing the true challenge in that task – conveying a basic point which causes most everyone’s eyes to roll – that in functional terms, money manifests as an abstract symbol, nominally the fungible resource used to facilitate exchange, but in actual practice the score keeping entity about which so much of ”civilized” human behavior is wrapped. The ‘civilized’ part of the facility being very much tied in a first layer to the fungible attribute – i.e. that money in functional terms translates (or if you prefer redirects) resources through time (e.g. interest is a temporal predicate, every money exchange allocates resources for later redemption, etc).Abstractions on this order are difficult for those enmeshed in practical commerce to embrace without concrete examples; oddly enough I found one recently in a book I was editing:“The financial resources allocated to support recreation programs came from a percentage of the receipts from the dry goods outlet, “Macys,” the liquor store, and the food outlet, “Safeway.” These were several times larger than normal due to the enormous incomes of the workers and the limited options where they could spend their money. With no competition and where everything was snatched up quickly, price was virtually irrelevant.” - Lynn A. Jacobson, Kwajalein, An Island Like No Other.The above title is a retrospective, written by a former employee of MIT / Lincoln Labs, describing his years at Kwajalein. Because of its then classified nature, there’s very little mention in the book of his work tracking inbound missiles, but snippets like the above, speaking to social, organizational and cultural conflicts and their various outcomes and consequences, hint at the artificial nature of his habitat related to the biased economy profile commonly induced around mission-critical Cold War facilities.Some history may be useful here (see: http://www.unicover.com/OPUBA565.HTM): Kwajalein Atoll is part of the Marshall Islands. At the start of WW I (1914), Germany lost control of the Marshalls to the already developed Japanese Navy, a fact that led to the ceding of other German possessions in Asia (e.g. Tsingtao China) to Japan in the wake of the Versailles treaty; Japan’s Pacific Theater expansion continued unabated through to the end of 1941. Following s number of WWII Pacific Theater battles, its possession fell into US hand. The post-war occupation included a general repurposing of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in support of the Cold War; from Sputnik forward, the Kwajalein base became a critical part of the US missile test tracking facility [the book suggests Hawaii handled much of orbital reentry analysis, with Kwajalein focused on various splashdown scenarios]. With time and technology, fiber optic connectivity has drastically reduced the staffing level at Kwajalein; the same work continues, but today’s knowledge workers are based in Hawaii. By these lights, we can say the “peak wave” of economic bias conditioning the Kwajalein environment ran from the late 1950s into the new millennium, but many of the contrasts the book describes are now history.By these lights, we can see in this title a “recapitulation in miniature” of certain larger economies, perhaps including today’s US if the lights prove bright enough – at a fundamental level expats with subsidized earnings on a remote island with nothing to buy face the dilemma of any nation’s wealthy class – tremendous choice for personal comfort and lots of opportunities to observe the locals, but rarely enough resources to change materially the community at large.

In an author’s note at the back of his interesting and amusing new memoir, Kwajalein, an Island Like No Other, Lynn Jacobson tells us that this and his other two memoirs came about because his “daughters and wife cajoled him into sharing his many stories collected over the years.” To his wife and five daughters, let me say thank you for the chance to enjoy all the anecdotes, vignettes and stories Lynn put into this volume.An MIT trained electrical engineer, Jacobson did three tours in the 1960s in this remote US military outpost in the Marshall Islands, some 2,500 miles west of Honolulu, working on missile reentry research as an employee of MIT’s Lincoln Lab. Kwajalein really was an unusual place, with families accounting for just 40% of the population and three thousand bachelors – all males! – accounting for the majority. The flight from Honolulu took eight hours. Mail arrived once a week. There were ham radios, but no TV. The one newspaper focused on local happenings. The local population, the Marshallese, sent some offspring to be educated in the US, but retained family and sharing customs that an American would find unusual, to say the least. No wonder, then, that Jacobson has been able to mine his Kwajalein experiences for so much material. He’s not much given to introspection, it seems to me, but why would he be? There was so much activity to fill up his days, starting with the commuter flight he had to make every morning to get from the island where he lived to another island where he worked. He was adept at his work, partook of the leisure activities on offer, including diving among sharks and shipwrecks, and during his last tour, when his daughters were in Minnesota, babysat an active group of kids while the parents were off somewhere and he was busy with his regular job.It’s remarkable that Jacobson has remembered so many stories about the pompous military brass, his many sex-starved bachelor coworkers, and the Islanders. He writes in short chapters, clearly and cogently. Even the most mundane little stories pass by quickly, and none of them suffer from well-you-had-to-be-there lameness. There’s some history, some natural science, and a bit of anthropology in these pages. But the main focus is on the stories about ordinary people – the good guys, the smart and the dumb guys, the lucky ones, the unlucky and sometimes self-destructive ones, and the few outright knaves. All in all, the book is a pleasant invocation of an unusual place in an era long before fast food franchises and the Internet made the world as flat as it sometimes seems now.

I grew up on Kwajalein; I arrived at the age of 5 and left at the end of my sophomore year of high school. It was truly a shangri la, so much so, that when I had children of my own, I struggled to reconcile that I could not give them the kind of idyllic childhood I had had. So, this book, by my mentor, swim team coach and life-long friend, captures, through short story told with great humor, wit and affection, so many of the unique, difficult-to-explain aspects of living on this tiny island community of Kwajalein Marshall Islands, often endearingly and maddeningly referred to as "The Rock."It is now my reference for friends who would like to get a glimpse of what life was like on Kwajalein, and I recommend it to all who wonder how anyone could survive--and thrive--on an island 3.5 miles by 0.5 miles in the middle of the Central Pacific Ocean. This enchanted island and the people who lived there remain firmly rooted in my heart; we are bonded eternally by this incredibly unique experience of living, playing and loving on Kwajalein.Thank you, Lynn, for recording in a series of short stories the unique charm and at times sheer preposterousness of this tiny island community and for conveying the love and passion we all have for our time there. You captured the essence of the experience because you lived it, and that's the only way anyone can describe Kwajalein, especially in its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.

If you were on Kwaj in the 1960s, this book has some good memories for you.