American Airplanes

The American airplanes that once flew over this part of the world have long since departed. Once they filled the sky in olive-green flocks, but now we only have remnants.

A concrete strip is cut into an island in the South China Sea. Chemical plumes lace the groundwater of Manila, Saigon, and Khorat. Horizontal concrete hotels stand in Southeast Asian cities, their bars paneled in wood with potted palms and velvet drapes, Jim Beam and Bacardi blended into tropical drinks for lieutenant's wives.



And of course the strips of bars with names like "Oriental Nights" where girls in pink fishnet stockings and go-go boots have been catcalling for decades, the sorts of places where Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken pointed guns at their heads, in towns where dislocated children with hazel eyes are born into uncertainty.



Sometimes the American airplanes were applauded. Other times they got spat on. And on the coraline islands of Vanuatu, they inspired the holy devotion of Melanesian fisherfolk.



Some of the Americans stayed. Others left and came back. You see the old men who live in concrete houses with local wives in old air-base towns like Nakhon Phanom and Udon Thani, or laughing over a seven-and-seven in the secret military bar on Sathon Tai in Bangkok.

Or you see them in sadder places, in sleazy pink-lit bars on Sukhumvit 22, eyes fixed in the middle distance, a Tiger beer in one hand and a slowly burning Marlboro in the other, and maybe they've got a greasy, thin burger made with gristly local beef on a chipped plate, cold fries going limp in a pool of ketchup. You see them leering in sleazy nightclubs where they listen to a band play covers of contemporary pop songs they can't stand.

And when they've reached their end you see them at the embassy in crooked sunglasses and a baseball cap that says U.S.S. NEW JERSEY, pushed around in a wheelchair by a Thai or Filipina wife who hates them, American children who pity them, signing their will.

Do you know what you're signing? the embassy official says.

The American airplanes came to Asia at a time when America was at its blindly optimistic industrial peak, when you could call Detroit "the Arsenal of Democracy" without smirking. The photos of the pilots are as bright-eyed and apple-cheeked as the Waltons.

They left Cambodia and Laos as UXO-riddled kingdoms of ghosts, Vietnam as a by-word for disaster, a legacy of hundreds of thousands of midnight murders in Indonesia, full-hearted support for the corrupt thugs running Thailand and the Philippines.

The lazy analogy is to call the Americans "cowboys"-- it's inapplicable, and yet somehow legions of clueless French and Germans still buy it-- but to be a cowboy implies self-sufficiency and a ruggedly individual spirit.

On the contrary, the American military machine in Asia in the mid-20th Century was just that, a machine, scientific in its approach, with lessons learned from cybernetics and systems engineering. War was laid out by men like the accountant Robert McNamara and the policy man Henry Kissinger, men in nerdish glasses, applying Taylorist principles of management to destruction and violent death.

And the ruins are accordingly mechanical: sulfur and phosphorus, carbon steel and vulcanized rubber. Even the food of Fordist America remains in the Carnation condensed milk poured into the coffee cups of Vientiane, in the Spam pressed into rice in Guam, in the slashed hot dogs on skewers offered as a street snack in Phuket.

But for me, the young American, it is now an antique society, existing in the same amber haze of history that cloaks belle-époque Paris and Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Things that, to a generation previous, were part of childhood TV broadcasts are now as horses and buggies.

And so, perhaps one day, I'll have nieces and nephews writing about the waning days of the imperial American urge. About their conversations with a Kurdish taxi driver, or their visit to a Pakistani town destroyed by drones. Atrocity is immediate. The process of history lets the act of killing unfold into a million subtleties.

Find Me at the End of the World

There is a reverie I keep having, one that I can trace to the memory of a summer day, the spin of a dust-covered and yellowed fan, a scuffed wooden floor, and myself as a boy with a globe and a well-worn atlas, afternoon light streaming in through the twelve-paned windows, highlighting neatly typed Italic fonts next to impossibly small islands scattered, like unnamed constellations, across what seemed to be the uniform, turquoise plane of the world's oceans.

The names alone were an endless source of fascination-- Tristan da Cunha and Diego Garcia, Howland and Jarvis, Palmyra and Clipperton. There were, of course, better-known places-- Easter Island, the Galapagos-- whose names have become bywords for remoteness and exotic lifeforms and bizarre histories, and which have become havens for adventure tourists. At this point, they are part of the media-driven myth of the desert island, a place where us "civilized" people can escape from the angst of modern existence. But these tiny islands, along with the icy granite massifs of the polar regions, fascinated me because they didn't conform to this fantasy. They were null spots, uninhabited or inhabited by only a few hundred people, claimed by incidental nearest nations-- Chile, Mauritius, Colombia-- or by the remnants of the French, American, and British empires.

And so many of them carry the scars of those imperial endeavors. There are the islands pocked with the remnants of phosphate mining. Ghost towns with Yankee and Aussie names haunt the atolls of the Pacific, rusted railway tracks running down to decrepit harbors, gravel airstrips overgrown, fresh water fouled and root-colored.



And there are the islands that bear the remnants of war, rusted fuselage and unexploded ordnance littering the idyllic beaches. A great many continued to have remote naval operations through the Cold War, and some do even today. Others were used for secretive negotiations. Yet others had the misfortune to be targets for bombing missions, nuclear and conventional, now transformed through imperial whim into red zones of shattered hillsides, uranium-laced soil, and malformed chromosomes.



After economic disaster and military conflict, the few remaining residents of the world's remoter islands have largely been displaced. Some are native. Others are the descendants of old colonials. And others, huge numbers, are the descendants of the slave- and coolie-labor forces that carried out the imperialist project, Africans and Chinese and Indians. As the smaller islands of the world slowly depopulate, the only people left are the military personnel that maintain the islands' connections to the metropole, and the scientific personnel that chart the motions of waves, magma tubes, schools of cuttlefish.

For the human story is only one of the many of each island. There are the odd flora and fauna that have emerged in geographic separation from the mainland, there are the underwater jungles of coral, there are the nesting sites and the seabirds' routes that cut invisible lines in the noonday sky.

My sights these days, are set especially on Kingman Reef, adrift in the Pacific, a few degrees above the equator. It's technically an American territory, although it barely rises from the surface of the water, a calcitic gravel boomerang as low in profile as an abandoned railway grade in a small town.The life all lies underneath. A single coconut palm sapling attempts, with absolute futility, to rise. It is a beach without a land, a single point where the whorl of the Pacific Ocean gives up. And I see myself on the end of that strip, looking out at the endless and unforgiving vastness that extends all the way to Hawaii, a full thousand miles to the north.

As climate change claims more and more of the world, these last isolated freeholds will, in all likelihood be snuffed out, along with the cormorants' nests, the travelers' trees, and the ruins of churches and lighthouses.

Part of me, the part of me that's been reading a lot of Rosa Luxemburg lately, wants to deem this to be the logical end result of capitalist expansion-- discover, enslave, exploit, vacate, destroy-- but most of me knows that I'm imposing a fairly tenuous narrative on something far subtler, more complex, more difficult to pin down, less attributable to any one social or environmental force.

But I know, more or less for certain, that I will never go to those little black dots on the atlas page that I used to dream about before the sun sets on them one last time and they disappear beneath the tides.