I spent a third of my military career around the Pacific, mostly Okinawa and Guam. Both islands still bear the scars of combat, and discarded equipment is still scattered around the jungle and along the beaches. I encountered two that still stick with me:
Tumon Bay Beach pillboxes: Hotel Row in Agana, Guam has a beautiful, sweeping strip of beach that seems designed to connect palm-thatched beach bodegas. One evening me and several other G.I.’s were meandering from bar to bar. I noticed that, near the treeline, were several of these ugly little 3-sided concrete boxes with a little window on the side facing the beach. The window was for a machine gun. These boxes were tiny. A gunner would have to squat or lay down with his legs poking out the back. Behind the boxes was a twenty yard strip of short scrub, then the palm trees. Anyone manning that box had to know that getting from box to trees was futile, and that the box was likely to be an impromptu headstone. Facing the kid in that box would have been bunches of kids in plywood landing craft. That day, on that beach, would have been a giant pile of suck for everyone regardless of uniform.
The Cave, Maeda Flats, Okinawa: Halfway up Okinawa’s East China Sea coast is the huge expanse of Nago Bay with its resorts, botanical gardens, and an excellent marine aquarium & museum. Just south of Nago Bay are Maeda Point and Maeda Flats. Both are renowned scuba dive sites. Maeda Flats has a huge coral shelf that has big square holes where coral was quarried. There are several secluded beaches separated by little headlands. Steep cliffs separate the beaches from the rest of the island, so one has to wade around the headlands in order to reach the beaches. One such beach has a low cave that’s large enough for several people to sit inside. The cave opening still has remnants of a concrete wall and the interior is still charred. It’s another gun emplacement. This cave anchors the northern end of Cape Zanpa—one of the invasion sites during the Battle for Okinawa. I sat in this cave once, contemplating what it must have been like knowing that there is no way off that beach. But for the time it survived, that cave would have been one hell of a gun emplacement, and I don’t envy those who got stuck with the task of taking it out. Another bunch of scared kids, another lethal encounter.
Today, both sites have reverted to subtropical paradises in spite of what mankind did in the name of oil, or iron, or influence. Who owns the blame is debatable to a point, but not debatable is the blamelessness of those who were actually on the beaches. They were obligated by powers larger than themselves.