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MEMOIR TIP: Here’s a simple but important tip when you’re writing your memoir. It helps your reader if you locate and pull them into your story by mentioning a specific time and place when an historical or common event occurred that correlates with something you’re talking about in your story. Similar to asking, “Where were you when JF Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Tx?” Or, maybe to a younger crowd, “where were you when Prince died?” Then you go on to tell what was happening to you during that period and you take the reader with you.
Today’s excerpt from A Southern Belle in Paris continues with a deeper dive into the topic of Radioactive Fallout from my last blog.
Today’s Excerpt from A Southern Belle in Paris:
BIKINIS, BOMBS AND BABIES
PART ONE
Kwajalein Island in the Marshall Islands/Notice the runway extends
down the full length of the island!
“I’ve got some exciting news,” Chaplin Tinker said to me one Sunday after I’d been directing the Chapel choir on Kwajalein for some months. “We’ve been invited to visit Ebeye by the Marshallese choir director who wants to collaborate with us for a joint choir concert.”
Although the two islands were separated by only a mile-long stretch of coral reef, which you could walk during extremely low tides if you didn’t mind the sharks that constantly patrolled the area, residents from Kwajalein were forbidden to visit the small nearby island of Ebeye, home to the Marshallese islanders.
After deciding on a date to meet, the Chaplin, myself and three other choristers took the boat and made the short ride to Ebeye. Once the boat docked at Ebeye’s harbor adjacent to the small village, we began walking down the dirt road that ran through the center of the village with houses bordering on either side. Almost immediately we all fell silent, stunned at what we saw. The houses were nothing more than flimsy structures made of cardboard, pieces of tin and wooden boards nailed together with holes left for windows and doors. Pigs, skinny dogs, chickens and naked brown children were running everywhere; garbage and refuse were strewn about on the road and in the yards. As I gazed at the poverty and squalid living conditions, I felt myself becoming nauseous.
Why would God allow such suffering? How could He allow innocent children and islanders to live in such abject poverty, even if they were living in sin because they hadn’t accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior, which was my strongly-held belief at the time. Perhaps, I reasoned desperately, a miraculous way would be shown for their poverty and ill health to be eliminated. I sincerely believed that with God anything was possible. That the poverty and ill health of the Marshallese might be related to the policies and actions of the United States in the South Pacific and had little to do with a punishing God never occurred to me. I was as naïve in my worldview, as spiritually impoverished as I reasoned that the Marshallese were but my heart was genuinely caring. I simply had never seen such abject poverty and people living in such filthy conditions.
I could feel Chaplin Tinker watching me from the corner of his eye as I kept swallowing to ease my nausea. As I looked more closely, I realized that many of the children and adults were crippled and had deformities I’d never seen.
“These children and adults got polio a few years ago,” the Chaplin said, seeming to read my mind. “Officials believe that someone from Ebeye was exposed to a carrier on Kwajalein and took it back to the village where it quickly spread throughout the entire island atolls.”
“What about the polio vaccine?” I asked, still trying to comprehend what I was seeing.
“They didn’t get vaccinated until after the outbreak, but by then it was too late. Many islanders died or were left crippled and maimed for life.”
“What about her and the little boy next to her?” I asked, nodding in the direction of two young children standing near one of the dilapidated houses. “What happened to them? Can polio cause such deformities?”
“Their deformities are from the radiation fallout many of the population suffered after the extensive nuclear testing the United States did a few decades ago. A lot of babies born to mothers who suffered from radioactive fallout were born with no arms and no legs.”
I struggled to understand what he was saying and how it related to what I was seeing. My heart ached knowing how the Marshallese mothers must be suffering for their children whom they wanted to grow up healthy and have a good life…many of these women were mothers who left their own children every day to come to Kwajalein to take care of our healthy, white babies.
I smiled and waved to the deformed young children, who smiled and waved back with their knobs where arms should have been.
*****
“What do you know about radiation fallout?” I asked my husband later that evening after I’d returned from Ebeye.
“Radiation fallout?”
“Yes. From nuclear bombs the military exploded here for years after World War II. The fallout from those explosions made a lot of the islanders sick and mothers are still giving birth to babies that are severely deformed. You should have seen some of those children with no arms that I saw today on Ebeye.”
“I don’t think those deformities were due to radiation fallout,” he said with a certainty born from a creed and devotion to the military as the only practical way for keeping peace. “The military’s really careful in how they conduct nuclear tests. If it hadn’t been for those tests, well, it put us ahead of the rest of the world in building up a stronger military force than anyone else. Everything we’re doing here now is a direct result of how successful we’ve been in the past. We need our large arsenal of missile weaponry to keep us safe, to keep the world safe.”
This was the same argument used in 1946 when the American military governor of the Marshall Islands, Commodore Wyatt traveled to Bikini Island where he assembled the islanders after Sunday church, asking them if they would be willing to leave their homes temporarily so that the United States could begin testing atomic bombs. “It’s for the good of mankind and to end all world wars,” he solemnly told the islanders.
Residents of Bikini Being removed by the U.S. Navy
“What is an atomic bomb?” the islanders had asked in innocence and confusion. How will it end all wars?” After sorrowful deliberation, King Juda, leader of the Bikinian people, finally agreed. “We will go, believing that everything is in the hands of God.
But what, you might ask, did the testing of atomic bombs in the remote Pacific and deformed babies and islanders being forced to leave their homes … what did any of that have to do with BIKINIS, as in the skimpy two-piece swim suits worn by women? As Mark Twain once said, “the truth is far stranger than fiction.” So, until next time when the strange, true story of that connection is revealed.
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Wild Women Write: Reconnecting with the Wild Feminine
Wild Women Write takes you to the core of your instinctual feminine essence by familiarizing you with tales & stories of women who walked in their power, providing archetypal models to reclaim & reconnect to that sacred place within ourselves that is both wild and powerful. Writing & art exercises help you to dive deep into your own unique self & to express what you find there!
Writes of Passage: Writing Through the Seasons of Your Life
Have you been wanting to write your memoir… tell your life story but don’t know where to start? Writes of Passage is the perfect book to help you get started. For each of the four phases of your life: childhood, young adult, mature adult, & elder, there are writing & art exercises that will give you all the material you’ll need to begin your memoir!
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Aloha! Marjorie