Word: kwajaleins
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...responsibility for more than 2,200 of them, sweeping in a 4,000-mile arc from American Samoa to Guam, with a 2,000-mile lurch northward to include the naval battleground of Midway. Many were the sites of bitter, bloody victories in World War II: Saipan, Tinian, Kwajalein, Truk...
...Micronesia-"Air Mike," as it is known locally-is the pony express of the Pacific. Three times each week the airline's two jets, both coated with Teflon to fight the corrosive effects of salty coral runways, hop among Micronesia's six island airports on Truk, Kwajalein, Yap, Ponape, Majuro and Palau. It is a measure of the region's isolation-the nights range up to 1,451 miles nonstop-that no plane travels without a mechanic and spare parts. Says Captain Lee Minors, 43, who prepped for atoll landings on the flight deck of the U.S.S...
Most of the dots, and all of the void, are of vital concern to the U.S. military. Unless they have specific clearance, Air Mike passengers are barred from leaving the plane during refueling stops on Johnston, a storage dump for poisonous gas; nobody gets off at Kwajalein, a target for missiles test-fired from California. Says Commander David Burt, Navy liaison to the trust territory government: "The fact that they're smack dab in the middle of the ocean makes all these islands important...
They also have a flavor of 19th century colonialism. On Kwajalein, 500 natives often perform jobs of equal status with those of the 3,000 Americans, but are forbidden access to the golf course, swimming pool, free movies and subsidized food available to the outsiders. For security reasons, only Americans can live on the island. Every night the natives must commute by boat three miles to Ebeye, a slum island where 7,000 people are segregated on just 73 acres...
...though they had the ability to build one. U.S. development started in 1955 and soon led to the first, primitive ABM project, the Nike-Zeus. Testing showed that Zeus could indeed stop an incoming missile under ideal conditions; dummy aggressors launched from California were intercepted by defenders based on Kwajalein...