Word: saipan
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...Viet Nam. But the newest play, which should have been the first, chronologically, just meanders, with no discernible destination. A telegram announces the death of Timmy, for instance, and Timmy's ghost (David Ferry) appears onstage to explain in interminable detail how he was blown to pieces on Saipan. Shakespeare pulled the same corny trick in Hamlet, but his ghost had a purpose. Wilson's does...
...sail under Castro's slow and erratic selection of exiles will have greater U.S. protection on the sometimes perilous 110-mile voyage than those hapless earlier captains whose boats were swamped by high winds. The U.S. Navy has the landing ship Boulder and the amphibious assault ship Saipan patrolling the Florida Straits. The Saipan has 14 helicopters equipped for plucking accident survivors out of the sea. The Coast Guard has ten vessels and at least eight helicopters on similar duty. More than 800 Marines were also flown from North Carolina's Camp Lejeune to Key West to help...
...since hundreds of Japanese civilians leaped to their deaths off the cliffs of Saipan as American forces approached the Pacific island in World War II had there been a comparable act of collective self-destruction. The followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, a once respected Indianaborn humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and paranoia, had first ambushed a party of visiting Americans, killing California Congressman Leo Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector from their heavily guarded colony at Jonestown. Then, exhorted by their leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes...
...Saipanese worry about their top-heavy bureaucracy, but it has not discouraged all initiative -at least on the part of incoming Japanese. They have asked for permission to raise eels and harvest seaweed around Saipan. A more grandiose scheme calls for coffee, rice and frogs to be raised on Tinian, just south of Saipan. Farther away, on Palau, Japanese investors plan to build a $325 million supertanker port if they get permission from local chiefs...
...Marianas offer a honeymoon resort and war shrine. Thirty thousand Japanese soldiers died on Saipan, and every year Japan Air Lines sends "bone-picker charters" to the island. They bring hundreds of cash customers who thwack through the tangantangan in search of ancestral skeletons -though any human bones will do. These are then burned to release the spirits of the dead, while the living grow nostalgically misty-eyed on tours of old bunkers. Says one local bureaucrat with profound seriousness: "The only problem I can foresee for the Marianas is running out of bones. We are aware of the shortage...