Word: saipan
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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...
Tens of thousands of evacuees had already reached the three principal U.S. "staging areas" in the Pacific: Guam, Wake Island and Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Others were scattered on Saipan, 250 miles from Guam, where 56 refugees landed after commandeering a South Vietnamese C130; at the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, 110 miles from Clark, where about 6,000 were staying; and at Thailand's Utapao Airbase, where almost 3,000 Vietnamese sought refuge. Soon they would be moving on to three military bases on the U.S. mainland-Camp Pendleton, Calif., Fort Chaffee...
...every December. But as with much else in the land of rising statistics, the Japanese effort appears to be much bigger, or at least more zealous. Last year about 6,000 Japanese toured World War II battlegrounds. A Pan Am jumbo jet last month brought 300 pilgrims home from Saipan, Guam and Tinian; another 400 will soon be leaving on a cruise ship for the burning sands of Iwo Jima, where no fewer than 20,000 Imperial troops died in combat. Later this year, other battleground pilgrims will visit Mindanao, Leyte, New Guinea and even Siberia...
...then it has laid waste to 100 sq. mi. of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest and most impressive collection of underwater coral formations. It has also destroyed nearly 22 miles of Guam's coral barrier. Marine biologists report similar starfish damage off Saipan, Fiji and the western Solomons. In only five years, says Oceanographer R. D. Gaul of San Diego's Westinghouse Ocean Research Laboratory, the starfish can destroy a coral atoll that may have taken thousands of years to form...
...Saipan, Mariana Islands...