During our long talks she told a story that could have happened only in the islands: ‘Before I met Dorn I knew he was married. That’s the first thing island women learn about a newcomer and my friends warned me: “You can set your cap for him, but it won’t do you much good.” But they were pleased—our women are like that—when we fell in love, and I made no secret of it. Anyway, who can keep a secret on Matareva?’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Hazen. For reasons I did not know at the time, he despised me. Did everything he could to humiliate me. To break me away from Mark, or Mark from me, he didn’t care which.’
‘But why?’
‘Ropati tells me that you’ve read the court-martial report. Have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it won’t surprise you if I tell you that I realized early on that Hazen was a confirmed homosexual.’
I was not surprised because that was what the court-martial record was all about, but those were the days when people, especially young women, did not use that word casually, and its sudden explosion in the air startled me. The reason the court-martial had been such a fierce jolt to the Navy was that because of the crowding of young men in cramped quarters aboard destroyers and submarines, our service had developed an almost mortal fear of homosexuality. When a sailor was convicted of it he was thrown into a brig where supertough Marine guards were not only allowed but encouraged to brutalize him. In 1944 naval officers were taught to be terrified of homosexuality.
Tetua, seeing my uneasiness, said quietly: ‘Hazen’s dislike of me stemmed from that fact. But he also felt it necessary to oppose me because I was Mark’s friend. He saw that so long as I remained faithful, Mark could not be isolated.’ Now her placid face became clouded, and after a long pause during which she was obviously trying to decide which of many ugly paths through the dark jungle she wished to go, she said: ‘It quickly became quite deadly, Lieutenant Michener. Hazen was inside the wire fence with all the Marines. Mark was outside with only me.’
‘What about Ropati? Wasn’t he on your side?’
Silence. ‘I don’t know how to answer that, not in a way you’d understand. I think you’d better ask Ropati about that.’
So I went back to my tennis partner, who was more than willing to explain what Tetua had preferred not to discuss: ‘When Hazen had Dorn isolated, as Tetua properly described it, he began a systematic campaign to entice the younger Marines into his net.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
He persuaded one after another of those young men to engage in sexual acts with him, and when they were indoctrinated he passed them along to others like himself. It was incredible, his malignant power.’
‘The testimony, before it was silenced, said that some twenty of the young Marines joined what Hazen called The Club, and that’s not easy to imagine. Nearly two dozen typical Marines—’
‘More like three dozen. The whole area behind the fence went ape.’
This was shocking even though in Noumea I had known the general facts. Three dozen Marines, like the ones I had known on various bases and with whom I had flown on bombing missions out of Emirau, behaving in this way—it was difficult to believe. Controlling my emotions, I asked quietly: ‘What role did you play?’
‘From the first Hazen had taken a special interest in me. He put his arm around me and confided: “Ropati, I appreciate your skill in handling the Matarevans—” ’
I lost my temper: ‘Goddammit! He was just a staff sergeant! What was he doing, giving you his benediction, and what were you doing accepting it.’
‘Lieutenant, he was running the base. He was in charge.’ Ropati’s voice rose perceptibly, for he was as contemptuous of my blindness as I had been of what I had thought was his. ‘And how did he prove to me that he was in charge? When he failed three times to get me into bed with him, he calmly drafted a report to my superiors in London charging me with incompetence and theft of funds that should have gone to the islanders.’ His voice rose to a shout: ‘And—I—was—fired!’
Humbled by his passion that had obviously been long pent up I suggested quietly that we walk over to Tetua’s shack and clarify matters. We sat together with a pitcher of lemonade that she provided, and I asked a series of short questions.
‘So inside the fence was a homosexual riot?’ Yes.
‘At least thirty Marines cooperating?’ Maybe more.
‘U.S. Marines! What in hell came over them?’ Loneliness, the feeling that they had been forgotten, betrayed by the high command. Month after month no women, no mail, the same movie night after night, no newspapers. The slow erosion of character through self-pity.
‘Did any refuse to participate?’ Obviously there were quite a few.
‘How did Hazen handle them?’
‘Ostracism. He was in control, remember.’
‘Where in hell was Captain Dorn?’ This required a long, involved explanation, with Ropati speaking as one who had worked inside the fence and seen the Machiavellian maneuvers that had rendered Dorn powerless, even though he was a senior captain and Hazen not even a commissioned officer; and Tetua describing the pitiful manner in which Dorn had been emotionally and psychologically destroyed by Hazen’s campaign: ‘After Ropati was fired and ordered by Hazen to stay off the base, it was Dorn, Ropati and me outside trying to combat the horror inside.’ And once more I asked the question that had perplexed Marine headquarters in Noumea: ‘Why didn’t somebody do something to stop this?’
The explanation, simple yet heartbreaking, was offered by Ropati: ‘Sometimes we wait till the vital moment has passed, and when we do shout, nobody hears.’
‘But you told me that you had spotted Hazen as a troublemaker right off the bat. And you, Terua, you knew that he had strong homosexual tendencies.’ Their joint explanation stunned me: ‘We both thought that Dorn knew, but that he was biding his time. We waited, and since he was the commander, we assumed he knew what he was doing.’ Then came Terua’s sad voice: ‘Too late he discovered he was powerless to do anything.’ Her voice broke and for some moments she wept quietly, then said with great pain: ‘In the end—maybe you know—Hazen wouldn’t even allow him to come onto the base. Locked the gate against him and jeered when he tried to break in.’
Realizing that she could say no more because of her weeping, I turned to Ropati: ‘You mean that a captain of the United States Marines stood by powerless while a staff sergeant took his detachment away from him?’
‘Yes.’
‘How in hell did it happen? Tell me, for God’s sake. How did it happen?’
‘Slowly.’
‘But how did you two let it happen?’
‘Do two Materava islanders move in to discipline a detachment of United States Marines?’
Since no one could provide an answer to that question, I turned to the final subject on which I and the men in Noumea required instruction: ‘What about the murder of the Matarevan?’
‘You read the record.’
‘Yes, but the trial ended before that testimony could be entered. All we had was the prosecutor’s opening promise that he would also bring witnesses to prove that a murder had been committed.’
‘I was to have been that witness,’ Ropati said. ‘But as I told you, I was left on the airstrip here. Never testified.’
‘Not to anyone?’
‘Questions were asked. My answers must be on file somewhere.’
‘None that I could find.’
‘What I would have said—been able to say, that is—wouldn’t have resulted in formal charges of murder, so maybe it’s just as well I didn’t go. The facts as I was able to put them together were like this. There was a handsome Matareva man working on the base, and two of Hazen’s men became his lovers. A violent argument took place, some of the Marines not involved in Hazen’s Club heard loud voices, and next morning the Matareva man was found dead—some distance from where the argument had occurred.’ He held his palms up: ‘Was it, wasn’t it? Who knows, a
nd as to who did it no one even offered a guess.’
‘But it was murder?’
‘Well, it’s not easy to commit suicide by stabbing yourself in the middle of your back and bashing in the back of your skull.’
Like Admiral Halsey when he finished with the court-martial record, I had heard far more about the Matareva incident than I really cared to know; I was satisfied that a first-class Marine captain from a fine family in Virginia had allowed a vicious enlisted man on a remote tropical island to steal his command, corrupt it totally, and lead it into the swamp of a hideous court-martial. Something like that should never have been allowed to happen, but happen it did.
When I walked out to the airstrip to catch the plane that would take me back to Noumea, Robert Weed and Tetua Stanton walked with me to the ramp. ‘It’s been a lively stay,’ I said. ‘I listened to a lot I really didn’t want to hear.’ But when I asked specifically, ‘What’s your final judgment on Captain Dorn?’ Tetua said: ‘I was damned unhappy that he was already married,’ and Ropati added: ‘One of the best men I’ll ever meet. Had he kept off this island I believe he’d have had a brilliant Marine Corps record. At the front, facing a known enemy like the Japanese he’d have charged right to the top of the hill and won medals. In the rear, facing an unknown enemy like Mike Hazen, he never knew the battle was under way till he was forced to surrender his sword, his epaulets, his honor.’ As I climbed the ramp I told Ropati: ‘You sound as if maybe you could be a writer.’
But Tetua brought the tragic story back to the young officer she had loved: ‘What happened to Mark?’
‘The Navy officers who detested homosexuals wanted to crucify him—throw him into one of their infamous jails, where he would be beaten and battered. But others warned: “You can’t do that without a formal court-martial—a justified military order.” ’
‘So what happened?’
‘It took a lot of questioning to find out, because people had been ordered not to talk. But I learned from an enlisted man who typed the orders that Dorn, Hazen and the three dozen others were spirited out of the war zone, slipped back into the States, and quietly dismissed from the service.’
As I look back from the vantage point of 1991 at the mixed-up events and emotions of that tour taken almost half a century ago, I find great consolation in the fact that somewhere in the dark and dusty files of the Navy my two field reports on Bora Bora and Tonga lie safely hidden. Each was carefully written and properly typed and each ran to about eighty very full pages, and I suppose that sometime around the year A.D. 2050 some mole, sorting through the junk, will stumble upon them and cry: ‘Hey, these must have been written by that guy who wrote the books.’
That they got safely into the files I know, because I placed them there, and confirmation came when the official histories of the two islands were compiled. I have copies of those histories and note that they quote copiously from my work, the Bora Bora one identifying me repeatedly in footnotes that verify the many interviews I conducted on various islands of French Polynesia.‡
The Tonga history uses much of my work verbatim but does not mention my name, referring to me only as ‘one naval observer’ or ‘a visiting historical officer from ComSoPac,’ and I regret that most of my more amusing episodes were censored.§ I imagine that some Annapolis-trained superior officer read about the little red truck on Tonga, or the sailor who burst into tears when he had to leave Bora Bora, and growled: ‘We can’t have stuff like that in here! Creates a disgraceful portrait of the Navy!’ and the scissors went to work.
I do hope my reports will be found in their uncensored form. If published, together with a few notes, they will make an interesting book showing not naval strategy but how a young officer reacted to Polynesia in the turbulent days while he was learning how to tell interesting stories about the islands. Many of the ideas that would direct the rest of my working life were first expressed in those reports.
I did not submit formal reports on five of the most interesting situations I helped handle on this tour. I told headquarters nothing about the two wonderful Grey sisters in Samoa; I judged their relations with the U.S. government to have been as profitable to us as to them and two finer women I never investigated. Nor was there anything I cared to say about Ratchett Kimbrell and his individualistic interpretation of State Department regulations on Tahiti; I liked him, respected Lieutenant Commander McClintock and loved Reri; and the island girls who decoded the top-secret transmissions didn’t do a great deal of harm, I felt sure.
Two of the other events were so personal that I could not see them as Navy business. The rescue of Robert Dean Frisbie from the reef at Pukapuka and his three daughters from Rarotonga was an act of grace to a fellow writer, and the echoes of that adventure still reverberate in my heart. Someone should write a coherent account of that remarkable family.
The Catholic priest and the New Zealand girl stand apart. I regarded her as one of those enviable young women with a warm heart and a steel backbone. She was worth knowing and cherishing as a friend, and to see her leaving that night for unknown worlds was a page from the drama of war. Their affair moved me deeply and perplexed me even more, and I still have no explanation of the matter. It seemed to me then, and still does, that the three principals—the priest, the young woman and Bishop Dawson—acted in conformity to his or her convictions and moral beliefs, and I could fault no one, and certainly not the ultimate resolution of the impasse.
And of course there was no written report from me on the sad affair of the Marine detachment on the little island of Matareva. There was at one time the official court-martial record that ended so dramatically with the young general proroguing it and facing the wrath of Admiral Halsey. I read it in breathless detail, adding here and there my own confirming notes in black ink, but some months later when I wanted to consult the record for a note I was making I was told that all copies had been destroyed, under orders from Halsey.
I have often reflected on the incidents at Matareva and Bora Bora. The similarities between the two were striking: two remote islands far from the war; two groups of men isolated there and left pretty much to their own devices. But the Bora Bora group, under the guidance of a wise and gentle officer and the cooperation of several score of joyous young women, created a little paradise in which, so far as I could detect, there had never been a criminal or an evil act, if one discounted the natives’ theft of gasoline for their stolen cars, in which they carried goods taken from the warehouses. What was important was that there were no stabbings, no wild drunkenness, no aiding the enemy after nightfall. On Matareva almost the identical type of young men, Marines this time, fell under the command of a junior officer unequal to the task, and then under the domination of a malevolent staff sergeant who corrupted the place, instituted a reign of terror that alienated the natives and led to murder and the total dissolution of a military unit.
What was the difference between the two groups? It was certainly not in the training or the traditions of the two services, Navy and Marine, nor, so far as I could ascertain, the basic character of the two commanding officers. The crucial difference was that Bora Bora was Polynesian, while Matareva was Melanesian. Over the past three centuries many European and American explorers and travelers have testified that the young women of Polynesia—Tahitian, Samoan, Cook Islander, Hawaiian—were some of the most gracious and delightful in the world, and I believe that they would not have allowed the American military on their islands to turn to evil. There would have been too much laughter. If the mad staff sergeant of Matareva had started his operations on Samoa, Aggie Grey would have asked: ‘What you doin’, son?’ And had he tried his machinations on Tahiti, Reri or one of her nineteen cousins would have said: ‘We havin’ a party our place, you come,’ and the poison would have been neutralized.
Years after the war ended, Chinn Ho, the Hawaiian entrepreneur, and I flew down to Bora Bora and met three of the young women who had lived with the sailors. They remembered me as the man who asked
questions and I remembered them as the girls who gave answers no one could have believed: ‘I paid for this stove.’ ‘I ordered this dress from Papeete.’ ‘My uncle gave me this, he works on Raiatea.’
On this visit we recalled old times, and they introduced me to young girls and boys of fourteen and fifteen who’d had American fathers, and there was none of the hatred that confronted such wartime children in countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. Here they were living in sunshine beside the lagoon; and they showed only mild interest to hear that I had known their fathers. When they had gone back to their games, some of the island women told Chinn and me: ‘Those were days of laughter and nights of love and we often talk about them.’
‘Are you married?’ I asked and they all said: ‘Sure.’
This was a real tour involving real islands, people and incidents, and even though some identities have had to be masked, it has been as faithfully reported as the passage of nearly half a century will permit. It was exceptional in that it dealt only with the backwaters of war, and I was always mindful of the fact that while I was exploring the joyous wonders of Polynesia many of my friends were landing on quite different islands: Tarawa, Saipan, Okinawa. I never forgot that difference.
But I make no apologies for having traveled to that quiet theater of war, because on many earlier tours I had prowled up and down that deadly chain of islands guarding the Slot, where the destinies of the United States and Japan were determined in fearful night battles between warships that could not see one another: Savo, Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Bougainville, Vella Lavella and distant Emirau, from which I flew as passenger on bombing missions over Rabaul and Kavieng. How ardently we supported General MacArthur’s command decision to bypass those impregnable fortresses and allow the Japanese holding them to wither. Had we attempted head-on invasions, we would have lost thousands of young men. I had seen enough war, so I was not eager for such duty.
During one trip to the Treasury Islands I accompanied a heavily armed patrol seeking a gun fight with troublesome Japanese remnants on lonely Mono island. We did not find the Japanese, but as we panted to the top of a steep hill, dripping with sweat in the humid jungle, we came upon one of the most miserable Melanesian villages I would ever see, a truly pitiful place with scrawny residents and only one pig. On a rude signboard attached to a tree, someone had affixed a cardboard giving the settlement’s name, and it was so completely different from ordinary names, so musical to my ear that I borrowed a pencil and in a soggy notebook jotted the name against the day when I might want to use it for some purpose I could not then envisage: Bali-ha’i.