Invasion, American Style
p. 14 · Read in the full issue
Tuvalu
A bizarre aid effort bewilders island recipients
THE far-flung atolls of Tuvalu (population 8500) were invaded by the United States in August l°r the first time since World War 11.
Ihe mam island of this resourcepoor nation, which recently celebrated a decade of independence, for several days resembled an army camp.
The US landing ship Arnold C Clinger sailed 3000 kilometres from Hawaii with a cargo of 10 25-tonne trucks, two 90,000 litre water tankers, a mobile crane, three jeeps, three portable generators, a satellite communications truck and 27 crew. A Hercules transport plane with 30 US soldiers followed e purpose of the exercise. The installation of eight water tanks.
Soon after the arrival of the Hercules, the Stars and Stripes was seen
rising above the women’s jail adjacent
to the airport used to house the troops. A field hospital was erected
and soon proved useful: three soldiers assembling the water tanks were admitted for dehydration.
Eight 13,000-litre prefabricated steel
tanks were soon put together before the aghast Tuvaluans: steel tanks are rarely used in the Pacific, because rust never gives them more than three years’ life . . . and that the tanks were bolted together using rubber washers presented yet another hitch. Tuvalu is home to the rubber-eating ‘knicker’ beetle, so called because it eats the elastic out of people’s knickers.
The whole operation is estimated to have cost around SAI million; Seventh Day Adventists recently installed 30 15,000-litre cement tanks in Tuvalu at a total cost of $27,000.
Irate Tuvalu officials were voicing concern to the Americans, tensions that spilled over into the handing over ceremony held in the country’s main maneaba, an open air meeting house.
Attending the gathering were six Tuvaluans including two senior minis ters and their wives, a handful of tourists and aid workers, 30 military
personnel, Suva-based US diplomat
Bob Benzinga, and chief of the army’s international military affairs division in Hawaii, Colonel Sam Hemmings.
In an ad-libbed speech Benzinga re flected Tuvalu concerns by saying the tanks were not the greatest part of the exercise the important part was that the army was able to show it could transport itself and its equip ment all that distance.
Our correspondent later overheard Hemmings, a soft-spoken man with a penchant for playing a Korean flute, discussing the exercise with some of his men in the bar of the tiny coun
try’s only hotel.
“I’ve just been reading about the war. You don’t know how close this is to a real live operation,”
Hemmings said. □