My friend and colleague, Duane A. Vachon, Ph.D, has been writing a column on Medal of Honor recipients for the Hawaii Reporter for several years. He recently asked me what I knew about the Battle of Wounded Knee, saying that his research was suggesting that the MOH recipients might not be entitled to the honor because it was more of a massacre than a battle. I knew about Wounded Knee, but took an evening to revisit the historical sources, look...

Midway Atoll is ruled by the birds again, after a short stay by humans during the twentieth century. “Pihemanu” is the Hawaiian word for Midway: “loud din of birds” is an apt descriptor for the location of the world’s largest nesting colonies of Laysan and Black-footed Albatross. Midway is one of the best known of all the outlying Pacific islands due to the tide-turning Battle of Midway in WW2. It lies about 1300 miles west of Honolulu and 1200...

On June 17, 2014, President Obama announced a massive expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands marine sanctuary to protect the rich ecological areas adjacent to seven Pacific islands and atolls. Obama used his executive authority, based on the Antiquities Act of 1906, to cover protection of nearly 782,000 square miles in the Pacific from overfishing, marine pollution, and other depredations. This smart but bound-to-be controversial move vastly...

The JPAC Wake Island mission began three years ago with the discovery of a group of human remains on the north beach. The location of the discovery and determination that the remains were Caucasian pointed to the massacre of American civilian contractors on October 7, 1943. While JPAC’s forensic anthropologists have studied the remains in their lab at Hickam AFB in Hawaii, I have been pursuing the families of the 98 to find qualified donors for...

Two weeks ago Wake Island’s nearest neighbor, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, filed suit in the international court at The Hague against nine global nuclear powers and in federal court against the United States. The lawsuits demand that these nations meet disarmament obligations established by international treaties. I looked into it at the time and watched for reactions and follow up in the coming days. Not surprisingly, it caused barely...

Like many of his generation, my father did not open up with the family about his wartime experiences. We knew he had been captured on Wake Island and spent the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, but little else. He had some mysterious, recurring illnesses and strange scars that we knew were related to that time, but I waited until long after his death to start asking questions. My quest to find out “what happened to Dad” turned into a full...