There are a half-dozen of us, 13-year-old boys draped over the gunwales of an old World War II landing craft as it clears the reef-enclosed harbor and heads for open water. We are a group of Sea Scouts, sons of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officers stationed at a super-secret training base on the island of Saipan in the Marianas, and on this Saturday morning in 1956 we are headed for the island of Tinian, ten miles to the south.
The two adults accompanying us are CIA personnel, founders and supervisors of our Scout chapter, each of them expert in small boat handling, an expertise they put to use weekdays training Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist guerrillas for sabotage missions on the Chinese mainland.
My friends and I are aware of the incongruity in our lives: This 12-by-5-mile island thousands of miles from anywhere, inhabited by an indigenous Saipanese population of spearfishermen and subsistence farmers. And in the middle of this landscape, atop the island’s highest mountain, a ready-made American suburb with carefully-planned streets with sidewalks and streetlights, 2- and-3 bedroom homes and a modern shopping center.
Mere steps from the edges of this unlikely compound was the jungle. All but the restricted area on the island’s northern end where the guerrillas trained was available to us, and much of our free time was spent cutting machete swaths through the brush or following narrow dirt roads through overgrown inland valleys. Where a year before I and my…