Tsunami Squad
I was spellbound. The waves were big but the water was smooth, and the energy pulsed like the earth’s heartbeat. Out beyond the rolling walls of a giant shore break that looked to me like house-sized barriers to even getting out there to face the waves behind them, a knot of young men and one or two women sat casually, each waiting for their turn to dice with death. And when they caught those blue-green rolling mountains, the grace they combined with courage and strength to ride them made my breath catch in my ten year old throat. Every wave I saw ridden made me terrified for the lives of those wave warriors, and envious of their abilities.
I tried to imagine the views they were seeing as those tall, thick moving walls of water pushed them along at breakneck speed, and the angles from which they viewed those walls as they heeled over at the bottom to turn steeply up towards the top, then coasted from the top to the bottom and back, again and again. But my mind couldn’t comprehend it. I knew I’d have to experience it for myself.
My first board was a ten foot balsa behemoth, and I was tiny on it. But I paddled out at Waikiki on a small – okay, a tiny – day, and I took what I thought were some pretty fierce beatings, and I managed to stand up. I can still feel that thrill coursing through me, that sense of power and invincibility. That connection with the wave and the sky and vitality of the world itself. The idea that humans can harness the silent energy of the ocean, welling up from the deeps to thrust me along like a god still shakes me to the core every time I see a wave.
In my home, Hawaii, surfing, or he’e nalu, had always been the sport of royalty, and I felt just like a king whenever I rode a wave. That something so pure, natural and good could exist, and that I could make it a part of my life – even if only for a few fleeting, exquisite moments – made me humble and grateful. And, from that first day on, almost permanently thrilled. Surfing was my life, and all I ever wanted to do, right from that first wave in late 1948, when I was ten years old.
As I grew up, I watched our local legends and many outsiders come to our shores to surf our big waves, and all I wanted to do was follow in their footsteps. And in my own modest way, I did. I survived some huge days at Waimea. Lived through the terror of a gruesome Sunset Beach hold-down. Was one of the nobodies surfing with big names on big days at Velzyland. But I was no champion. I was a journeyman surfer with a good set of lungs and a decent pair of cojones, so I had one or two moments in which the waves starred, and I was a stiff-legged ornament on a gliding piece of timber that seemed to know which way to go by itself.
The point being, that with my talent and in those days, I had less than no hope of making a living through surfing. It was a time when the horror of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was still very real and present on the islands, and the memory of the war was still strong. I was only three years old when that happened, so I didn’t directly remember Pearl Harbour, but there were reminders everywhere, and people still spoke about it as if it had happened last week.
My friends and I joined the navy when we turned 18, hoping to travel the world, sample its many waves, women and cuisines, and if at all possible avoid conflict. The reality wasn’t quite what we’d hoped it would be, but shipboard life wasn’t too bad. My shipmates were great friends, the work wasn’t too trying, and the peace that had the world in its embrace seemed as endless as the horizons we gazed at every day. Life was all going to plan.
But the prospect of peace is not in the purview of those that plan war for a living, and their minds were at work on the potential for a conflict that could end civilisation, or even life itself. And so it was that in mid-May 1958 we sailed into the Marshall Islands, and headed for Eniwetok Atoll. I had just turned 20 years old, and I thought that here was just another sunburnt paradise for us to enjoy. But the navy had other plans for me and my buddies.
We were there as part of Operation Hardtack 1 – a vital part of the United States government’s drive to maintain a destructive edge over the Soviet Union in the field of nuclear weaponry as the growing tensions of the Cold War continued to heat up. In a little less than five months, my government detonated no fewer than 34 nuclear devices in the skies above, and on, over and under the seas of what had until then been a picturesque chain of idyllic islands. The largest of these was the 8.9 megaton Oak explosion, which blasted a crater a mile across in the lagoon of the island of Eniwetok on June 28, 1958.
Because the people that build these things have a perverse tendency to use the Little Boy bomb that blew Hiroshima to smithereens in 1945 as the benchmark, I can tell you that the Oak bomb was 600 times as powerful as the one that pulverised tens of thousands of people that August day in Japan.
Our task was to participate in the Umbrella test, a relatively small device generating about half the destructive force of the Hiroshima bomb. Umbrella was to be detonated on the bottom of the lagoon, in about 150 feet of water.
The mood on board was nervous. The words “guinea pigs” were tossed around a lot, and odd, frightening rumours abounded. The fear was palpable, but we were committed. We’d signed up to serve, and if this was what that meant, so be it.
I was on my bunk dreaming about Waimea when a seaman came in and said, “The skipper wants to see you.”
This is not something that happens to a sailor like me every day. I’d never even spoken to the commander of our vessel, as I was just one of over a thousand nameless seamen who inhabited the warren of hot bunks below decks. What could the skipper possibly want with me? I smartened up as much as I could in a few seconds, and followed the fellow to the captain’s quarters.
I knocked on the door and he uttered the timeless invitation, “Come,” and I entered.
The commander got right down to business, although at first I thought he was just making small talk.
“They tell me you’re a surfer, son,” he said. “Is that right?”
“Yes sir,” I said, surprised at the question. Surfing wasn’t highly thought of, if it was thought of at all, in those days.
“A big wave surfer?” He was watching me with a strange intensity.
“Uh, I guess, sir,” I replied. I hated the idea of being thought a smart ass or a boaster, but it was true, I did love big waves.
“How would you like to surf the biggest wave of your life?” The commander was being genuine – and almost urgent.
“Sir?” I had a shocked inkling as to where this was going, and I didn’t know whether to be excited or terrified.
“On Saturday we’ll be on hand when our government detonates a nuclear device in the lagoon at Eniwetok lagoon,” the commander said. “We expect that it will generate a tsunami of some magnitude, and we’d like you to surf that wave. Are you interested, son?”
My mind was alive with questions. How big would the wave be? Where would I get a surfboard from? How dangerous would it be? But the tingling in my spine told me all I needed to know.
“Yes sir!” I said with a snap to attention, a salute and a barely suppressed grin.
The skipper returned my grin, and stood up. “I knew I could count on you, sailor,” he said as he returned my salute. “You won’t be alone, you know,” he continued. “I’m sure you know Alderton, Forde, Apua and Park.”
Three of them were the surfing buddies I’d signed up with, and Forde I knew by reputation. A fierce, competitive big wave waterman.
“We call it the Tsunami Squad,” said the skipper. “Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you sir. It’s an honour to be chose, sir.” I wasn’t faking my gratitude or my enthusiasm. Stepping off into the unknown is what we surfers do. Paddling out, not knowing how big it will get or how gnarly it will be is what we live for.
Over the next two days, the five of us hung together as much as possible, talking about what we were going to do, what it would be like and how best to approach this unknown beast. While there was an element of trepidation about our task, it was overwhelmed by a sense of impatience, a keenness to get into the water and go for it. None of us had been surfing for a long time, and we were itching for this one massive wave. We plotted courses down and across a face that we assumed would be at least five storeys high, planned manouevres, and wondered quietly about the consequences of a wipeout. Not one of us professed fear, but I know we all felt it.
On the Friday we were presented with surfboards, which had been delivered by chopper that morning, who knows from where. They were all brand new, state of the art Hobie shapes, ten footers that had new-fangled “stringers” in them, which supposedly strengthened the foam blanks beneath their fibreglass skins. Having ridden nothing but balsa boards up until that point we were sceptical, but willing to be convinced by these polyurethane models. The stores we’d all heard had been good, and after a ten minute test paddle around the vessel, now anchored in position off Eniwetok, our excitement had trebled. These new boards were so light, so buoyant and so easy to paddle!
“This’ll be a cakewalk,” said Apua, and we all nodded vigorously. It would be a great day’s surfing, and the only bummer about it would be that it was just one wave. Or so we thought.
At 9am on the day of the test we were taken off the ship, piling our boards and our bodies into a small boat for a short trip to a tiny, unnamed island on the fringe of the atoll. Eniwetok is quite large, being about 18 miles across at its widest point – a giant tilted acorn-shaped coral chain, like a necklace festooned with charms that are islands of sand, rock and palm trees, ranged around a gloriously blue, still body of water.
The detonation site was located at the southern end near the bottom of the acorn, in 150 feet of water. The boat dropped us on the outer edge, on an island less than a hundred yards wide at about 7 o’clock on the dial of the atoll, and we walked across the sand to the inner lagoon. We were less than five miles from the place where the bomb would rip the sea bottom apart and displace millions of tons of water. At 11.00am we paddled directly out from the island, into the lagoon. I was closest to shore at a100 yards, and the other fellows were further out in increments of 100 yards apiece, with Alderton way out the back at 500 yards off shore. We were told to sit there facing the island we’d just paddled away from, with our backs to the explosion, and keep our eyes closed until after the initial flash had passed us by. When we asked how we would know when to open our eyes and turn around, the officer smirked and said, “you’ll know.”
At 11.15am the bomb was set off. For a second or two, there was nothing, and then a flash that seemed to penetrate my entire skull and turned my tightly closed eyelids into boiling red curtains ripped through me. A deep rumbling quickly built to an inner earthquake followed swiftly by an earthshattering shockwave that almost knocked me off my board, and a second after that an ear splitting POW! that seemed to morph into an endlessly rolling thunder.
Turning around, I saw an impossibly tall cylinder of water rising, rising, rising and growing in girth as it rose. At its base there grew a collar of roiling foam – a wall of water that seemed to be blossoming out towards us like a deadly white flower. My first thought was, “I’m dead.”
At that point, as I stared up at the holocaust unfolding just a few short miles away, the first droplets of warm water fell on my face, driven on a hot wind. The sky-scraping column of water began to collapse back on itself, leaving behind a plume of dazzling white smoke. It was hard to tell smoke and steam from sea. The boiling foam wall engulfed the ships that were close to the blast zone, swallowing them like they were jelly babies, and continued its march towards us.
But the seconds, and then the minutes, ticked on, and nothing happened, except that the menacing wall of water appeared to shrink and dissipate. About five minutes after the detonation, the first of a series of lumps started to appear on an otherwise now calm sea. I counted six or seven in the set, and I watched as my buddies further out to sea rose and fell as these nuclear swells swept silently under them. The water they were in was just too deep for these waves to break in. I let the first two go, and I could see that they were breaking about twenty yards closer to the beach than I was sitting, on a shelf of reef jutting out from the shoreline.
I lay down and paddled furiously towards the tiny islet as the third and probably largest of the waves slipped by underneath me. As it passed, it gave me a little surge forward and put me in the perfect spot to take off on the next one. It picked me up and I stood, racing towards the shallow coral edge of the island. I’d say it was a six footer, but the shape of the bottom wasn’t ideal for a surfing wave, and almost immediately I got down the face, it closed out. I rode the foam into the shallows and stepped off on almost dry land. My fellow Tsunami Squad members were paddling in, having no hope of catching the ebbing waves. The squad was forlorn because the mission was a dud – and we’d had such high hopes. I guess if we’d been less excited and more analytical, we would have known from the topography of the sea bottom that a breaking wave of any shape would be virtually impossible.
We later found out that the droplets that fell on us – on our bare skin – were radioactive. We were exposed to quite a lot of radiation that day, in fact – although I’m told that subsurface nuclear explosions aren’t as radioactive as airborne detonations, because the water “absorbs” the radiation.
All I know is that Apua died of cancer at a relatively young age. As did Forde. Alderton, Park and I later developed skin cancers that our doctors put down to sun exposure, which I guess is plausible. Alderton’s wife gave birth to a child with horrible deformities, which he was told was just bad luck. I also developed thyroid cancer and then prostate cancer. All the other members of the Tsunami Squad are dead now, and I am a sick old man.
I think the US government knew that there would be no surfable waves that day, let alone a tsunami. My hunch is that we were sent out there so the Navy could study the effects of nuclear rain on bare skin. So now they know.
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