Still on Duty

When I met him, he was bent over a table in a Chinese restaurant, filling out a survey about his people with absolute concentration. A black knit beanie was pulled low over his brow; graying sideburns and a sharp jawline disappeared into a thick beard. A cup of tea sat beside him. Seated sideways on a reddish-brown wooden chair, he kept his eyes fixed on the paper under the warm light.

When he handed me the completed form, my eyes moved to the age column: “68.” I looked at him again, not quite believing it. Even with a face half-buried in gray-white whiskers, he looked younger. He sat straight in a black-and-white checkered flannel shirt, solidly built and alert. Twenty-two years in the United States military had left him not only physically fit but with an upright, no-nonsense bearing that seemed drilled into his bones.

This was Victor, president of a Marshallese community association in Seattle. By his estimate, the organization served roughly two thousand Marshallese. Two thousand people barely register in a metropolitan area the size of Seattle, but for a Pacific nation thousands of miles away, they constituted a large village scattered across foreign ground.

He speaks fast, clipped and decisive, with a soldier’s precision—a natural authority, and not the easiest man to warm to. But the work in the years since discharge he described—founding the association, fighting for medical resources and housing, interfacing with government agencies—revealed a life structured by “duty,” even though he never used the word himself.

Victor was born on Ebeye, a small island within Kwajalein Atoll.

Kwajalein is the largest atoll in the Marshall Islands and among the largest coral atolls in the world; today it hosts the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. Under the renewed Compact of Free Association (COFA), the United States military controls access to eleven defense sites within the atoll through 2066, with annual rent payments to the Marshallese government of roughly fifteen to twenty million dollars. Though Marshallese workers sustain the base, access remains controlled by the U.S. military, and most Marshallese citizens cannot enter without authorization.¹

The contrast between Kwajalein Island and Ebeye is among the clearest physical expressions of American military power in the Marshall Islands. The base developed into an American-style suburban enclave for military personnel, contractors, and their families. Ebeye, across a narrow stretch of lagoon, absorbed Marshallese laborers and families displaced from elsewhere in the atoll. In 1965, the U.S. military relocated residents of several mid-atoll islands to Ebeye to clear space for missile testing. Many Marshallese employed at the base were also required to live off-site and commute by boat. Crowding, land scarcity, and pressure on water, electricity, housing, and sanitation were therefore not simply the results of population growth; they were produced in part by the military division of the atoll. Outside journalists have called Ebeye the “Pacific Slum.” Victor grew up inside that fractured picture, in the one corner of his country where the American presence was a daily commute.²

When Victor came of age, he took the path many young islanders saw as their one shot at changing their fate: he joined the U.S. military. In his early twenties, he put on a U.S. uniform and served for twenty-two years. Because he worked in administration, he spent most of that time stationed in the United States. “I went everywhere,” he said, moved from one assignment to another as the military required.

After twenty-two years, he retired. His wife and six children had settled in Seattle. One daughter became a teacher, another worked for the government, and another entered business. “Every child has their own interest.” All six had found a direction, he said, and his pride surfaced as he listed their paths. Most of his siblings and cousins remained dispersed elsewhere. One brother lived as far away as Dubai; one sister lived in Majuro. Victor planned to visit the Marshall Islands but not to return permanently.

The American passport he carried was the “prize” he associated with his service. “Yeah. That’s true. I do have this passport. After two years in the military.”

Behind that sentence lies the machinery of the COFA, which took effect in 1986. It permits Marshallese citizens to live and work indefinitely in the United States as lawful nonimmigrants and allows eligible citizens to enlist in the U.S. armed forces. For young people without permanent-resident status, military service can open access to wages, education, travel, veterans’ benefits, and an expedited route toward citizenship. It functions not only as employment but as a form of migration infrastructure: an institution capable of moving a person from an atoll into an American career and, sometimes, legal permanence.³

Before interviewing Victor, I had already heard two other respondents describe military service as a path outward. David considered it a way for Marshallese youth to change their prospects; Richard still regretted, at thirty-seven, not enlisting when he was young. I put this view to Victor, and he replied without hesitation: “Yeah, one of the best ways.”

“If you join when you graduate from high school, you can get your degree while you’re serving.” Enlistees earn a salary and may use military tuition assistance while on active duty; after qualifying service, the GI Bill can help cover education and housing costs. A career of twenty years can also lead to military retirement benefits. Victor likewise explained, “you get free housing, free education, free…” His phrasing overstated the universality of those benefits—housing, medical care, and education depend on status, eligibility, and the particular program—but it conveyed how expansive the offer could appear from an island with limited jobs and expensive schooling.⁴

Enlistment could therefore become a reliable way to “get off the atoll.” The Pacific has even been called “a recruiter’s paradise.” In 2010, the per-capita enlistment rate among COFA youth was roughly double that of Americans. The appeal lay in what the uniform made possible: an income large enough to support relatives, assistance with college, travel, and an escape from limited employment at home. Accounts of recruitment have compared an entry-level soldier’s pay to “about the same as a state governor’s salary on the island.”⁵

To call enlistment a choice is accurate but incomplete. Choices are shaped by the alternatives surrounding them. On Ebeye, where the American military occupied nearby land and anchored much of the wage economy, the institution presenting itself as a route outward was also part of the structure that had narrowed life at home.

The path also carried risks. Military assignments are shaped by test scores, education, English proficiency, institutional need, and the jobs available when a person enlists. Recruits with fewer educational advantages can enter specialties with limited transferability or greater physical danger. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deaths among service members from the freely associated states—especially Samoa and the Marshall Islands—imposed a striking burden when measured against their countries’ small populations. The Federated States of Micronesia, for example, experienced a per-capita fatality rate several times the U.S. average, higher than any U.S. state except American Samoa.⁶

Marshallese who serve in the U.S. military are publicly honored for their sacrifice, but less attention is given to the conditions that make enlistment one of the most viable paths available to island youth. Victor was among the lucky ones—twenty-two years, discharged whole, a passport, a pension, six children settled. The wound waiting for him was the kind that does not meet you in combat but at your own front door.

Only in the country Victor served did he begin to understand what that country’s testing had done to his own.

Schools had not taught him that history. “The government didn’t teach us about what was going on. When we grew up in the Marshall Islands, they never taught us about nuclear—what’s going on back in the old days, you know.” No one had told him what had once happened in these waters, no one had told him that the sky above his head had once been lit by mushroom clouds.

He began assembling that history only after joining the military and moving to the United States. “And then the nuclear really impacts our life here in the United States. The reason why people like to come here is because of medical.” What he learned about nuclear testing became inseparable from what he witnessed among Marshallese migrants: illness, travel for treatment, and families reorganizing themselves around access to care.

I asked him, “It’s been more than sixty years now, hasn’t the contamination diluted some?”

“I don’t think so.” He answered fast and flat.

Victor described working or training in a military unit that studied toxic hazards from nuclear explosions. “We studied how the poison spread when it exploded... it will get bigger. The longer time it’s getting, the bigger and bigger it gets.”

That understanding shaped his skepticism toward official boundaries. He remembered hearing that “only five islands” and later “eleven islands” had been recognized as affected. “Well, that used to be five, now it’s eleven.” He objected to treating those lines as the outer limits of harm. “If you put all the Marshall Islands in the research, it will give you guys [knowledge of] all affected by the bomb.” Then he offered the evidence available to him through community work: “The sick people get conditions from all over the Marshall Islands, not only like five or eleven islands. Okay? They’re from all over RMI.”

Dose reconstructions have found measurable fallout from twenty tests across every inhabited atoll, although exposure varied enormously, with the northern atolls receiving far higher doses than the central and southern islands. This does not mean that all places were equally contaminated or that every Marshallese illness is radiation-related. It does mean that the four-atoll compensation framework never captured the full geographic reach of fallout. Official boundaries determine which communities are recognized as affected and which qualify for particular forms of care or compensation. Beyond those boundaries, nuclear testing remains a national inheritance, carried through displacement, mistrust, dietary change, migration, and dependence on foreign medical systems.⁷

Victor did not attribute every health problem to radiation. Diet mattered too, he said, but dietary choice had itself been constrained because there was “nothing else in Marshall Islands”—expressing the narrowed choices of urban and displaced communities increasingly dependent on imported rice, canned meat, instant noodles, and sweetened drinks. His own family tried to be careful. “You don’t have to eat a lot of rice and junk food.” Water carried a related mistrust. Victor remembered people drinking from wells; now, he said, many preferred bottled water “because nobody believes that well is clean anymore.” Radiation was one source of that suspicion, but not the only threat to an atoll’s thin freshwater lens. Drought, saltwater intrusion, crowding, inadequate sanitation, and other forms of contamination also place groundwater at risk. Once people no longer trust the land beneath them or the water held within it, the injury is both material and psychological.⁸

He delivered all of this fast, cool, nearly expressionless, as though delivering a report. And his work in Seattle made clear that, for him, recognizing nuclear harm meant securing care for those still living with it.

Medical care has shaped Marshallese migration, but the route from the islands to an American clinic has never been simple. COFA permits residence and employment in the United States; it does not guarantee free treatment. In 1996, federal welfare reform excluded many COFA migrants from Medicaid, leaving access dependent on state policy, income, insurance, and local assistance. Washington eventually created a state-funded program that covered premiums and out-of-pocket costs for eligible COFA residents. Congress restored federal Medicaid eligibility in 2020, and Washington transferred eligible residents into Apple Health the following year.⁹

By the time I interviewed Victor, Washington was no longer the only state where an eligible Marshallese resident could receive Medicaid. It remained attractive because years of state action had produced an established system of coverage, navigators, community organizations, and relatives who knew the system. Medical migration follows such networks.¹⁰

“A lot of people like coming from other states to Washington state to get medical help,” Victor said. That need helped drive him to establish a Marshallese association in Seattle. By his estimate, the local population numbered roughly two thousand, “only all Marshallese.” The organization became a landing point for people moving not only across the Pacific but between American states in search of care.

He described the association’s work: “We do have a lot of clubs, working with other communities, just as an outreach like medicals. You know we work with the government. So this is kind of like the resources that we bring from the government and give it to the communities. This is like medical and housing for residents and all those kinds of stuff.”

The language of “outreach” makes this labor sound simpler than it is. A newcomer may be legally eligible for assistance and still face English-language forms, unfamiliar institutions, transportation problems, specialist referrals, long waits, and a housing shortage. The association’s “interfacing” work turns eligibility on paper into actual access to medical care, housing, and other assistance. “Yeah, very important,” he said. “We get a lot of sick people.” Victor understood radiation’s effects as wide-ranging, and he offered an example: “Mostly people get diarrhea from the part that you know is nuclear-[related].” Behind that attribution lay a deeper distrust of official assurances: uncertainty itself had become part of the nuclear legacy.

When I asked about U.S. compensation, Victor recalled that residents of affected islands received payments. “They get a hundred dollars?” He shook his head. “It’s... not enough.”

What he said next surprised me: “But that... we don’t need that kind of money; we just need to bring people here so they can see a doctor for free.”

“What we really need is free treatment,” he continued.

Victor’s association was one node in a network of Marshallese organizations across the United States. Northwest Arkansas contained the largest share of the Marshallese population—roughly fifteen thousand—recorded by the 2020 Census, and Springdale had become so closely associated with the community that residents sometimes called it the “Springdale Atoll.” The Seattle-Auburn-Puget Sound area in Washington State, Salem in Oregon, Hawaii, Oklahoma, and California all hold Marshallese communities of varying sizes, scattered pearls on the American map, and around each one, organizations.¹¹

“Different Marshallese associations have different focuses, like MEI, CANN…” Victor said. The Marshallese Educational Initiative, based in Springdale, was Arkansas’s first Marshallese-centered nonprofit, working on nuclear history education and advocacy—it has carried Marshallese language, nuclear memory, and youth art as far as the United Nations and the screens of Times Square. The COFA Alliance National Network, headquartered in Oregon, works across states to expand access to health care, food assistances, driver’s licenses, public benefits, and other rights. Local organizations like Victor’s perform more immediate mutual-aid work: helping families find housing, understand medical systems, and reach government programs.¹²

Marshallese organizations often name cooperation as jerbal ippān doon—working together—and service as jipan ro jet, helping others. Together, these organizations formed an archipelago of care. Their work connected communities without pretending that distance had disappeared. It also converted individual problems into collective claims.¹³

The largest of those claims concerned nuclear justice. The 1986 COFA established a $150 million trust fund as part of what the United States called a “full and final settlement.” The Nuclear Claims Tribunal later awarded more than two billion dollars for personal injuries, property loss, and damage to Bikini and Enewetak, but the fund could pay only a fraction of those judgments. Congress did not appropriate the remainder.¹⁴

Victor remembered the disparity: “Like a 150 million fund? Not enough. I remember it’s over 2 billion dollars or something.”

A second claim concerned the rights of COFA migrants inside the United States. After the 1996 welfare law stripped Medicaid eligibility, community organizations spent twenty-four years pressing for its restoration. Congress restored Medicaid in 2020 and reinstated access to most other major federal benefit programs in 2024. Yet federal eligibility did not guarantee access: local organizations still had to translate information, complete and renew applications, and challenge agencies that misunderstood COFA status.¹⁵

Longer-term concerns gathered around identity and “homeland. Organizations such as MEI carry Marshallese language, youth art, nuclear memory, and political advocacy into American schools, museums, civic forums, and international spaces. Their work creates places in which younger Marshallese can decide what that inheritance will mean in Arkansas, Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere.¹⁶

Victor returned repeatedly to the same priority: “We don’t need all this kind of money; we just need to bring people here so they can see a doctor for free.” That insistence on care gave the network of Marshallese organizations a shared purpose. Through it, dispersed communities turned stripped benefits, endangered language, and threats to their homeland into shared memory and collective struggle. In fighting for one another, Marshallese abroad did more than preserve an identity; they practiced it. As Victor put it, in America, “we are all one community.”

If medical care was the immediate problem before Victor, cultural transmission was the longer one. “I feel our generation is gonna be gone,” he said, and for the first time his voice carried an older man’s urgency, “and we need to teach our kids so they can know our culture, our customs.”

He pressed the point: “Our custom is really different from others’ around the world, you know? Dance, the traditional festival of kemem—all of it is special. So, once it breaks, it can never be picked up again.”

He believed the change was happening “very quickly.” “Yeah, it’s very quickly changed because we don’t… we don’t teach our kids all that.” In his view, responsibility began at home. “Whether the culture survives, it depends on the mom and dad. It all comes down to whether parents are willing to help their kids, to push their kids.” He had watched children in the United States lose fluency in Marshallese while some parents stopped getting “involved in going to parties and all that.”

Victor attributed some of that disengagement to the relative security of life in the United States. Once people reached America, he said, they could settle into “free money, free medical, then forget everything,” losing sight of what they were responsible for preserving. In his view, the same assistance that helped families establish themselves could also make cultural transmission feel less urgent.

That was why Victor continued to “push” parents. “My job in the community is to push the parents help your kids, be a teacher for your kid.” The association’s mission therefore also extended to cultural transmission and preservation; it created occasions on which children could experience culture as a shared practice rather than a lesson delivered after it had already begun to fade.

“First birthday party. This is one of the traditions that we do in the U.S. First year birthday party. Yeah, it’s the real, biggest party in your whole life.” A kemem celebrates a child’s first birthday, a milestone historically associated with surviving the precarious first year of life, and gathers extended family and community around the child. Continuing the tradition in the United States allows younger Marshallese to experience how kinship is practiced.¹⁷

The association also organized events for Constitution Day, which commemorates the Constitution that took effect on May 1, 1979, and Fisherman’s Day, held on the first Friday in July to honor the country’s fishing traditions through competitions and community celebrations. Together, these gatherings became living classrooms in which younger Marshallese could learn the history and practices that told each of them “who I am.”¹⁸

For Victor, formal education was equally important. A sustainable life in the United States required children to “go to school and complete education.” “First you got to be educated. That’s the first key to the world.” His own children’s careers were evidence of what he believed schooling could make possible.

When the conversation turned to education in the Marshall Islands, his concern shifted from parents to government. “Our government is not pushing more kids to school and sending more college students and interns.” Outer-island schools were especially difficult to staff because, he said, “nobody wants to work on a small island” and “nobody wants to get paid for a dollar an hour.”

He connected educational weakness to the broader cost of island life. “Because they don’t get minimum wage… what, there is, like, three dollars? And then foods are expensive there, you know, everything needs transport there.” For years, the Marshall Islands’ minimum wage remained at three dollars an hour. Even after it rose to $4.50 in 2025, wages remained far below those in Washington, while the cost of ocean transport raised the price of nearly every imported necessity.¹⁹

He sighed. “We should feel sorry for our people in the Marshall Islands.”

I asked Victor, “Will more Marshallese leave the islands to work elsewhere in the future?”

“Yeah. The trend ... this trend cannot change, cannot stop.”

He said it calmly, less as a prediction than as a condition to work within. If he could not stop the movement outward, he could help build the communities that received Marshallese at the other end.

When I first saw him, his head was bent over my survey in the warm afternoon light, tea steaming beside his checkered flannel sleeve. It was an ordinary afternoon, but he worked through the questionnaire as though it were an assignment awaiting inspection, answering each question thoroughly and to standard. At sixty-eight, he brought that same discipline to the responsibilities he had assumed for his community. The work bore little resemblance to military service, but the reflex behind it remained the same: “see a problem, fix it.”