Hawaii's fabric of life: Vulnerability mixed with a little fatalism

HONOLULU - Hawaii has long lived with the threat of being wiped out, whether by tsunami, volcano or invader.

Now, the Obama administration says North Korea could launch a ballistic missile in the state's direction -- possibly around the Fourth of July, according to Japanese news media -- prompting the U.S. military to beef up defenses there.

Anti-missile interceptors are in place, the Defense Department said, and Hawaiians watched the other day as a giant, towering radar commonly known as the golf ball set out to sea from the base where it is normally moored.

But if lifelong residents like Gerald Aikau are on any state of alert, it would be the one telling him that his octopus, caught with a spear, is overcooked. "What are you going to do?" Aikau, 34, a commercial painter, said as he grilled his catch at a park. "You are going to go sometime, whether it's on a wave, or a missile, or your buddy knocking you down and you hit your head."

Vulnerability, and a certain fatalism about it, are part of the fabric of life in this archipelago, 2,500 miles from the mainland and, as many residents seem to have memorized since the Obama administration raised the alarm last week, 4,500 miles from North Korea.

People took comfort in the heavy, year-round military presence provided by several bases there but also wondered if it made the state more of a target.

Calls to Gov. Linda Lingle, a Republican, were referred to Maj. Gen. Robert G.F. Lee, the state's defense department director, who suggested the threat was more saber-rattling from North Korea.

He questioned whether its missiles had the technological capacity to go very far, but just the same, he said, the state was ready for hostile action. "Our military assets should be able to protect us," said Lee, whose duties include civil defense.

'Out here by ourselves'

He said that the state's disaster sirens were working and that residents, as always, were advised to keep a three-day supply of food, water, medicine and other essentials in stock.

"Out here by ourselves, we have to be a little more prepared, just in case help does not get here quickly from the mainland," Lee said.

Of course, the specter of Pearl Harbor still figures prominently there, as well as the cat-and-mouse of Cold War maneuverings off the coast, including the mysterious loss of a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine 750 miles northwest of Oahu in 1968.

"We are first strike from Asia," said state Rep. Joseph Souki, 76, a Democrat, who remembers the wave of anxiety that swept his neighborhood on Maui as Pearl Harbor was bombed. "It's not like we are in Iowa."

Still, he said, "more than likely nothing is going to happen."

"Hawaii is like a pawn in a chess game," he added.

Tourism way down

The state can ill afford anything approximating a calamity. The recession has been blamed for a nearly 11 percent drop in the number of visitors there last year compared with the year before. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in May reached 7.4 percent, up from 6.9 percent in April and the highest in three decades.

The tourists that did come carried on as usual, taking surfing lessons, strolling Waikiki Beach and reflecting at the USS Arizona Memorial, whose park includes a display of old Polaris submarine-launched missiles.

"Send one of these babies up," suggested Clifton Wannaker, 45, an accountant from South Dakota, when told of the North Korean threat.

Standing at the shoreline in view of the Arizona Memorial, Steve Brecheen, 54, a pharmacist from Oklahoma City, seemed a bit more unnerved.

"North Korea seems the most unstable government as far as a threat to the U.S. is concerned," Brecheen said.

He motioned to the memorial, which sits over the remains of the battleship sunk by the Japanese in the Pearl Harbor attack. "In 1941, some of these people didn't think the Japanese were an extreme threat, and they got their minds changed pretty quickly," he said.

But among Hawaiians, skepticism is mixed with annoyance and even anger that their state could be a testing ground.

"I think they would be stupid to do that test," said Misioki Tauiliili, 39, a delivery truck driver, taking in the placid scene at a city beach near Waikiki. "The U.S. should go out there and shake them."

By that he meant the United States perhaps firing its own rockets in North Korea's direction, "to test them."