I spent a good part of the summer of 1982 in the beautiful sunny city of San Diego, at government expense, for my second summer of Naval ROTC training. That summer's training was to be mostly an introduction (or "orientation," in militaryspeak) to different branches of the Navy and Marine Corps for us young midshipmen to consider making our careers in.
One day we got a briefing on Surface Officer Warfare School (SWOS), which is just where folks go to learn to drive ships. In other words, it is the default location where someone lands if he (or she) doesn't choose to become something else, such as a pilot, a submariner, or perhaps something really exotic like a diver or a SEAL (the latter being my personal aspiration). As such, SWOS is not really something set up to screen people out, because if someone failed, where in the Navy would he go? To emphasize this point, the instructor joked,
"This is it, if you fail here, you become vending machine officer on Diego Garcia."
I had never heard that name before, and I thought I knew the names of most if not all of the many naval bases spread around the world. Apparently others hadn't heard of it, either, because before I could ask, someone else did it for me.
"Diego Garcia? Where's that?"
"It's an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, far away from anything. US Navy owns the whole thing," replied the instructor.
Okay, that answered that question, but now something began to trouble me. Had there just been some uninhabited island in the Pacific, waiting for the US Navy to claim it? There are billions of people on the planet, and something about this seemed odd, that nobody lived on this island. It must be big enough to host a naval facility, at least. Why would it be completely uninhabited? Just as I was getting ready to ask my question, somebody beat me to the punch again.
"Who lived there?"
"Nobody," replied the instructor. "It was uninhabited."
Oh, well, I figured, maybe the place has no fresh water. The instructor moved on with his presentation, and I forgot about Diego Garcia for about twenty years (I never went on active duty, due to kidney stones that were discovered about two weeks before I was to be commissioned in 1984). But when, in the aftermath of 9/11, there were press reports about detainees being taken to the US Naval base on Diego Garcia, I certainly knew what and where they were talking about.
But the instructor had it completely wrong. The island was not empty before the Navy built a base there. In his defense, he was just repeating a lie that had been told to him, and had never had the inclination to question it (just as I didn't at the time I heard it). Finding the truth about a place like Diego Garcia in 1982 would have required an afternoon trip to the library and some serious research. But thanks to the revolution we call the Internet, the truth is only a mouse-click away. If you haven't already, I urge you to take a few minutes and read the truth about Diego Garcia. It's right here.
December 30, 2006
