Kwajalein, An Island Like No Other

In the 1960s, Kwajalein, a remote 900-acre Pacific island leased from the Republic of the Marshallese for reentry missile tests, was characterized by sharks, water rationing gone wrong, Dear John letters gone even more wrong, incomes on steroids, ship diving, Chinese satellites, gazillion-dollar radars, lovelorn bachelors, Russian multi-radar “fishing” trawlers, and local interceptor missile launches.

Kwaj was home to an elite core of 2,000 expat scientists and engineers (including families); a small military contingent handling island logistics; 3,000 highly paid, seriously female-deprived, lonely bachelors; and several hundred Marshalleses who commuted each day by ferry from their nearby home island.

These 5,000 inhabitants with too much money, too little opportunity to spend it, too few available women, no cars, no TV, no overseas phone service, and too much isolation proved that they were also far too human.

Who better to tell the collective stories of their lives, their quirks, their heartbreaks, and their adventures than author and MIT engineer Lynn A. Jacobson. In his book, Kwajalein, an Island Like No Other, Jacobson details his time on Kwaj, which included two tours with family (including the birth of a daughter) and one as a bachelor, where he was more privy than most to the happenings on the island.