Guam finds itself in the crosshairs of N. Korea

Tribune News Service

After President Donald Trump threatened nuclear-armed North Korea with “fire and fury” — and after Kim Jong Un’s hermit kingdom replied with a bombastic warning aimed at a speck of U.S. territory in the vast western Pacific — many Americans got busy Googling“Guam.”

To the outside world, the tropical island is perhaps best known as a bloody battleground in WorldWar II.

In subsequent decades, Guam, the largest island in the Mariana chain, became an outsized bastion of U.S. military might in a remote but strategic region — a role that probably placed it in the gun sights of an erratic and oftenparanoid leadership in Pyongyang.

And at a distance of about 2,100 miles, Guam lies closer to North Korea than any other U.S. territory.

For the island’s 160,000plus inhabitants — who awoke Wednesday to news of the North Korean military’s announcement that it was weighing operational plans for a ballistic-missilestrike on Guam — it was a jolting switch from concerns like the local scuba-diving conditions, a bird population beset by invasive tree snakes and warnings of chewingbetel nuts.

Native-born Guamanians are U.S. citizens by birth, and the island’s governor, Eddie Baza Calvo, took to YouTube on Wednesday to say that he had been assured by the White Housethat Guam — home to some 7,000 troops stationed across the island — would be defended as if it were the U.S. mainland should North Korea try to strike.

It wasn’t the first time the island has been on the receiving end of Pyongyang’s threats. There was similarly ominous talk from North Korea in 2013, making specific note that Guam’s sprawling Andersen Air Force Base, among other Pacific territories, lay within target range.

“When you’re from Guam and live on Guam, it’s disconcerting, but not unusual,” said Robert Underwood, the president of the University of Guam and the island’s former delegate to the House of Representatives.

Still, many residents wereworried.

“It’s kind of scary, because we don’t know what [Mr. Kim] is capable of,” Rudy Matanane, the mayor of the town of Yigo, which lies close to Andersen, told the Pacific Daily News. “I hope our mother country does what’s right for us.”