Hawaii: Always a Target for Someone.
People tend to think of Hawaii as being way out in the middle of nowhere . . . so far off the beaten path that, except for tourists, we’re almost overlooked entirely.
It is true, of course, that Hawaii is the most remote populated spot on the globe. We are, in fact, a minimum of 2500 miles or five hours by jet from anywhere.
All those miles of separation notwithstanding, some unpleasant people, both now and in the past, have had us in their gunsights.
There are still plenty of locals who were here on December 7, 1941—the “date that will live in infamy”. And I can assure you that a lot of us were aware of our vulnerability in the final tense hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember someone handing me a small American flag in downtown Honolulu on one of those days in October of 1962.
For years, there was a Russian submarine constantly cruising several hundred miles off our beaches loaded with missiles programmed to obliterate military installations on Oahu. It’s still out there, for all I know.
I do believe that in those days the people in charge had no loose screws . . . that no single individual could stupidly start something that couldn’t be stopped.
But, alas—comes now an erratic, volatile tin pot leader with long-range missiles at his disposal and whose boundless ego could take offense at some trivial incident and cause him to impulsively start something . . . something that could have unimaginable consequences for these islands.
And of course there’s also Kim Jong-un in North Korea. He’s kind of scary, too.