Is Guam in America

Guam's troubles with the US do not end with the DPRK menace.

Since 1898 Guam has been a strategical place for the USA. In the Vietnam War, its military base had a similar function for US planes in operations over Vietnam and was the first refugee and soldier base after the Saigon accident.

Today it is often referred to as America's "spearhead" and "unsinkable air carrier" with its army base near the focal points of Northern Asia such as Korea and the South China Sea. In contrast to the remainder of the near Micronesia countries in the Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the USA, Guam is regarded as 100 percent US terr.

This" MINIHAWAII ", as its governor has named it, is more than just a US army basis - it is home to 160,000 inhabitants, many of whom are identified as part of the Chamorro tribal nation that survive hundreds of years of colonization and warfare. However, there is also noteworthy diplomacy here - Guam has both the highest recruiting rates and the highest accident rates, per head, of all U.S. nationalities.

I worked with Guam Battalion in Afghanistan in 2013 and found that the accident frequency was 450 percent above the American averages. In their homeland, they have long been living in the shadows of conflicts and know that Guam is an important destination. That has risen since the announcement by the US to carry out a massive armament operation there.

Whilst much focus was placed on the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, since the early 2000s the US army has silently developed what the former US naval officer, BJ Penn, described as "the biggest defence ministry ever tried" - a $15 billion armament of the Andersen Air Force and Naval bases in Guam and the proposed transfer of several thousand US navies to South Korea and Japan.

A major reason for the reallocation was the feeling that the US army in South Korea and Japan was becoming more susceptible to rocket attacks, and so it was better to move away by moving to Guam. It then became clear that even Guam could be too closely involved - hence a newer approach founded on the concept of "distributed lethality".

Part of the US "rebalance" in the Pacific, the increasing concerns about progressive rocket technologies in China and North Korea is one of the reasons why US Navy troops, originally intended for Guam airfields, were sent to Darwin instead: greater safety and reaction averages. I interviewed naval commander Dan Schaan at the naval station in the port of Guam last year.

During a previous meeting I talked to members of the Chamorro Nation who are against the strong US presences, worried that their country has been accepted into the base and is furious that, although they are US nationals, they cannot elect in any US poll. "Why is it that a US military stationed here can elect here after three month and we, the tribal peoples of Guam and US nationals, can never take part in the US poll?

" So I asked him if he believed Guam was a prime destination. "but how are you gonna stop 100 rockets from falling on us? "The United Nations ranks Guam among the 17 areas in the world on its decolonization agenda.

Mr Calvo has advocated a self-determined referenda that will offer Guam electorates three possibilities in the future: autonomy, admission to the US state or "free association" with Washington. It is not only Guam that is in the shadows of the threat from North Korea and the increasing conflict between the USA and China.

"``Yap is only 500km from Guam, that's frightening.... they could miss Guam and meet Yap instead of LOL,` said Leo Pugram in a Facebook mail from Micronesia's Yap Isle. asked another annotator in the Mariana Islands, just off Guam: