Dan's Papers - April 3, 2009

It has always seemed incredible to me that our army and air force, for many years, would bomb the hell out of beautiful islands along our coasts for target practice. They don't do it anymore. But until about 1975, they did. It was at that time that Americans woke up to the fact that we were poisoning our environment and one way we were doing it was with gunpowder, smoke, explosives and rockets. So we stopped.

In my travels, I have encountered numerous such islands. One was the Island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico. (I was actually on the island while they were bombarding it. One half, the Navy owned. The other half, the Navy did not own, and so the locals there put up with thunder, smoke, jets flying overhead and flashes of explosions on the Navy half. And so did I. Just part of the day, is what it seemed to us all at the time.)

Another victim, off the coast of Maui, was the Island of Kahoolawe, which the Navy bought in its entirety. It was just a mile off Wailea. They had stopped bombing by the time I was there, but because it was going to take years to find all the landmines, live shells and other poisonous material there, it was off limits. But you could look at it. Or secretly skin dive or snorkel off it. There was a great coral reef filled with colorful fishes just offshore.

Here on the East End, there was an island just off our shores that was bombed so much over a 50-year period that it is no longer an island, but just a pile of rubble.

Because there was a sandbar that you could walk across to get to it at low tide, the discoverers of it considered it part of the larger island it was attached to, which they called the Isle of Wight.

You do not know an island by that name today. It was discovered in the 1500s, but it was not until 1639 that Lion Gardiner sailed across the Long Island Sound from Connecticut with his family to settle there and subsequently rename it Gardiner's Island, which you do know. Gardiner was the first English settler in the State of New York. Gardiner's Island Point, as it came to be known, stuck out from the sand bar extending along the north side of Gardiner's Island, ending in a small earthen blip of land about four acres in size.

In 1851, President John Tyler (who married his second wife, East Hampton born and raised Julia Tyler, in the White House) ordered that the government buy Gardiner's Island Point from the Gardiner family so the Army could build a stone lighthouse on the tip. The sale went through, the lighthouse was built, but then, just 30 years later, a hurricane washed away the sandbar and in 1894 another hurricane damaged the lighthouse beyond repair and it was abandoned. It actually collapsed into the sea three years after that. What a mess.

One year later, in 1898, Spain and the United States were on the brink of war. President William McKinley sent a delegation of diplomats to Cuba - Cuba was a Spanish colony then - to try to work out a peace deal. But at the same time, he ordered a gun battery built on the rocks of the ruined lighthouse at Gardiner's Island Point, facing out to sea, in order to prevent the Spanish Navy, which was formidable, from coming into Long Island Sound to invade America. McKinley renamed Gardiner's Island Point at that time. He called it Fort Tyler, honoring the president who had built the lighthouse there.

Today, however, nobody calls it Fort Tyler. They call it "the Ruins." The fact is that the Spanish-American War of 1898 resolved the differences between America and Spain (America won) without Spain invading Long Island. The guns of Fort Tyler never had to be fired in anger.

During World War II, the eastern end of Long Island was bristling with defenses in what was feared might be some sort of Nazi invasion.

There was a machine gun nest in a concrete pillbox on the south side of the Montauk Lighthouse. There were anti-aircraft guns along the shore there. There were Naval batteries aimed out to sea and there were Coast Guard lookout towers along the beach all the way to New York City. In Westhampton, an Army Air Force base was built, and it was aswarm with bombers and fighter planes for the duration of the war.

As for Fort Tyler, it was decided that its antique guns would be useless, and its small size would make it impossible to defend. Why not have the planes from Westhampton bomb the crap out of it?

And so, for four years during World War II and then another six years through the Korean War, fighter and bomber pilots used Fort Tyler as a place for navigation and bombardier training, for aircraft testing and for just plain air force dive bombing fun. The Fort itself was soon reduced to rubble. And then the rubble was reduced to still further rubble. As for the bombs and bullets that missed the fort entirely, all there was around Fort Tyler were shellfish, a sandbar and fishes. Too bad for them.

Bombing Fort Tyler ceased in the early 1950s, which was just about the time that the Army bought Plum Island, only a few miles away just off Orient Point, where they had decided to build an animal disease research center. Live, sick animals would be brought there. Attempts would be made to find cures for the diseases they had. A goal would be to create serums and vaccines that could prevent future animal diseases. What they didn't want, one suspects, was a lot of barking and mooing and growling going on as the noise of bombarding Fort Tyler wafted over Plum Island and spooked the hell out of the animals. The bombardment stopped. The Plum Island Animal Research Center opened and is still open today.

Well, wonderful sophisticates that we are today when it comes to not polluting, we no longer bombard the beautiful islands that dot the coasts of America. Testing goes on, however, and bombing runs do continue, but not on our islands and not in the mountains, which are also beautiful, and home to much protected flora and fauna, but either far out at sea, where nobody can see what is going on, or in the American deserts, where the populace also cannot see and where, presumably, the only damage is done to a bunch of ugly rattlers and lizards. As for the sea - well - underwater, the fishes could get out of the way, could they not?

Here on Long Island, nobody calls the rubble Fort Tyler anymore, although that remains its official name. It is called Off Limits by the government, which never has gone to the trouble to clean the sea bottom for stray bombs and shells, or even properly clean up the gunpowder and unexploded ordinance on the rocks there. As for yachtsmen, fishermen and sailors, as I mentioned before, they call it "the Ruins."

You can picnic there if you like. But it's probably not a good idea. Certainly, I wouldn't.