Beachhead on the Moon

Flag details and a bugler stood at attention. Before the South Seymour Island Service Club, the U.S. garrison faced the Ecuadorean sailors. Galapagos goats idled nearby. Then the bugler blew retreat and the U.S. flag came down on Ecuadorean soil. But the U.S. abandonment of its Galapagos outpost was more protocol than reality. Ecuador is broke. Until the Government can face either the political risks of an outright lease to the U.S. or afford to keep the bases in repair, some 100 U.S. "technicians" would stay around to help out.

Dysentery & Loneliness. On hand for last week's flag-lowering was TIME Editor Carl Solberg, who cabled a report of wartime life in the security-hushed Galapagos :

"The islands that had been a naturalists' paradise became in war a sunset home for soldiers & sailors. For the G.I., Seymour (smallest of the 16 islands of consequence, 990 miles southwest of the Panama Canal) was The Rock--the never-never land of igneous boulders and shifting red dust, the U.S. Army's beachhead on the moon.

"The $10 million base took some building. Going ashore, the landing parties got stuck in volcanic beach powder deeper and dustier than Iwo Jima's. At first, the G.I.s ate corn willie three times a day, supplemented with what they could shoot and fish. Wild goats gnawed their communication lines to pieces. Moths followed smokers and smothered out cigarets. By Christmas 1941, the Navy log read: 'All hands tireder than all hell.'

"Dysentery laid many low. Dead were buried in graves blasted out of the volcanic rock. Loneliness also took its toll. Stories abound about the way men called the rocks by name and greeted goats as friends.

"But there was still the fact that a man saved all his money on The Rock. And the friendly weather belied the old adage that the only perfect climate is bed. After life got stabilized, the men got five-day furloughs every three months in the fleshpots of Panama."

Albatross & Wild Goat. "The wild life was sport, too--the six-inch penguins, flightless cormorants, pelicans, flamingos. At night, albatross dueled with their bills. The wild goats did the policing, ate all the waste paper. . . .

"Now the Quonset huts and many of the more substantial installations have been pulled down and carried away to Panama. The broad macadamized fighter strip is now abandoned, and only our three visiting B-17s are visible beside the longer main strip. Soon there may be only the caretakers left. Dull, drab Seymour Island may shortly revert to the goats, and the archipelago itself to the naturalists."

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