The Most Pre-Protested Would-Be War in History?

The Golden Gate Bridge has forts on each end. One, the Presidio, is a Civil War–era Army base. The other is Fort Cronkhite, a Cold War rocket launcher. Both forts are decommissioned but remain standing. They are not visible in photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. The rest of the Pentagon influence in the region goes unnoticed similarly—though the physical evidence hides in plain sight. Treasure Island sits right in the center of the bay. It’s a perfect square. The Works Progress Administration built the island in the thirties, but the U.S. Navy took it in the Forties and held it for the rest of the century. Alameda Island is the same; viewed from the parking lot at the Lawrence Hall of Science, high in the hills beside the Lawrence labs, the island comes to a ridiculous, perfect right angle where it meets the water. It’s a synthetic landscape, planned to suit the needs of runways with a protractor, so fighter-bombers could operate. Nearby, an entire city, Richmond, exists because of the Richmond Shipyards. It built navy vessels in World War II. A statue of Rosie the Riveter decorates the sailboat marina there. Twenty miles down the shore from Richmond is the Concord Weapons Station. Concord shipped many of the bombs used in Vietnam; nearby is the spit in the bay where the town of Port Chicago used to exist. Port Chicago, also a weapons depot, disappeared in an explosion in 1944. The explosion vaporized an entire ship and shattered a second, leveled the town, and killed 320 people, of whom two-thirds were black stevedores. The Navy, embarrassed, sentenced fifty of the stevedores, who had urged caution while loading bombs on the ships, to fifteen years hard labor. They received probation in 1946, but not clemency. It took fifty years to clear the name of the last sailor, Freddie Meeks, which President Clinton did by executive pardon in 1999, ending one of the more disastrous and shameful incidents in local military history.

Across the bay is old Hamilton Air Base, which received a large number of the American casualties during the Vietnam war. A bleak joke from the period refers to dead soldiers heading “home through Hamilton.” Further up the road is Travis Air Force base, which receives casualties today. Another ten miles east is a ghost fleet of battleships and destroyers anchored in the delta of the San Joaquin river, twenty or so stacked in rows, waiting to be gassed up and armed if needed. Further south is Moffet Field. It’s another mothballed airbase. There are National Guard buildings in Oakland between an Ikea and the east span of the Bay Bridge. Soldiers are mustering there right now for...