A year after the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the battle of Guadalcanal—a days-long celebration in which American veterans returned to the beaches and told stories of a desperate battle—the State Department closed the embassy on the Solomons, hoping to save, as Farrand recounted, $387,000 a year. Over the following decades, the United States constantly made promises—to reopen the embassy, to send in the Peace Corps, and to invest in a deepwater port. But there was no follow-through. Aid dribbled in—for disaster relief, to remove mines, to gain United States access to fisheries—but the
...more
