Book Review: Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam

Events overtake people. They pull them along, into situations in which they do things that they would not otherwise have done, for which they are later judged. Such was the fate of Chamorro men in the Marianas during the war years of the 1940s. After the Japanese military seized Guam from the Americans in December 1941, it gathered up and took with it men from nearby islands, Saipan and Rota, who had been living under the Japanese South Seas Government for a quarter century. The military needed these men to serve as translators and petty administrators on Guam. Many of them ended up observing or participating in wartime assault, torture, rape, and killing. Afterwards, the victorious American military tried them for war crimes alongside their Japanese counterparts. Together these are the Sacred Men to which the title of Keith Camacho’s book refers, and the naval tribunal that rendered them thus, its subject.