Advocates see gains in efforts to reclaim Makua Valley from Army

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Joe Estores was practically born to be a soldier.

Born on Oahu, he was the son of a military man, and all of his brothers were soldiers — except one who became a Marine. As a child he was present for the attack on Pearl Harbor and joined the Army as soon as he could, serving in Korea, Vietnam and around the world throughout the Cold War.

In 1964 he was stationed back on Oahu and was tasked with teaching helicopter pilots how to fight as the war in Vietnam was heating up. At the time, American military advisers and the CIA were on the ground backing South Vietnamese forces fighting communist insurgents.

Estores developed a training program for helicopter crews to practice their fighting skills shooting targets on the ground. He placed the targets in the Makua Military Reservation.

Estores recalled the valley as having a lush canopy of mango trees and native palms. He and his fellows soldiers tore it up, raining bullets and explosives on the land below as they prepared to fight guerrillas who relied on the jungle canopies of Southeast Asia to fight and hide camps and supply routes.

“That was my job,” Estores said. “At that time I had no know­ledge, no thought about who used to live in this valley, what happened in this valley. … I was one of those that partook in destroying what was living here — plants, animals, whatever was there — because we shot our rockets, our machine guns, our grenade launchers, everything, up and down this valley.”

Estores, a Native Hawaiian, said he now feels deep regret. Today he’s one of several activists and community members fighting to get the military out of Makua.

The valley is one of the most controversial of the military’s training grounds in the islands, and holds particular significance for Hawaiian cultural practitioners. In Hawaiian, “makua” means “parent,” and the valley is considered the place where human life was first created, according to oral tradition.

A key parcel the military uses in Makua belongs to the state, one of several state-owned parcels used by the Army, whose leases expire in 2029. As the deadline approaches, community leaders and military officials are preparing for what could be contentious negotiations. The military considers the Pacific its most important theater of operations amid tensions with China, and Hawaii is a key hub for those operations.

But military leaders are moving forward as the Red Hill water crisis and other environmental issues have brought renewed scrutiny to the military’s footprint in Hawaii and prompted some island residents to reassess their relationship with it. Now some who have been fighting over Makua say they believe that could give them leverage.

In 2022 then-U.S. Rep. Kai Kahele introduced the Leandra Wai Act, which would have compelled the Army to return Makua to the state. The legislation was named in honor of the late co-founder of Malama Makua, a Native Hawaiian community group that for decades has fought to protect and restore the valley’s unique environmental and cultural resources.

The Army hasn’t fired a shot in Makua since 2004, when a lawsuit by Earth­justice on Malama Makua’s behalf brought an end to live-fire training after wildfires burned brush and revealed ancient Native Hawaiian cultural sites within. But the Army and Marine Corps have continued to use it for helicopter crew training.

The bill ultimately didn’t pass, and Kahele, a one-term congressman who gave up his seat to return to flying for Hawaiian Airlines after an unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, was succeeded in January by U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda.

But William Aila Jr. — a longtime Hawaiian rights advocate and former director of the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands — said the flurry of media attention around Kahele’s bill helped spur renewed awareness and discussion about Makua and its future.

“We’re setting the stage for transition, the transition to the civilian control of this valley,” Aila said.

David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney who has represented Malama Makua, said, “We would hope that Tokuda would kind of take on that mantle as the now- representative for the area, and it’s certainly an appropriate way forward.”

Tokuda told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser she didn’t want to take a position yet on any specific parcel of land or training areas, but said that when it comes to negotiations between the state and the military, “there’s always going to need to be concessions made.”

Tokuda, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, included a provision in Congress’ annual defense funding bill calling on the military to appoint a person to oversee all the leased lands and the negotiations.

Families displaced after Pearl Harbor

Makua was once home to several farms and ranches owned by members of a diverse community of Hawaiian, Japanese and Portuguese families.

The military began using parts of Makua for live-fire training in the 1920s when the islands were governed as a U.S. territory. But after the Japanese navy’s surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the military imposed martial law in Hawaii and took control of all of Makua for training, which meant kicking out the farmers and ranchers in the valley. Military officials assured them it would be temporary and that they would be able to return when the war was over.

But in 1945, World War II ended and the Cold War began. The military asked Hawaii’s territorial government for the transfer of 6,608 acres at Makua for training. In 1964, five years after statehood, the Army paid just $1 for a 65-year lease from the state to continue training on Makua and the other leased lands.

“We should not and must not assume that 100% of the areas are required (for the military),” Tokuda said. “I think a robust discussion has to be had about what is essential and required, and what potentially could be returned. We’ve got some critical timelines coming up between now and 2029 when the renegotiation comes to, but I have told (the military) that we do need to ask ourselves serious questions about the total footprint: What is required, what is not?”

Part of Malama Makua’s lawsuit required the Army to allow “cultural access” to ancient Hawaiian sites in the valley. Malama Makua leads groups a few weekends a month into the valley under the supervision of Army ordnance removal contractors to ensure no one steps on or touches unexploded munitions left behind from the decades of live-fire training.

Both military officials and activists alike recall the early cultural access events as tense or outright hostile, with blistering speeches and bitter arguments between activists and officials. But in recent years they’ve managed to cool tempers.

Malama Makua member Vince Dodge said the fact that many of the activists — including his late father — are veterans or come from military families themselves may have helped the two sides develop a rapport and find common ground during visits.

“Maybe we have the easy part now, because things weren’t so friendly and cordial back in the day,” Dodge said. “Our Army cultural support team is really a wonderful cultural support team. It was very adversarial in 2004; it was a totally different kind of vibe then.”

An Army spokesman said the military branch spends about $6 million a year on reseeding local plants, preserving and studying archaeological sites, groundwater monitoring and removing unexploded ordnance.

After a tour of Army facilities led by military officials in April, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi told reporters he was “especially impressed” at “the stewardship in the Makua Valley that the Army has done up there for the last 20 years. It’s absolutely incredible.”

Blangiardi acknowledged that the military’s use of Makua has been controversial but said, “Anybody who might possibly think the military would be indifferent to even the smallest of subtleties when it comes to taking care of the place … I would refute that.”

But there’s still pointed debate over who gets to define those “subtleties.”

Malama Makua and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners have been at odds with federal officials over how best to care for cultural sites in the valley.

Army archaeologists manage and study the sites but keep them roped off to make sure no one touches them during cultural access days. Many of the practitioners want to see the sites restored and rebuilt, arguing that the government is treating their culture as a dead one to be studied.

Estores said he wants to bring officials, including Gov. Josh Green, to the valley with Hawaiians like him to see it and hear their stories. Green’s office did not respond to a request for comment on his position on Makua or the Army’s other leased lands.

Tensions high over spills, leaks

The 2021 Red Hill fuel spill, which contaminated the Navy’s Oahu drinking water system, deeply strained relations between Hawaii residents and the Pentagon. The military is now preparing to defuel the aging World War II-era facility, which sits just 100 feet above a critical aquifer most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water.

But subsequent spills and leaks of toxic material at Haleakala and other sites in the islands have put military officials in the hot seat as the Army prepares to ask the state to renew leases on training lands it considers critical.

With that current political climate, Aila said, it would be in the military’s best interest to look at concessions. He argued that Makua, which the Army already doesn’t use for live fire, would be an easy one for military leaders to give up and make a show of returning. Aila said he expects “that in the next couple of years, a decision is going to be rendered.”

However, Tokuda said equally important to looking at Hawaiian land that could be returned is ensuring that the military remediates any land it returns to make it safe for people to live on. The military hasn’t always done so.

When the Navy returned the island of Kahooalawe to the state in 1994, it was still littered with unexploded bombs, and decades of bombing had cracked the island’s water aquifer.

Aila said that fully remediating Makua could be costly and take time but that “there are people still living in Japan with all the bombs that were dropped, people still living in London with all the bombs that dropped. So it’s not inconceivable 70 years later that people can, with the right amount of work and expertise, clean this place up to some point where human existence is possible.”

Estores said local Army leadership ultimately has little say over whether the military will fight to keep the land. The retired Army officer said he wants to take it to the Pentagon and have an audience with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. He vowed that he won’t stop fighting until the valley is returned.

“I tell everybody about the story that when I did all of that, I had the American flag on my shoulder,” Esto­res told a group during a cultural access day in June as he recalled when he and fellow soldiers trained in the valley. “I’ve taken the American flag out (and) put the Hawaiian flag here. I’ve taken the American heart out of this body and put the Hawaiian heart back. And that’s me today, trying to make up for what I did.”