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Corps: No explosives on Guam firing ranges

No explosives will be on any firing ranges on Guam, a Marine Corps official said Thursday.

Craig Whelden, executive director of the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific, said no explosives will be heard at the proposed firing range near the Pågat area.

“First of all there’s nothing that goes boom,” Whelden said. “No explosive charges will be on any firing ranges here in Guam — that’s not our intent. Just as the Navy requires ships and the Air Force requires airplanes, we require trained and ready Marines.”

And trained and ready Marines mean that there will be sounds of firearms discharging, but Whelden said the impact to residents nearby will be minimized.

“Sometimes there are rifles, sometimes they are pistols, sometimes they are machine guns, but that’s the core building block of the Marine Corps training readiness requirements and that’s the reason we have to have training here on Guam,” Whelden added. “No bombing. Expect some gunfire, but we obviously will try to train in such a way that it will minimize any impact on any of the communities near the training ranges.”

The military’s plan to build a Marine firing range along Route 15, close to Pågat — an ancient village — wasn’t finalized in the Record of Decision that was signed in September. The firing range has been one of the most controversial topics of the Guam buildup. Groups such as We Are Guåhan and the Guam Historic Preservation Office have protested the firing range.

Retired Marine Maj. Gen. David Bice, executive director of the Joint Guam Program Office, has said the Defense Department decided to delay the release of its final firing range plans so it could have more time to finish a consultation process under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Section 106 has to do with how to handle artifacts, storage and curation to name a few.

“We have one plan, and that plan is to come to Guam, and unless we are told by a competent authority like the Secretary of Defense or the President of the United States that we’re to do something else, then that’s exactly what we plan,” Whelden said. “We’re very excited about the possibilities of coming here. We would like Guam to be the station of choice for the Marines for generations to come. We want to be great partners with the people of Guam. We don’t want to impose our own culture on anybody in Guam. We want to both respect and adapt to Guam culture, and teach our Marines about Guam culture and Chamorro history.”

About 8,600 Marines and their 9,000 dependents will relocate to Guam as part of the military buildup. Their relocation will require infrastructure support, including the firing range. The buildup was to happen by 2014, but the military has since implemented an adaptive program management plan that will pace the buildup, to prevent any burden on the island’s existing infrastructure.

This means that the number of Marines to move to Guam and when the move will happen is now dependent on the ability of the local and federal government to get the infrastructure in place that is needed to support the Marines.

Bryan Wood, director of the Pacific Division Headquarters Marine Corps, said Thursday the relocation is a One Guam approach.

“It’s the only way it’s going to work here on Guam,” he said. “We’re not going to build a new Marine Corps base ... and the Marines are going to move here and we have Guam and then we have Marines. We’re going to build a next village on Guam. We want to have a Marine Corps village on Guam and blend into the local culture.”

Wood said it’s up to the Marines coming to re-establish the relationship residents had with the Marines in 1944.

“So when we come here, we are not looking at next week or next year,” Wood said. “We are looking at 50 years of being here, and to do that we have to be good neighbors.”

Wood said there will be no fights over Pågat but that the Marines do need a place to train.

“The most important thing is that we do have to have [an] individual firing range somewhere here on Guam in order to train Marines. We simply can’t do it anywhere else. It will ruin our operations here,” Wood said. “How we’ll work that out? We’d like to do that in concert with the people of Guam. ... We’re trying to find the place that has absolutely the least impact on the entire island, the culture and the people of Guam.”

Wood said the final Environmental Impact Statement has identified the Route 15 area as such.