There is a man kneeling on a runway in Vanuatu. It is not a real runway. The strip is bamboo, laid out in a rough approximation of what he saw the American engineers cut into the jungle during the war. He is wearing headphones carved from coconut shells. He is waving two red-painted sticks at the empty sky. He watched the men in olive-green uniforms perform this ceremony. He watched what arrived after. Metal birds full of tinned food, boots, bla…