Tracy Dixon is a 28-year Navy veteran and spent three years as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Diver at Kaho’olawe. He spent many months living at the base camp at Honokanai’a and learned his trade craft on the ordnance littered landscape of Kahoʻolawe (thatʻs him in the middle of the photo.)

Now a full-time student on the GI Bill, Tracy transfer from Leeward CC and is now an anthropology major at the University of Hawai’i-West O’ahu.

About writing, Tracy says:

My poem is an impressionist vision of Kahoʻolawe as I remember it from 1988. That memory runs like an old scratched up 16 mm color documentary film that plays in a continuous loop in my memory.

I love words and language and have always enjoyed reading and listening to poetry. I started writing poetry as part of a creative writing class at Leeward.

I want the readers of my poem to see and remember the surreal dystopian place that the Island of Kaho’olawe had become after 50 years of environmental abuse in the name of military readiness. I want to give them that film that plays in my memory.