Anyone familiar with Guam’s history knows that it has had a tough go — centuries of punishing Spanish rule followed by a takeover by the United States in 1898, the same wave of expansion that added Hawai‘i and Puerto Rico to the US’s portfolio of territories. This was the beginning of the US’s militarization of the Pacific, which has been described in classic works like Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches, and Bases as well as more recent publications like Militarized Currents. The Center for Pacific Island Studies at UH Mānoa even has a class-room ready textbook on militarization and nuclear testing in the Pacific which I’d highly recommend you read or teach.

In the case of Guam, there is a large literature on resistance to military buildup, the impact of the 2009 decision to increase military presence on the island(including the fencing off of parts of the island) and how the rhetoric of liberation legitimates the military presence on Guam. Just google “Guam militarization pacific studies” and you’ll find plenty to read.

As someone who shares an island with the command center for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, I have many vets in my classes, and know friends who have served in the military. As a result I’ve come to appreciate how our troops suffer when our civilian leaders make terrible decisions — as they have for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s a tragedy that members of our volunteer army are in harm’s way because we have a president who can’t tell nuclear war from defending the wall from white walkers.

But it’s even more of a tragedy that people born and raised in Micronesia may have their lives, land, culture, and history obliterated in an instant because they had the bad luck of being strategically positioned. A strike on Guam would be genocide, culturecide, landicide — the literal erasure of a way of life that has survived for thousands of years. Even the Guam diaspora, as strong as it is, could never recover from that. This simply can’t be allowed to happen. And screaming at North Korea will make it more likely to happen, not less.

I had a chance to visit Guam recently for the biannual meeting of the Pacific History Association. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality of the conference organizers. Undergraduate volunteers staffed the airport lobby twenty four hours a day to make sure conference goers got to their hotel after a long flight. When I say twenty four hours a day, I mean it. I got off my flight at 1:30 in the morning and was greeted by a smiling college student who game me a lei, a bottle of water, my conference package, and arranged travel to my hotel. It was an amazing show of aloha. Real aloha. That smiling young student had her whole life ahead of her. Next month she may be vaporized, along with everyone else at her university.

I personally still feel that Kim and Trump are not stupid enough to do more than make threats. I believe that both leaders recognize that actual war is not in their best interests. I hope that a nuclear strike on Guam is still a rhetorical threat, not a real one. But every time this tension is ratcheted up, we move closer to a future where we will all have to live in a world polluted with radiation. Except for Chamorro people, who will not be living at all.

I was part of the interdisciplinary group, co-directed by Catherine Lutz, that co-authored the report which aims to comprehensively explore the vast scope and scale of the impacts, the many kinds of costs, of the U.S. military response to 9/11. So, not surprisingly, the mood strikes me to tell you something about it.

There were more than 20 of us who contributed to the project, and anthropologists were well represented alongside historians, journalists, political scientists, economists, and others.

One of the great strengths of the report and it’s interdisciplinary approach is that it brings together numbers (like international civilian casualty rates) and issues (like impacts of deployment on the children of U.S. service members) that are often disarticulated or overlooked all together.

Now, for better or worse, numbers make good headlines, and this report is chock full of them. We noted that:

The wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are 75% more likely to die in car crashes than their civilian counterparts; Military responses to terrorism have been successful in only 7%of the 268 examples since the late 20th Century; An M-1 Abrams tank gets about half a mile per gallon of gas; In the U.S., the proportion of hate crimes against Muslims has risen 500%since 2000, even though overall hate crime rates have gone down; And, as everyone from The Washington Post to The Toronto Sun noted, the report estimates an (incomplete) price tag of between $3.2 and $4 Trillion.

These numbers are compelling. And, true to the axiom “if it’s integerial, it leads,” (that’s how it goes, right?) numbers make good copy.

But as an anthropologist with a healthy disciplinary skepticism of faith in statistics and all their quantitative kin, and one who worked with injured soldiers and their families and wants people to know about their struggles, I was torn between the power of contagious numbers, and their simplifying and sometimes anesthetizing effects.

Thinking that some of you folks might be too, I thought I would share a few other findings of the report; findings that speak to the power of absent numbers:

The $4 Trillion number leaves much uncounted. For example, it doesn’t count ‘solatia’ payments that the U.S. makes to the families of some Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed or the cost of Predator and Reaper drones (we do know, however, that Predators cost $4.5 million each, and that more than one third of them have crashed).

Project Co-director Neta Crawford’s contribution on casualties begins with a poignant description of the historical, logistical, and political reasons that a death, especially, but not only, that of a civilian can be made uncountable.

Political scientist Alison Howell and I note the way that sensational statistics, like divorce rates, can mask the strains on military families, the very things for which they’re supposed to stand as proxy.

Matthew Evangelista’s contribution offers some important historical lessons using unexpected numbers often disappeared from amnesiac comparative histories of terrorism including those related to organizations active in the 1970s like Germany’s Red Army Faction, Italy’s Brigate Rosse, and Quebec’s Front de Liberation du Québec.

So, though Reuters has made $3.7 Trillion the headline of the Costs of War report, it seemed you might be interested in other ways the rest of us are doing the numbers.