TO BE PUBLISHED ON MY DAD’S BIRTHDAY
A story of ka’u, family, service, and legacy
The Book
In 1988, a seventeen-year-old boy from Pāhala, a sugar plantation town on the southern shore of Hawaiʻi island, boarded a plane to San Diego and reported to Navy boot camp the next morning. It was his first time on the U.S. mainland. He would not return home for 32 years.
The Promise I Made is the memoir of those 32 years and what came after.
It is the story of a 10th generation Native Hawaiian who flew combat missions over Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and logged a thousand hours of strategic reconnaissance against China, Russia, and North Korea, qualified as Officer of the Deck aboard USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) on her maiden deployment to the Persian Gulf and Western Pacific, advised the Iraqi Minister of Defense in Baghdad during the fight against ISIS and the liberation of Mosul, and retired in 2020 as the Commanding Officer of the Navy’s largest research and development center on the West Coast.
It is also the story of a son who made a promise to his dying father — that a dialysis clinic would be built in Kaʻū so kūpuna would no longer have to leave the ʻāina to live. And of the work that promise became.
This book is for anyone who has ever served a country whose history is complicated, loved a place that asked everything of them, or carried a promise heavier than they thought they could bear.
What you will find inside
A military memoir — combat flights over Iraq, reconnaissance missions conducted against three nuclear powers, the maiden deployment of the USS Ronald Reagan, command at sea, command on shore, and a year in Baghdad advising a foreign defense minister during the height of ISIS invasion in Iraq.
A leadership memoir — what 28 years in uniform taught me about leading people when the cost of being wrong is measured in lives. No theory. No LinkedIn aphorisms. The lessons that survived contact with reality.
A Native Hawaiian history — from the Polynesian voyagers who landed at Ka Lae (South Point) more than a thousand years ago, to the 1893 overthrow, to the 1993 Apology Resolution, to what it means to be the tenth generation walking the same shoreline.
An American identity story — what it means to wear the uniform of a country that overthrew your ancestor’s kingdom. To serve, to lead, to bleed for the flag…and still carry the older flag in your heart.
The promise — the dialysis clinic in Kaʻū, the nonprofit foundation built to make it real, and the federal program – designed for Native Hawaiians to become econonically independent – now under attack by the very government I served.
A Passage from the Book
On August 25, 1939, Opelu Pai (my great-grandfather) entered the water off Ilio Point, the western tip of Molokaʻi, and pointed himself at Oʻahu. Understand what this means. The Kaiwi, the channel between Molokaʻi and Oʻahu, is roughly 26 miles wide. It is 2300 feet deep at its center. It is swept by trade-wind currents that can push a swimmer ten miles east of where he means to land. It is home to oceanic whitetip sharks, to tiger sharks, to billfish that hit the surface with the violence of a small car striking a wall. No one in 1939 was thought to have crossed it. Keo Nakama would not be credited with the first widely-recognized solo crossing until 1961, 22 years later. My great-grandfather was attempting something no one was certain could be done at all.
He did not walk into the water. The shoreline off Ilio Point is rocks and coral, sharp enough to cut a man open before he ever started swimming. So Captain Abrams, who was running the small support boat, took him out about fifty yards offshore and let him drop in. This detail would matter, decades later, when the swim was reassessed. In 1939 nobody minded. The point was the channel. The channel was the channel whether you started from a boat or from the beach.
He swam for 18 hours and 56 minutes. The men on the boat – Captain Abrams, Benjamin Awana, Henry Jellings (a Navy worker) – kept their distance. The rule was that he could not touch the boat. If he touched it, the swim was disqualified. So when he had to eat or drink, they fed him from the end of a bamboo pole.
Imagine it: a man alone in the channel at dusk, the lights of Oʻahu somewhere ahead in the dark, a wooden pole extending out from a wooden boat with poi or a bottle of water at the end of it. He grips the pole. He drinks. He releases. He swims.
Years later, when newspapermen came back to ask whether the swim had really happened, the witnesses were emphatic. Captain Abrams told them he would “swear on a stack of Bibles” that Willie Pai had crossed the channel entirely without help. Benjamin Awana, by then an insurance adjustor in Honolulu, the kind of profession that does not put its name on affidavits lightly, said he would willingly sign one. Henry Jellings said it most directly: anyone who cared to ask him would hear that Pai had done it under his own power, with no help of any kind.
His sponsor was Mrs. Alice Kamokila Campbell. If you know whose name that is, you understand at once that this was not a stunt. Kamokila Campbell was heiress to the James Campbell estate, one of the largest fortunes in the territory, and she was a Hawaiian Royalist, a senator in the territorial legislature, the only public Hawaiian voice who would testify against statehood in 1946.
– from The Promise I Made
About the Author
Melvin K. Yokoyama Jr. is a tenth-generation Native Hawaiian, born in Honolulu and raised in Pāhala. He served twenty-eight years in the U.S. Navy as a Naval Officer, retiring in 2020 as Commanding Officer of the Navy’s largest Information Warfare Center on the West coast, NIWC Pacific. He is the founder of Akamai Intelligence LLC and Chairman of the Mālama Kaʻū Foundation. The Promise I Made is his first book.
Be The First To Know
The Promise I Made will be available for purchase on my Dad’s birthday, October 6, 2026.. To receive notice when hardcopy and paperback versions of book is released — and to be invited to early reader and launch events — join the list below.