Many civilians say that reassurances from friends and family in the military have helped them stay calm. One resident, Kathy Diaz, who has four sons who are Army officers, told the local newspaper Pacific Daily News, “I hear about (the threat), but I’m not worried. Only because I have boys in the military. They said, ‘Don’t worry Mom, if anything happens, we’ll let you know.’ I have faith in the military.”

It’s a perspective I even found myself clinging to in the hours after North Korea’s initial announcement while I absorbed the news from Washington. The first thing I did was call my dad, a retired Army colonel born and raised on Guam who served in Operation Desert Storm. He sounded unfazed when he picked up; he insisted he wasn’t worried and that I shouldn’t be either, because the military was doing its job. Many others also cited either their own service or the service of relatives and friends (usually parents, children, siblings), as reasons for their relative peace of mind. On Guam, “I trust the military” so often translates to, “I trust my family, my friends, my island.”

Carl Peterson, a certified financial planner who has lived on Guam for 52 years and who served in the Navy for five years, told me in an email that he had faith in both Trump’s leadership and the U.S. military. “Guamanians are always known for taking war and freedom very seriously,” he said. (John Oliver hailed the Guamanian sense of patriotism in a Last Week Tonight segment on island voting rights in 2015: “The American flag should really just be a guy from Guam waving an American flag.”)

“The people are extraordinarily patriotic American citizens who live in a very contentious part of the world where the threats from North Korea are concerning,” Adam Carbullido, the communications director for the Guam Congresswoman Madeleine Z. Bordallo, told me. “At the same time, we understand the role that we play as members of the American family. We hope that these events help bring light to some of the challenges that we have being a territory of the U.S. and not being fully incorporated members of the United States.”

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Complicating this longstanding attitude of patriotism is the fact that Guam is a U.S. territory whose citizens cannot vote for president; it is also technically a U.S. colony (one of the last remaining colonies in the world, according to the United Nations, since unlike some other U.S. territories it’s not legally self-governing). Guam residents often feel the island gets overlooked by mainland Americans—a sense reinforced recently by the national media’s sudden interest in the island following Pyongyang’s threats.

The inaccurate Fox News graphic I mentioned earlier, in particular, is being widely circulated on-island and has stoked anger among residents of various political backgrounds. Many told me they see it as further evidence of how ignorant the “mainstream media” is about Guam (despite the fact that top outlets are generally not under-reporting the number of Americans that would be affected by an attack on the island.)