9

Boys Gone Wild: How the Philippines Became the Friendliest Country in the World Despite/Because of the U.S. Military

September 11, 2001, made a decade-old idea of mine fashionable overnight. In 1992, in a ten-by-six, bamboo-veneer room I was renting in the back of an expat bar called Midnight Rambler, not far from the U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay in the Philippines, I sat on a tiny bunk and scribbled down the outline for a book called “A Field Guide to World War II Sites in the Pacific.” My idea was to travel to every place where combat had occurred in the Pacific, walk the old battlefields, and document all extant traces of the war, from the fall of Singapore to the assault on Guadalcanal to the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri. The data would be put into a concise travel guide that would give like-minded history geeks the nuts-and-bolts information they needed to locate everything of war-related interest—abandoned tanks in Saipan and the hallowed invasion beaches at Peleliu—a perfect Christmas gift for the man who gets misty in the presence of battleships and black-and-white newsreel footage.

Throughout the nineties, I pitched the proposal to a dozen or so publishers and always got back more or less the same comment: “Interesting idea, too costly to produce.” Then came 9/11. Suddenly, patriotism was back in style. “God and country” hadn’t been the point of my book, but given recent events and the Greatest Generation spin that accompanies virtually all treatments of World War II, patriotism—not travel or history—revived interest in the project. Two publishers who remembered my proposal called to ask if anyone had ever picked up the rights. I ended up selling the book to Greenline Publications, a small company in San Francisco.

Some might prefer the cafés of Paris or the coast of Spain, but fresh off the Travelocity magazine fiasco, the dense foliage of Asia seemed to me a decent place to disappear for a year or so. You say “tomato” I say “banana ketchup.” I shook on the deal and decided to start my research on familiar turf, the Philippines, a country I’d been taking regular trips to for more than a decade.

 

Arriving in the Philippines for the first time in 1990 was a shock. The tight security at airports that irritates American travelers today had by then long been a way of life in Manila. Only ticketed passengers were allowed inside the airport, a restriction that forced welcome parties to wait in a large fenced pen outside in the tropical heat. Given that entire Filipino villages sometimes empty to herald the return of a beloved cousin, the crush of humanity in front of the arrivals terminal at Ninoy Aquino International Airport turned the greeting area into a giant rugby scrum.

From the antiseptic tranquility of the airport, I walked past a pair of armed guards into a blinding sun and was confronted by a sea of brown faces, each one mashed against the ten-foot-high chain-link fence. The crowd roared and lunged into the fence as passengers appeared. Taxi drivers stuck their arms through holes in the fence and clawed at my sleeve, offering to take me to whatever I wanted—girls, drinks, drugs, hotels. Above the incomprehensible racket of two thousand people screaming for the attention of two hundred passengers, the humidity descended like a blast furnace, leaving me glazed in a thick sweat. I retreated from this theater of the surreal back into the terminal to figure out my next move.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said to no one in particular. At that moment I heard a voice calling my name. From a hundred yards away I recognized my brother walking toward me and waving.

“I paid a security guard to let me in the terminal,” he said, grabbing my bag. “No way you would have found me out there in Thunderdome.”

Leaving the chaos in our wake, we drove past the cardboard and sheet-metal shantytown that still surrounds Manila’s airport and got on the highway. With his wife and two boys, Mike was stationed at Cubi Point, part of the gargantuan Subic Bay naval base, at the time home to the largest community of Americans (twenty thousand, including dependents) living outside of the United States. Somewhere on the highway, we passed through a time warp. Three hours from the cacophony of Manila, I opened the car door and stepped into 1950s Kansas.

America’s large overseas military bases operate as if the last fifty years never happened. More wholesome than Ward and June Cleaver’s annual missionary hump, they’re an isolated nirvana where all is clean and orderly, flags fly from every building, and children are never late for school. Men go to work during the week and fire up the backyard grill on weekends. Shopping, cooking, and household chores are the domain of wives and domestic help drawn from the local population, young women who often become integral parts of the family structure. Pulling up to Mike’s house inside the base, I noticed a sign on the lawn.

“We won this month’s ‘nicest yard’ competition,” Mike said, explaining the placard. “Second time this year.”

The Philippine town that neighbored this airtight island of Americana was called Olongapo. It was to Subic what Woodstock once was to upstate New York. Each day at the base’s main gate, navy, marine, and air force personnel—squids, jarheads, and zoomies, in the argot of the culture—dropped their facades of military sobriety as they left Little America and dove into the shameless intoxication provided by a town that existed to meet a military man’s every need and desire.

Following the primal call of metal, hip-hop, and other stripper music blasting from giant sound systems in bars abutting the base, America’s finest crossed a small bridge over the “Shit River”—a chunky flow of open sewage that separated the United States from the Philippines in the same disconcerting way that rivers, ditches, and gullies separate prosperous America from down-at-the-heels Mexican border towns. First stop in Olongapo was the row of smiling money changers, where U.S. dollars were traded for “carnival tickets,” the military’s euphemism for Philippine pesos and an indication of the arrogance of the Americans who patronized the legendary collection of go-go bars, taverns, and whorehouses that awaited along neon-lit Magsaysay Boulevard and Gordon Avenue.

Top Gun, Florida Club, Hard Rock, Solid Gold Disco, Cindy Bar, Body Shop. Unanimously regarded as the most potent arrow in the navy’s quiver of reenlistment incentives, Olongapo’s bars came fully loaded with available women, San Miguel beer, and Tanduay rum. In the economically depressed P.I. (as military men have always called the Philippine Islands), recruits who struggled with menial jobs back home found that their navy paychecks vaulted them near the top of Olongapo’s economic ladder. Like thousands of Ray Liottas in Goodfellas, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids suddenly had the run of the town, blowing wads of cash on cars, women, alcohol, weed, blow, and whatever else they wanted, then going back to “Mom” (enlistee-speak for the U.S. Navy) for another pile and starting over the next week.

An army may travel on its stomach, but it sets up camp around booze and poontang. Olongapo provided sparkly diversion to the thousands of men permanently stationed in Subic and millions of round hats who over the decades poured off American ships like second graders set free for recess. Olongapo was the U.S. Navy’s last great liberty port, a Wild West, free-for-all holdover from the World War II and Vietnam eras that, as one young marine assured me on my first visit there, “made anything in Bangkok look like a Campfire Girls bake sale.”

Having seen both red-light strips operating at full bore, as well as Singapore’s famed “four floors of whores” and other landmarks of Asian debauchery, I believed I was in a position to judge the respective levels of decadence on offer across the region. I told the marine that though there was much in Bangkok to recommend to a man of libertine interests, I couldn’t argue his basic premise that for widespread depravity, Olongapo was impossible to beat. He beamed like a lighthouse at this pronouncement, declared us the kind of guys who could be buddies back home, then wandered off to hoot at a pair of bar girls in micro-miniskirts stepping out of a cab down the street.

 

I traveled to Subic Bay twice in 1990, first in August, just days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. By the time I arrived, the American government had already begun its massive military buildup in the Middle East under the umbrella Operation Desert Shield, and President Bush I was putting together what looked like an authentic coalition to stand up to the Iraqi aggression. By the time I returned to Subic in late December, Wolf Blitzer had become a household name, and the imminent invasion of Kuwait by U.S. forces was only weeks away.

Always alive with military commotion, Olongapo that December was electric. Subic Bay had been designated a major staging area for Operation Desert Storm. Seventh Fleet troop ships from the West Coast by way of Pearl Harbor were arriving almost hourly, dropping their anchors in the harbor and disgorging an endless stream of combat-primed soldiers ready for one last liberty before war.

Through the sterility of press conferences and grittier field correspondence, it’s possible to get a sense of the American fighting man’s dedication to duty. These staged affairs do not, however, convey the gut-churning thrill of watching an army united behind a single purpose assembling for battle before your eyes. During that last week of December, I spoke with dozens of sailors, marines, and flight crew around Subic, and what remains most vivid nearly seventeen years later is the absolute certainty they felt in their mission and their unwavering support, without exception, of the orders issued by their commander in chief.

The run-up to the Gulf War was the last great spasm in the long history of Subic Bay, and it peaked on New Year’s Eve 1990 in Olongapo. Following an anxiety-filled month of interminable sea voyages, combat maneuvers, and amphibious landing exercises with names like Operation Quick Thrust, most of the troops heading to the Persian Gulf already had their orders to ship out after the first of the year. Word of what was going on at Subic spread throughout the provinces, and by Christmas every bar girl, dancer, marriage hopeful, and straight-up streetwalker in the country had descended on Olongapo alongside an army of drug dealers, tattoo artists, pimps, and pickpockets to work the exodus.

I was up early on New Year’s Eve, but Olongapo hadn’t even gone to bed. At eight in the morning, Magsaysay Boulevard looked like Times Square. Every bar was open, every stage jammed with bikini-wrapped girls, every million-dollar sound system on the strip shook the earth with Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, Metallica, and the miraculous sound-alike Filipino cover bands who played even louder renditions of the same. In front of a club called Sierra, I stopped on the street and watched small clouds of dust literally being stirred up by the sonic waves rumbling from the wall of speakers inside.

A lone American didn’t have to stay that way long. You couldn’t walk ten paces without a girl appearing in a doorway, throwing an arm around you, and trying to drag you inside for a drink. Sailors with two and three dusky hotties clamped around them spilled out of jeepneys, staggered into bars, groped their trophies on sidewalks, and retired to hotel rooms for “short time” recreation before flinging themselves back into the bedlam. Fireworks exploded throughout the day, at times so powerful and sustained that drunken marines assumed a live-fire ordnance test was taking place on a training range across the Shit River.

After wandering around the circus for a couple hours, I ended up in a restaurant where I bumped into a well-spoken navy-enlisted guy I’d met in a bar earlier in the week. Over beers we’d gotten into a friendly debate, and though we disagreed on many issues, I’d come away impressed with his sensitivity and historical insight into the forces and plans at play in the Middle East. In the restaurant he recognized me, left his besotted companions in the company of a gaggle of laughing teenage girls, and brought his plate over to my table. We immediately picked up the geopolitical discussion we’d left off days before.

Minutes later a slightly chubby Filipina shortie with large eyes and a flapper haircut sashayed across the room and asked if she could join us. We made space and she got down to business, placing a warm hand on each of our thighs and offering backroom hummers at a considerable discount. My amiable buddy accepted at once. The cordial apology he extended as he draped his arm around the girl and stood up led to a brief conversation that now strikes me as one of the most absurd in my life.

“You mind?” he said, nodding at the girl.

“No, not at all,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

“Don’t let them take my plate away. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

And he was, with a smile on his face, completely at ease with himself, to finish our discussion of troop deployments, Iraq’s Revolutionary Guard, and the putative effectiveness of smart bombs. There’s a lot to admire in soldiers. There’s a lot to deplore. And there’s a lot that leaves you shaking your head.

 

In any review of the Philippines, particularly one written from an American perspective, military operations must provide the backdrop, if only to stick a finger in the dyke of the public’s stunning ignorance about the war machine it’s been feeding for the last century. History isn’t necessarily Americans’ trump suit, but that’s no reason to stop telling people about the touched-by-an-angel similarities between presidents G. W. Bush and William McKinley, why Japan really bombed Pearl Harbor, and what made a guy named Robert Beightler one of the biggest jackasses in U.S. Army history.

The 7,107 islands of the Philippine archipelago stretch like a curse across one of the most strategically valuable expanses of ocean in the world. From deep-water ports in the Philippines, a military or merchant fleet has direct access to shipping lanes that feed most of East Asia, including China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and in a pinch, Japan and Korea. This was true a thousand years ago and it’s true today. It’s the reason why at some point in your lifetime, battles will once again be fought over control of the Philippines.

As the eighty languages and dialects spoken by its people attest, “the Philippines” is one of those products of colonial convenience, not ethnic, religious, or political reality. Scattered in early times with independent merchant fiefdoms established by seafaring Malays, Chinese, Muslims, and other groups, the islands became a political collective only after the Spanish arrived to claim them in the name of King Philip II. Spain’s rule began in 1565 and ended in 1898 when the Spanish-American War was settled with a treaty giving the United States—which had recently squashed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay—dominion over the Philippines, as well as a rapidly swelling head as it thundered into the twentieth century.

Having endured three-hundred-plus years of Catholic muskets, the locals were less than thrilled about another crop of sanctified foreigners putting them to work in cane fields and shipyards, then siphoning the profits back home. Eager for independence, the Filipinos fought the Americans in a vicious, atrocity-filled war that lasted almost three years, involved at its peak seventy thousand U.S. troops in the field, and left as many as two hundred thousand Filipinos dead. Historians now consider the village-burning, civilian-terrorizing, small-unit jungle fighting in the Philippines to be a precursor to the Vietnam War. The P.I. is where words such as “gook” and “quagmire” entered the American lexicon to describe fighting in Southeast Asia.

In the Philippines this period is referred to as the Philippine-American War. In the United States, if it’s mentioned at all, it’s called the Philippine “insurrection,” proving once again that political euphemisms never die, they just get recycled by sleazy campaign advisers. Though now largely forgotten, the “war” or “insurrection” was, much like Iraq, the singular political question that gripped Americans around the turn of the century. The defining issue of the 1900 presidential campaign, the Philippines was America’s first foray into European-style colonialism. Debate in Washington over whether the nation should head down this unholy path was bitter and divisive.

In favor of enveloping the Philippines in a snuggly Yankee Doodle embrace were such heavyweights as Teddy Roosevelt and President William McKinley, the latter of whom claimed God had specifically told him to annex the islands. Opposing were prickly moralists such as Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, the latter of whom suggested that the new Philippine flag might be “just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.” Like social critics such as Jon Stewart today, Twain won the war of words, but the imperialists won the congressional vote. The United States officially declared sovereignty over the Philippines in 1902, and for the next four decades proceeded to run the place like a combination military base/Christian youth camp.

Unhappy with America’s creeping influence into what it considered its rightful sphere of rape and pillage, Japan seized the Philippines from the United States in December 1941. Most Americans know December 7 as the date that will live in infamy, but Pearl Harbor was only one American target attacked by the Japanese that day and was, in fact, something of a sideshow. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to cripple the U.S. fleet anchored there, thus ensuring that its roughly simultaneous invasions of the Philippines, Guam, Malaysia, and, eventually, Singapore wouldn’t be seriously threatened. In the Pacific, Southeast Asia, not Hawaii, is where the significant ground action of the early war took place.

Japan controlled the Philippines from 1942 until late 1944. When American forces returned, they came with such a vengeance that they burned the capital city of Manila to the ground. This was done to save the lives of American invaders and to make the kind of statement back-from-the-dead militaries love to deliver to friend and foe alike. In his activity report for the Thirty-seventh Infantry Division, General Robert Beightler, among the chief architects of the indiscriminate artillery attacks that killed one hundred thousand Filipino civilians, tactfully wrote: “I have no apologies to make…. So much for Manila. It is a ruined city—unhealthy, depressing, poverty stricken. Let us thank God our cities have been spared such a fate.”

After most of the country’s assets had been reduced to smoking rubble, the United States kindly gave the Philippines its independence—with conditions. These included the continuing presence of massive American military installations (presumed necessary to thwart budding Russian ambitions in the region) and political sway that would ensure guys like Ferdinand Marcos could remain in power long enough to empty the country’s bank accounts before retiring to a Hawaiian estate. In the postwar period, the United States poured vast capital into reconstructing its former enemy Japan into a first-rate economic titan. Meanwhile, the P.I. struggled to rebuild itself.

After all of this war and destruction and betrayal, you’d think the people of the Philippines would hate us. By “us,” I don’t just mean Americans, but Muslims, Spaniards, Chinese, Japanese, and any other group that has arrived through the years to extract what resources they could from the islands while exploiting its inhabitants. And yet the Filipinos don’t hate us. After centuries of foreign oppression and injustice, Filipinos remain the most optimistic, friendly, and generous people on the planet. In a world of takers, they inexplicably remain givers. Which is why, despite the abundant poverty, natural disasters, and man-made catastrophes, whenever I’m asked what my favorite travel destination is—travel writers get this question all the time—I always say the Philippines.

 

Though you wouldn’t have gotten hundred-to-one odds on the proposition at the time, within two years of the Gulf War, the virile arsenal of democracy at Subic Bay and the riotous business center of Olongapo had become ghost towns. Obviating the need for a cosmic military presence in Southeast Asia, the close of the Cold War dovetailed neatly with the rise of rancorous nationalism within the Philippine Senate and the end of the United States’ lease agreement with the Filipino government. Despite overwhelming Filipino public support in favor of keeping the Americans, the military base leases were not renewed. America’s permanent military presence in the P.I. ended when the last American warship, the helicopter carrier USS Belleau Wood, pulled out of Subic Bay on November 24, 1992. Amid a flood of tears and heartfelt speeches, the American flag was lowered. For the first time in four centuries, the Philippines were free of foreign military forces.

Three months later I was back in Olongapo doing interviews and gathering data for a project called “Filipino Relations at Home and Abroad,” for which I’d received a grant from an Alaskan group with a connection to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The study was supposed to examine all manner of ties between the two countries, but the American military departure had left such a deep gash on the Filipino psyche that no one was able to talk about anything else. Its fallout quickly overwhelmed my project, turning it into a sort of social-impact study that flattered the Filipinos but which few Americans outside the Alaska Humanities Forum ended up caring about.

Walking down Magsaysay Boulevard in winter 1993 was like taking a tour through your worst hangover. Buildings were abandoned or gutted. The concert-strength sound systems were gone. Neon signs hung at crooked angles, their bulbs looted or punched out. In the few clubs trying to stick out the economic collapse, lone barmen waited for customers who never showed. Here and there a hostess stood in front of an empty restaurant. If the Philippines had tumbleweeds, they’d have been blowing down the street.

The most conspicuous legacy of the party were the Amerasian children—“souvenirs” they were called—left behind by American fathers. An estimated fifty thousand such kids were scattered around the country, at least three thousand in Olongapo. In more than a few pairs of the green and blue eyes juxtaposed against brown skin, one sensed the expectation of a future as bleak as the present.

Until recently the domain of navy officers and vacationers, upscale apartments and houses were renting for around ten or twenty dollars a day. Since I was going to be in the country for several months, I looked for one near the beach. The first place I checked out had a large banyan tree in front, new tile and counters in the kitchen, some decent leftover rattan furniture, and views of the gorgeous bay rimmed by brown and green hills. I was about to say, “I’ll take it,” when I stepped onto the balcony and tasted in my throat the sickly sweet effluvium of rotting flesh. I gagged reflexively and looked down to find the corpse of a headless pig decomposing in the grass below me.

 

From February to May I conducted interviews around the country, and although the military was gone, there was no shortage of trouble to get into. Traveling mostly by bus, I absorbed by osmosis the protocols of the country’s intricate rural routes, a peculiarity of which led to one of my few uncomfortable encounters with locals in the P.I. Because control of commercial activity remains defiantly tribal in the Philippines, no single national bus line is allowed to service the entire country. Operating within strictly defined territories helps to protect minor corporate empires, but it can freight such simple acts as transferring buses with perilous consequences.

This I learned at three thirty on the blackest morning I’ve ever been awake for when my overnight bus from Ifugao to Olongapo stopped abruptly in the middle of the two-lane jungle track it had been speeding down for the past hour. The tough-looking ticket taker—in addition to the driver, P.I. buses have a guy who collects money and oversees the passengers—stood in front of me.

“You go Olongapo?”

I nodded.

“Get out here.”

I looked out the window. It was as if we’d stopped inside a cave.

“Is there a bus station?”

“Not here,” the ticket taker said. “Wait on side of road. Another bus come pick you up.”

“How will I know which bus?”

“Is only one bus.”

“How long till it comes?”

“Soon.”

No one else was getting off. I looked outside again. No lights, no people, no buildings of any kind. The idling of the bus suggested comfort and safety to me, whereas the side of the road in the middle of what I was guessing was the Benguet province suggested a long, lonely wait.

“Here? Are you sure?” I was practically begging him to change his mind.

“You get off now or wind up in Ilocos.”

I stood on the roadside watching the taillights of the bus being swallowed by the darkness. The chatter of the diesel engine disappeared. Not a sound from bird nor cricket moved into the dead calm to replace it.

Nothing is more tedious than waiting for a ride you’re not sure is coming. For fifteen minutes I fought off a gnawing suspicion that I’d been dumped in the wrong spot. I walked up the road a hundred yards in both directions and found no sign of life.

And then something stirred in the bushes. Far ahead of me, a human outline, then another, emerged from the tall grass that lined the road. Two silhouettes began coming toward me. I squinted hard—two males, one carrying a long, narrow object that swayed from his hand. As they neared, two more men popped out from the bushes to my left, barely twenty yards away. There was something weird about their stiff posture. I knew right away they’d been in the high grass watching me since the moment the bus had driven off. Their appearance was followed by more rustling and more strangers.

With terrifying speed I went from being a guy waiting for a bus on the side of the road to a target surrounded by eight Filipino men in the middle of a deserted jungle highway. They wore loose-fitting jeans and old T-shirts with holes and stains, items most likely donated by American charities and picked up cheap at local markets. In Tagalog they spoke to each other, but not to me. Two of the men carried machetes—that was the long, narrow object I’d seen—which they swung slowly like pendulums, back and forth, back and forth, as the group appraised me. All farmers in the Philippines carry machetes, but these guys hadn’t been out plowing the north forty in the middle of the night.

The leader was medium height, more round than angular, with wavy black hair, thick eyebrows, and what was, given the circumstances, a gracious smile. After a nerve-wracking moment of silence, he introduced himself, asked for my name, and, for whatever reason, told me that he was twenty-seven years old. I was so freaked out I couldn’t recall his name, even the next day, but I’ve always thought of him as Rivera, because that was the name of a particularly breakneck member of the suicide-squad kickoff team at Oregon when I went to school there, and because I did remember the guy on the roadside rolling a couple of r’s in that distinctive staccato Filipino way.

“Is this the place to catch the bus for Olongapo?” I asked Rivera, trying to ignore the film of sweat crawling across my back.

“I think maybe. Why are you going to Olongapo, Chuck?”

Someone had taught Rivera the salesman’s trick of establishing rapport by repeating the mark’s name, but hadn’t mentioned that overusing it was more creepy than congenial. I told him about the research project and my apartment in Olongapo.

“I don’t like Olongapo, Chuck,” he said. “The countryside is much nicer than the city. Don’t you like my province?”

I told him his province was impressive. He said I should see it in the daylight when I could appreciate its beauty.

“You shouldn’t travel alone at night,” Rivera told me. “Foreigners are often kidnapped in these mountains.”

As we spoke, Rivera edged within inches of my face. Rural Filipinos are generally as tough as bricks, and I’m generally not, but I did have size on Rivera, and to some extent, my back was against the wall. If the situation were going to be decided by desperate moves, I’d have taken my chances in a fight. Reading my mind, the posse tightened its ring around me.

“How much money are you carrying, Chuck?” Rivera asked me.

I strained my eyes down the road trying to will a pair of headlights into existence. It had been twenty minutes since the bus dropped me off, and not a single vehicle had passed.

“Not much money,” I said. “Ten U.S.” In fact, I had about two hundred, but ten bucks for a solo traveler was a believable figure in the province.

“You must carry credit cards. What kind do you have? Visa?”

“No cards, just a little cash.”

“I don’t think your bus will be coming soon.” Rivera brushed my forearm with his fingertips. “Would you like to spend the night with us?”

I said I hadn’t seen any houses nearby. He told me the name of his village and said it was along a trail just behind the road. It probably was. I’d heard of entire platoons walking within ten feet of villages in Vietnam and never seeing so much as a rooftop through the darkened jungle. Rivera feigned sadness when I declined his offer, but he kept after me about it, resting his hand on my shoulder while I tried to casually pivot away.

“Chuck, tell me something. Why are you insulting me?”

“I’m not insulting you. I’m waiting for my bus.”

“For we Filipinos hospitality is a way of life. When you refuse our hospitality, it is seen by us as an insult.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, and I genuinely appreciate the offer. But I really need to get back to Olongapo.”

It was still dark, but Rivera was so close I could see he was looking into my eyes.

“Chuck, tell me something,” he said. “Have you ever had sex with a gay man?”

For the single male traveler, homosexual come-ons are, like delays at JFK and overpriced hotel food, a part of the process to which one grows accustomed. I’ve been pickup quarry in the United States, Japan, Palau, and several other ports of call. In Lençóis, Brazil, a chatty American tourist sitting next to me at a hotel bar broached the subject by saying, “Well, I guess you know why I’ve taken such an interest in talking with you.” I told him I didn’t, he explained, I said there had been some sort of misunderstanding, he apologized, bought me a beer, and we ended up talking for another hour.

Rivera wasn’t like that. For starters, no gay man I’d ever met had come with a retinue of machete-wielding bodyguards. You expect to see that kind of thing onstage with Madonna, not on the side of the road in Benguet province.

“You know what,” I said to Rivera as confidently as I could, “I haven’t had sex with a gay man, and I’m really not at all interested.”

“Maybe I could change your mind, Chuck.”

“I doubt it.”

Rivera worked the how-do-you-know-you-won’t-like-it-till-you’ve-tried-it angle as though arguing with a kid refusing to eat his lima beans. I told him I’d held out on smoking pot for my entire high school career, and after I’d broken down later I decided I didn’t care for it anyway. This line of argument had a long history of failure with me.

If this was something beyond a very aggressive pickup, it had at least been fairly civilized, but by now we’d run out of things to say, and each of us sensed the time for action was at hand. Between fight, flight, or diplomacy, none of my options looked promising. And then, as if conjured by a magician, a pair of faint, yellow orbs blinked in the distance.

As kids roaming the Juneau streets late at night, we played a game called beady eyeballs. It was a straightforward sport that required the player to stand in the middle of the Loop Road—basically our highway—until a pair of headlights, or “beady eyeballs,” appeared in the distance. The player then engaged in a game of chicken with the oncoming vehicle, holding his ground as the eyeballs became larger, leaping out of tragedy’s way at the last possible instant, scaring the hell out of the driver and confirming his own bravado with the preadolescent peers laid out laughing and critiquing in the ditch. I was pretty good at beady eyeballs, and now for the first and only time in my adult life, I had a chance to revisit that glorious career. Nothing was going to get me out of the middle of the road.

Rivera knew what was on the way before I did. He and his gang backed toward the shoulder of the cracked asphalt. My feet might as well have been cast in concrete. When I heard the whine of the big engine and saw the boxy shape of the bus taking form, I began waving frantically.

No orchestra in the world ever hit a note as sweet as the pneumatic hiss of that Victory Liner bus door opening. I didn’t ask which direction we were heading, just grabbed my bag, blew past the ticket taker, and found an empty seat next to a window. On the road outside, the Benguet gang shadowed my progress as I walked down the aisle.

“Nice meeting you, Chuck,” Rivera said, raising his hand through the open window. “Please don’t travel alone at night anymore. It is not always safe here in the province.”

“Keep in touch,” I said as the bus began rolling and our hands fell apart.

 

My brush with gay machete sex notwithstanding, I’ve never felt more at risk in the Philippines than in any other country. But it’s true that strange things often happen in the Land of the Not Quite Right (as expats used to call it), and stories like mine from Benguet make the P.I. a staple of books such as Fielding’s The World’s Most Dangerous Places. It’s a shame, but the fact stands that potential sodomy is more entertaining than clement weather, reliable public services, and obedient citizenry. After prostitution, “kidnapping” and “terrorism” are the words that many people associate with the P.I. Lured by such newsworthy qualities in the late ’90s, Escape magazine offered to send me to Mindanao, the southernmost major island in the Philippines, center of Islamic culture, and home to its most notorious citizens.

Mindanao appealed to Escape for the same reason Colombia appealed to Maxim: danger. If Intrepid Reporter could walk into the P.I.’s treacherous Muslim-controlled rebel territory and come out with all his limbs attached, fabulous. If he managed to get himself taken hostage or simply disappeared in the forbidding territory, all the better.

Collectively called Moros, the Muslim peoples of Mindanao are by any standard among the toughest and most resilient in the world. While the rest of the P.I. was being subdued by four centuries of foreign colonization, the Moros never stopped fighting for their independence. The Moros are a case study in why you should never, ever expect Muslims to stop fighting any attempts to occupy or exploit lands they consider their own.

Early in the American attempt to pacify the Philippines’ restive Islamic fundamentalists, Colonel Louis La Garde testified before an armaments board to the indomitable will of the Moros that had stunned U.S. forces. Telling of a relentless Moro who’d charged a group of Americans, La Garde described an entire squad opening fire on the man from a hundred yards away. Through a hail of bullets, the Filipino continued to charge. Just five yards from the firing party, he finally fell, but continued to struggle. It took a shot through the head with a .45-caliber Colt revolver to kill him and end the grisly incident.

“There were ten wounds in his body from the service rifle,” said La Garde. “Three of the wounds were located in the chest, one in the abdomen, and the remainder had taken effect in the extremities. There were no broken bones.” All that in addition, of course, to the bullet through the skull.

America is still fighting Muslims in Mindanao. A few weeks after 9/11, the Pentagon sent Special Forces and other troops to the island to deal with Abu Sayyaf, the Muslim separatist group charged with running terrorist camps there. Organizations such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front—known by the unintentionally agreeable acronym MILF—also drew American attention. Before the Iraq invasion, Mindanao was for a brief time the “second front,” after Afghanistan, in the war on terror. It remains today the focus of U.S. antiterrorism efforts in Southeast Asia.

Even Mindanaons are afraid of Mindanao. One of my duties for Escape in 1997 was to check out a medium-sized city in the interior of the island called Marawi, regarded as the burning and bloody heart of Muslim culture in the country. In the Philippines, taxis and eager drivers are as common as palm trees. But it took most of the morning in the coastal city of Cagayan de Oro to find someone daring enough to make the run to Marawi. The first two guys I asked laughed in my face.

“Marawi? Too dangerous,” they said.

“What’s dangerous?”

“For the foreigner, kidnappers, Muslims.”

“What about for Filipinos?”

“This year, more than once, a taxi goes to Marawi from Cagayan and does not return. The driver is found in Lake Lanao. The car is never recovered.”

“Marawi is a Muslim city,” they concluded, laying the matter to rest in terms that even a dumbshit with a death wish should have grasped.

Eventually I came across a paunchy, fortyish guy with rheumy eyes named Carlos. He tripled his price, sucked on his teeth with disapproval, and agreed to take me on the condition that we return by nightfall. Two hours later, twenty miles from Marawi, Carlos’s already stoic face had become a death mask.

“We are in Muslim territory now.” He mumbled the words like an epitaph as veiled women, soldiers in jungle fatigues carrying M16s, and the distinctive onion shapes of mosque domes began to appear out of the sweltering jungle. We eased into town and soon got bogged down in a traffic snarl on a crowded street.

“‘Marumi’ means ‘dirty’ in Tagalog,” Carlos said, pointing at a garbage can spilled across a sidewalk. “Sometimes we call Marawi City ‘Marumi City’ because it’s so dirty.”

For most of the drive, Carlos had been sociable and courteous—two virtues that define almost every Filipino I’ve ever known. But his Muslim paranoia was getting me down and, as this was my first overseas gig for Escape, I didn’t want to miss any opportunity to get myself killed. I grabbed my camera and hopped out of the car, telling Carlos to circle the block a few times.

“Mr. Thompson, do not get out here!” he shouted. “Wait for a safer place!”

For a second it looked like Carlos’s fears might be justified. I hadn’t walked twenty yards from the car before a guy in a long, loose-fitting blue robe intercepted me in the street, grabbed my arm, and insisted I come with him. Since he was old and seemed more friendly than hostile, I followed him. He turned out to be a corn dealer who said he wanted to personally welcome me to Marawi. In his shop, hundreds of pounds of shucked corn were drying in the ninety-degree heat. He invited me to inspect his product and delivered a short speech about the importance of corn and coconuts as Mindanao cash crops. He introduced me to his three daughters—all wearing black veils over their heads, but not their faces—who helped him run the business. As I left the store, the old man forced a glass of water on me, shook my hand like he was mixing cookie batter, and smiled as if he were seeing off one of his five sons.

All over town the reception was the same. Two men who sold furniture waved me in off the sidewalk and offered me food and water. At a busy intersection, a cop made a big show of stopping traffic and personally escorted me across his street while drivers hung out their windows praising Allah on my behalf. Instead of being threatened in Marawi, I felt like a long-lost nephew dropped into someone’s family reunion, smothered by an endless stream of kissy aunts and sloshed uncles. I wandered for an hour chatting up the locals before finding Carlos parked in an alley, stewing in the front seat.

“Seems like a decent place,” I said, trying to buck up the lump beside me. “Let’s go grab some lunch.”

Carlos stared through the windshield. He rebuked me for running off and reminded me of the fate of the cabbies who had been fished out of Lake Lanao. I said I understood his position but reminded him how much I was paying and that I hadn’t come all the way to Marawi just to look out the windows.

“Frankly, I don’t think you’re giving these people a fair shake,” I said. “I could’ve eaten ten free meals in the last hour if I’d wanted.”

“It is true; most Muslims are good people,” Carlos finally allowed. “But the Muslim problem is they have some very bad element. If they have problem, their solution is murder and kidnap. If Christian has problem, they are not murder and kidnap people.”

“Maybe from the Muslim perspective the Christians have the national army and Americans to do their dirty work.”

“There is truth in this. What you say is what we already know.”

“So, there are problems on both sides. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.”

“Yes. As long as we are out of town by dark.”

At Marawi’s central mosque, people finally seemed more intent on their own business than mine. Carlos and I met a thin, middle-aged man named Ahmad.

“Perhaps it is an incongruous combination to you, these banana trees and mosques,” Ahmad joked as best he could in his formal English.

“Maybe a little surprising,” I said diplomatically. “But not necessarily out of place.”

Carlos smiled politely but said nothing. After Ahmad went inside the mosque, I finally gave in to Carlos’s simmering impatience and headed back toward the car. He smiled and said his wife and children would be relieved to see him. Like a stable horse turned around toward home, he drove twice as fast on the way back, and we made it to Cagayan de Oro in time for cocktails.

 

It wasn’t the war on terror but a more romantic conflict that brought me back to the Philippines in 2002. Since it’s impossible for anyone under thirty to recall a time when carrying an American passport abroad didn’t make you the biggest douche bag in the room, it’s only natural that the media has made a fetish of World War II, the crowning social, technical, and military achievement in American history. The site of some of the Pacific theater’s most critical battles—names like Bataan, Corregidor, Leyte, and Manila still resonate with many Americans—the Philippines was the first stop on my twenty-five-site Asian tour for the World War II travel-guide project.

One of the poorest provinces in the Philippines, Leyte is a ninety-mile-long island where little has changed since the B-29 Superfortress ruled the skies and if you were American, your name was automatically “Hey, Joe!” When I was there, the airport used the same runway laid out by American Seabees during the war. Down the coast a plaque still marks the spot where in 1944 a stealthy former Boy Scout named Valeriano Abello used semaphore flags to alert American warships to the locations of entrenched Japanese defenders.

“Don’t bomb beaches,” he waved. “There are civilians. Let me direct the shellings.”

After anxious debate aboard the ships, the American invaders gambled that Abello wasn’t a Japanese plant. They flashed a reply: “Come immediately—awaiting.”

Credited with risking his own life to save countless others, Abello became a local hero. He died on the island in 1999. World War II is full of these kinds of amazing stories, which is why its legacy will never die and the History Channel will never go off the air.

Leyte’s pièce de résistance is a larger-than-life bronze sculpture near the village of Palo depicting the famous landing party led by General Douglas MacArthur. It was here in 1944 that MacArthur made good on his famous “I Shall Return” promise by wading ashore after the U.S. Navy had obliterated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. MacArthur had been commander of all armed forces in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked in 1941. After his humiliating withdrawal from the islands, his subordinates were forced to surrender seventy-eight thousand Fil-Am troops to the Japanese, the largest capitulation of soldiers in American history. The ensuing Bataan Death March endured by many of those men remains the United States’ most grievous battlefield disaster.

MacArthur’s return was redemption not only for him but the entire Philippines, which suffered often inhuman brutality under Japanese military rule. Controversial among American veterans and historians, in the P.I., MacArthur is revered to this day with something approaching religious idolatry. His 1961 “sentimental journey” to the Philippines—his first visit since the end of the war—arguably marked the twentieth-century high point of American prestige throughout Asia, even if the general had to make the trip without “Dimples,” his longtime Filipina mistress, whose existence proved that under the stars and chest decorations MacArthur had a heart and taste for Filipina babes like any other grunt.

“To the Filipinos, he was nothing less than superhuman,” wrote journalist Stanley Karnow, who covered MacArthur’s valedictory visit and later authored the best book yet written about the Philippines, In Our Image. Along Mac’s parade route, thousands of admirers leaned from windows, climbed lampposts, waved signs proclaiming him “Our Savior,” and surrounded his car for fleeting glimpses of the legend. Children sang to him. Girls threw flowers in his path.

Even if you don’t care for bumpy runways and malaria-filled jungles, the Philippine provinces are great reminders that the world really did once love Americans. In Leyte, the goodwill remains. As I walked the shore in front of the MacArthur monument at Red Beach, a raspy “Hey, Joe” caught my attention. A short, wiry older guy with a few knocked-out teeth was walking my way with quick, tiny steps. He asked if I was American and invited me to his house a few minutes up the beach.

Three middle-aged guys sat outside the hut, smoking cigarettes and, alarmingly it seemed to me, passing around an old plastic jug of Prestone antifreeze. The jug was filled with a nuclear orange fluid, which they poured into small glasses and guzzled. The old guy introduced me to his pals, and they introduced me to tuba, the P.I.’s famed homemade hooch made from the sap of a coconut tree. Once the fermenting process begins, the sap turns sour after a few days. Eight to twelve weeks later, it becomes pure vinegar. Somewhere in between it’s pronounced tuba and declared ready for combat.

The boys offered me a taste. It went down like a rake through gravel. I shook my head and looked at the sediment in the bottom of the empty glass. The Prestone carafe suddenly made sense. Whatever dregs of radiator coolant were left over presumably made the tuba taste better.

I coughed and said, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” The guys ate this up and poured me a second round. I threw it back and made a violent stab at my water bottle.

People who ridicule bottled water as the pinnacle of American consumer gullibility must not travel much. What those critics fail to realize is that we aren’t buying the water, we’re buying the bottle. More to the point, we’re buying mobility. In places like Leyte, invaluable peace of mind comes from knowing there’s always a clean rinse handy in the event you cut open your leg on a thorny plant or are called upon to pour rancid coconut sap down your throat. Make fun of bottled water all you like, it won’t change the fact that it has opened obscure back roads and tuba socials to millions of travelers.

The boys and I sat outside doing tuba shots for an hour. Instead of drinking, the old guy talked. He’d been a kid during the war and had ended up working for twenty years in the ship-repair facilities at Subic Bay. All of his stories placed Americans in a supremely positive light, which I assumed was meant to put his somewhat tuba-wary American guest at ease. Given all the Philippines had been through, I told him I found his uncompromising support of the United States a little surprising.

“We still love you guys,” he said through the cigarette smoke and tuba fumes. “See all those people back there?” He meant the MacArthur monument. “Leyte’s shrine is a national treasure. At least once in their life, every Filipino will visit this place to pay their respects.”

I asked him if he thought America was still the same country it had been in MacArthur’s day. He waved his hand in front of his face.

“I’ve been talking to guys like you since 1944,” he said. “Only the haircut changes. You know what I tell everyone who complains about the Americans? I was there in 1992 when all the guys shipped out to the Middle East. I supported them. I worked for them. Do you know why? Because they did the same job there that General MacArthur did here. You tell me something. What would the Middle East look like today if the Americans didn’t kick Saddam Hussein’s butt out of Kuwait?”

I told him I had no idea. Before he could reply, one of the guys leaned over with the Prestone jug and said, “Have some more tuba and maybe you’ll be able to figure it out.”

 

After photographing the MacArthur monument from every possible angle, inspecting the silent guns of Corregidor, and walking and driving the length of the Bataan Death March, I finished my World War II research in Manila. Like Bangkok, Jakarta, and a handful of other festering, beggar-laden Third World megatropolises, Manila is one of the great sprawling shitholes of Asia, a reeking mess of poverty, traffic, smog, crime, corruption, and filth. Bursting with people who somehow maintain a bulletproof optimism in the face of decay, disorder, and daily tragedy, these are frenetic slum-cities where anything, from blow jobs to military coups, can happen at any time. Cities that you love just slightly more than you loathe.

For those unacquainted with the region, “sprawling Asian shithole” is employed as a term of endearment and does not apply, for instance, to cities such as Seoul, which are simply sprawling and Asian and shitty while lacking any sense of the epic or unexpected. Against my advice, Glasser once took a yearlong teaching job in Seoul, and the debriefings he sent as his tenure dragged on bore increasingly dark subject lines like “The Horror That Is South Korea.”⁷

The first person I looked up in Manila was Helen Mendoza. A legend among the world’s small community of Philippines scholars, Helen has a master’s degree in English literature from Stanford and a PhD in American literature from the University of Minnesota. I mention her credentials because it’s always worth reminding people that in spite of widespread perception, only a fraction of Filipina women, or Thai women for that matter, are engaged in the sex trade. (Not that half the stories in this book are going to tear down stereotypes.)

For years Helen has run a guesthouse and research office in Manila for visiting students and professors. She’d been a robust sixty-seven when I’d last seen her in 1993, and the intervening years hadn’t aged her. We ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant, during which I asked if Bantai was still living at the house.

“Sadly, Bantai is no longer with us,” Helen said.

I said I was sorry, and we told a few Bantai stories, laughing about the night I’d met him.

Enclosed within a high metal wall, Helen’s guesthouse was actually a long, two-story dormitory with about ten rooms that faced the two-story home in which she lived. The space between the dorm and the house formed a courtyard where visitors socialized outside, house girls washed laundry by hand, and birds flitted in and out of wide shade trees.

When I was a guest in 1993, my room on the top floor of the dorm faced the courtyard. My first night, I was awakened in the early hours by the sound of a man wheezing and coughing at irregular intervals. My uncle Ralph had died from emphysema, and I imagined some similar respiratory affliction was behind this man’s unnerving death rattle.

Though still weak, the coughing became heavier and steadier as the night wore on. When I heard frantic choking noises, I got out of bed and rushed to the window. The sound seemed to be coming from outside, so I stared down at the courtyard. The choking stopped. The courtyard was empty. A few minutes after I got back into bed, the coughing started up again and continued to wake me at intervals throughout the night.

This scenario repeated itself for the next two or three nights. An hour after lights-out, the wheezing and coughing would begin. I’d get up, look out the window, wander along the outer walkway, see nothing, go back to bed, and wake up sporadically till dawn to the sound of a man struggling to maintain his fragile hold on life.

Imagining the old man might be Helen’s husband (I’d met her only a few days before) or some infirm resident, I decided not to risk offending anyone by asking about the coughing. During the day I kept an eye out for likely suspects, but aside from me the only other men around the place were Lauren, an expat student from Ohio, and a professor from Michigan who didn’t look terribly fit but who I doubted was on the verge of a dirt nap. Able to stand the mystery no longer, I finally raised the subject of the sick old man as Helen and I sat outside one evening having iced tea.

“It’s weird,” I said. “I can hear this guy coughing and wheezing all night long, but I can’t see him anywhere. I’ve looked all over the courtyard. I even opened the gate and walked around the block last night.”

“You know we Filipinos are big believers in the supernatural,” Helen said. “Maybe you are being visited by a ghost.”

I told Helen that at this point I wasn’t discounting anything. She laughed and shook her head.

“I am sorry to say you are not being haunted,” she said. “Come this way.”

Helen led me around the side of the courtyard to a bushy spot where the fence formed a corner near the back of her house. Trash cans and cardboard boxes were stacked against the hedge and fence. She moved one of the garbage cans and pointed at the ground. Huddled against the fence, quivering as it slept, lay the body of a tiny, pitiful animal. Clumps of hair were missing from at least half its emaciated torso. Though it appeared to be a dog, perhaps some sort of mixed spaniel, the creature was so reduced and frail that discerning an actual breed was next to impossible. If it hadn’t been for the shaking, I would have assumed the thing had flat-lined earlier in the week and was being thrown out with the garbage.

“Say hello to Bantai,” Helen said, reaching down to stroke the dog’s eczema-ridden belly. Bantai stirred momentarily, then lapsed back into semiconsciousness.

“This poor animal,” Helen said. “He has cataracts so he’s almost blind. As you can see, all of his legs are still attached, but only three of them are in working order. He barely has the strength to eat. And he has liver flukes. That’s what makes his barking sound like a person coughing.”

“Barking?” I said. “You’re telling me that the coughing I’ve been hearing all week has been this dog’s idea of barking?”

“Of course,” Helen said indignantly. “That is his job. In Tagalog, ‘bantai’ means ‘protector.’ He is our watch-dog.”

I burst out laughing.

“I don’t see what’s so hilarious,” Helen said.

I told her I was laughing because it didn’t look to me like “Bantai” was capable of protecting his own water dish, much less the house. Helen smiled at me, then looked down at the forlorn Bantai. She gave his repulsive belly another rub.

“That’s all right,” she said, ignoring my laughter. “Bantai’s been around for a long time, and he’s always done his job as well as he’s needed to. The truth is, it’s never been as dangerous around here as everybody would like to believe.”