Vic Socotra

05 August 2009

The ‘Po

(Club B-29 Portrait)

Olongapo is gone, the one we knew, but it lives in dreams. Fevered dreams, the mind’s lens distorted by alcohol and desire, and lubricated by sweat.

It is quite over, and has been for years, since Mount Pinatubo blow its stack and gave everyone the excuse to end the acrimony.

The Base is still there, or at least the bones of it. The aircraft on poles that decorated squadron installations have been taken down. The Club is there, though it is a hotel, and the furnishings to the legendary bar are in Pensacola, FL; the PX remains, though it is now a duty-free store. The Arthur Radford Field is still there, though it is a FedEx hub. The tough little Negritos are still at the Jungle Evasion and Suvival School, though it is now a zoo of sorts.

Of course, it always was.

During the Vietnam conflict, the nightclub district of the Po was able to handle the disparate and simultaneous recreational needs of three aircraft carrier battle groups. By my day, the city had adapted to satisfy the carnal desires of Midway , the local lady and her swift gray acolytes, and the periodic arrival of the West Coast Show-Boat groups of Ranger, Connie and Coral Sea.

I have ventured down the path of attempting to describe it, and may do so again. It was an earthy carnival that waited at the end of the river of dollars that kept the Naval Reservation and its sprawling components of the Subic Bay and the Naval Air Station at Cubi Point afloat.

I cannot do it justice in the space and time permitted. The first few minutes of he film “An Officer and a Gentleman,” were filmed right there with the backdrop as it existed in those days, and the monkeys really did race out from the trees next to the golf course to steal balls, and Romi really did pour Cubi Specials at the BOQ bar along side a .25-cent Cubi Dog, and outside the gate the scrawny little brown kids, some with blue eyes, begged for alms.

Rattan furniture and intricate carved wood. Cheap t-shirts with crude silk-screened messages. Young women from the provinces, old beyond their years.

There was exploitation and the enormous cruelty of crushing poverty, and there was love and laughter and theft and confusion. Ducklings fed to alligators; dogs stolen and eaten; serial polygamous American-Filipino families created by regular deployments.

Sigh.

It was a complex place, and sickly sweet, like a fried plantain doused with syrup left to congeal in the relentless moist heat.

It did not take long for the place to cloy on the palate. A four-day port-visit was normally about all I could handle.

That was not the case for the troops. Olongapo was designed for the enlisted sailor. The price was right for kids making nothing much, but who mayh have had a couple paychecks in the front pocket of their dungarees, and they could live like princes for a few days. You could live quite comfortably on a retired Chief’s pay, if you cared to do it, and that is what many 7th Fleet sailors did.

A dear friend wrote me this morning about her days as a young Navy wife in the Philippines just after the Korean War.

Her husband was assigned to a squadron based at NAS Sangley Point, one of the dozens of installations around Manila Bay. Part of the deal of independence struck between President Roxas and the Three Generals- Macarthur, Electric and Motors- was a century-long lease for twenty-three military bases to house the American infrastructure in the Far East.

That was consolidated into two vast reservations north of the capital; the naval complex at Subic and the Army Air Corps at Clark Air Base.

A few special sites, including the spooks at San Miguel and the resort at Camp John Hay were retained as well, but Manila was essentially cleansed of the Colonial presence, even as two low-rent and thoroughly secular Disneylands were created elsewhere.

Bobbie K. Hubbard retired right there in Subic, right in the heart of Disneyland. He may have been fighting liver cancer this past year.
As my old boss Vinnie observed, “He was one helluva Intelligence Specialist, and was the very best leading chief on Midway,” and for my money, he was the best shipmate and mentor a young officer could have.

If he was not cursing you or banging you against a locker for doing something stupid.

Hubs settled right into the landscape in retirement, his belly vast and his face inscrutable.. After the treaty for the Subic Bay Naval Station ran out in 1992, the son of the previous mayor (and mayor at the time), Richard Gordon, succeeded in getting the land turned into the Subic Bay Freeport Zone.

Shortly thereafter, most of the places that catered to the service members closed down, causing a severe impact on the local economy. It wasn't as severe as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, which left 14 inches of wet ash on the city.

It was nothing like what happened to Clark, but I will have to tell you about that tomorrow.

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