Vic Socotra

06 August 2009

Grave Diggers

(Clark Cemetery, Angeles City, R.P.)

A long time ago, in a place far away, on this very day of the year, the Army Air Crops dispatched Colonel Paul Tibbets on a special mission. There are pictures of him waving from his hastily-christened B-29 serial number 44-86292 Enola Gay just before take-off.

He and his crew arrived in the skies over Hiroshima at 0815, and thereupon deployed the first atomic device uses in wartime.

The Japanese are stubborn people, and it took the use of another one to make all the madness stop, but that turned the trick. My pal Mac was on the ground in Yokosuka less than a month later, and his stories about that are pretty remarkable.

The United States was the undisputed master of the Pacific then, and stayed that way for almost five years, until another stubborn Asian leader decided he could unify the Korean Peninsula.

There certainly have been some moments since, but from the stalemate of Korea came a sort of equilibrium in which the Navy had absolute ownership of the seas, and was pretty adamant about exercising it. Even during Vietnam, there was no real threat to the independent operations of mighty warships right off the coast of North and South Vietnam, and regularly cycling them for mainenance and R&R through the vast naval base at Subic Bay.

Even after we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in that sad affair, we came and went on the seas as we pleased.

Bobbie K. Hubbard was part of the Vietnam-era Navy, which made McHale’s version of merry bandits look positively tame. The system, in those days, was to draft kids who had the wits not to become rifle-totters in the Army, and exploit them ruthlessly on the gray ships under the tender ministrations of the most remarkable enlisted member of the armed services: The Navy Chief Petty Officer.

The Marines have a similar tradition, investing their NCO’s of equivalent grade with astonishing autonomy, but the Army and Air Force never have had anything like The Chief, and never will. On being selected for CPO, there was an exhausting and humiliating initiation rite that went on for months.

At the end of it, the dungarees were put aside, and the uniform became khaki, like those of the despised officers, but with the proud anchor on the collar that shouted out “I work for a living.”

Bobbie Hubbard was the best of the breed, and woe betide any young officer who thought he could make Bobbie’s troops do anything that The Chief did not want them to do.

I still remember Ensign Morgan, suspended in the air at the end of one of Bobbie’s ham-like hands, face drained of color. You would think that roughing up the junior officers would have had consequences, but it was a different Navy then, and Bobbie made everyone look good if you just got out of his way and let him work.

Anyway, today’s prim Navy left all of us behind, one way or another, and the Fleet is a young person’s game. Bobbie retired in the P.I., the Philippine Islands, which is what the cognoscenti still call the Republic of the Philippines. He lived in Subic, out toward the Barrio Baretta, I think, with his wife of the moment. He did not stop traveling, and took an annual trip for Special Liberty at the pleasure spas of Thailand with his old pal, Mustang Larry.

He lived on his terms, and no others. The low cost of living made his retired pay go along way, and a few schemes kept him in beer money.

Of course, the times had changed. The wild night-life was gone, with only a few clubs remaining to cater to the non-Navy tourist trade. The residual ExPat communities had to reach out to one another; where there were two Fleet Reserve Associations, there became one, and that moribund.

The VFW posts, which welcomed all services, became the de facto American centers after the bases were gone. As an exclusive group, the numbers began to diminish over time, and many of the old sailors and airmen stayed right where they wanted to live.

Dying is part of life, and there was no cemetery that survived the end of Subic Naval Station. There was one just a short Victory Liner journey down the road.

The graveyard at Clark Air Base, now just the Clark Cemetery, was formed between 1947 and 1950 by moving the headstones and remains from at least four other U.S. military cemeteries. They were in the Metro Manila area: Fort Stotsenburg 1 & 2, Fort McKinley, and the Sangley Point Naval Air Station.

The site at Clark was over twenty acres, and had room for 12,000 plots. It is located just inside what was the main gate of Clark Air Base, not far from the legendary Air Start Alley, where you could get just about anything, back in the day. All WWII dead were moved to the American Cemetery in Manila, which had official sponsorship of the US Government. Clark does not.

Clark is an ecumenical place. It contains the remains of U.S. veterans from the Army,m Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Air Force and the Philippine Scouts (PS) and their dependents. Veterans of the Spanish-American, the Philippine Insurrection, WWI, WWII (died after the war), Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars are there, and sooner or later there will be some from Afghanistan. The largest category interred are civilian, mostly U.S. and Filipino and their dependents, all of whom worked for the U.S. Government.

Clark Cemetery was budgeted for and maintained by the U.S. Air Force from 1947 to 1991. When the Air Force departed the Philippines in November 1991, an agreement was struck with the Philippine Air Force to continue maintenance, but was ignored. No maintenance was performed for three years, and you can imagine it was a mess.

The Angeles City VFW Post 2485 took over the job of maintaining the cemetery after deciding the cemetery condition dishonored all veterans buried there. In November 1994, Post 2485 was permitted to maintain the Clark Cemetery and open it for burials of U.S. veterans, including Philippine Scouts. They are even permitted to display the US Flag, which is a big deal there. The current version of the agreement runs through March, 2031.

That is not exactly forever, but it may be as long as any of us reading or writing this will need.

Post 2485 is billed as “the fastest growing in the Pacific,” which must mean all the other organizations are collapsing down into it.

As it turns out, I have a couple pals buried at Clark, which surprised me. In addition to Bobbie, Sergeant Major James Slowey lies there, who I knew in Korea and Japan. He was as amazing a soldier in life as Bobbie Hubbard was a Chief.

The Post has one truck, and a small group called The Grave Diggers who take care of the dead. At one time, support from the U.S. Congress to fund the cemetery made it to Representative Sonny Montgomery in the Committee for Veteran Affairs, but it died for lack of interest.

I think that is a scandal, personally, and dishonors the memory of some Great Americans.

I made out a check in Bobbie’s memory, endorsed to "VFW Post 2485" with a memo of "Cemetery Maintenance Fund.” I mailed it to:

VFW Post 2485
PSC 517, Box RCV
FPO AP 96517-1000

It may be a Fleet Post Office address, but it is actually in a land and time far away.

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