by J. E. Park
We agreed that Tala and Mari would not go with me to the base. Every bar girl working in Olongapo was sure to be there, as would a lot of American military men hoping for one last hurrah before departing. Neither of us wanted Mari exposed to that, so I was going back to Subic Bay alone. Or so I thought.
Sergeant Tejada was waiting for me when I stepped out of the gate. “You need a ride?”
I threw my bag in the back of TJ’s patrol vehicle and jumped into the passenger seat. Before I could thank him for his offer, he sped off and said, “You no worry ‘bout Tala and Mari. Dey gonna be okay. I take care op dem. Apter you ship leave, da city hire private security to protect da port.”
“Blue shirts?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Tejada said, grinning at me. “You very observant, aren’t you? I know da guy who doing da hiring, and I get Tala to work dere. It good job. Pay very good. I get Lorna job dere, too. It much better dan da grocery she workin’ at now.”
That was a load off of my shoulders. Changing topics, I asked, “You getting everything straightened out in Barrio Barretto?”
“Oh yeah,” TJ answered, smiling like he was having a lot of fun with that. “Da new order op t’ings around here already beginning, Doyle. Da Barretto boys, dey pinished. All gone. Most op dem dead. Da pew dat lept, dey run away to Manila or Angeles. Dey get da message dey no welcome here no more. I hope Pagsanjan next. I gonna go dat way and spread da word about what dat prick Paulino Favila did during da war next week. Den, we gonna be getting us some op dose sick poreigners going dere por our kids.”
Tejada asked me to light him a cigarette. He could not do it himself and drive at the same time with his arm in a sling. “You know, I gonna miss da Americans, but in da long run, dis gonna be better por my country. It sad to live in a giant whorehouse. Dere gonna be a lot op new money comin’ in, a lot op new opportunity por my people. Ip we do dis right, girls no having to come here and sell dey bodies to get somet’ing to eat. Dey pind real jobs in Olongapo. We just gotta keep new bad guys prom pilling in da vacuum lept by da old bad guys.”
“Yeah, I guess that’ll be the challenge, won’t it?” I said as I passed the sergeant his smoke.
“It sure will. Dere is already a lot op gang boys coming down prom da barrios up nort’. Dey in town now, watchin’ you guys leaving, making trouble. We watching dem, dough, taking pictures. Da streets here be empty tomorrow. Ip dey show dey paces again, we gonna make dem wish dey stay north.”
“You think you can actually do it? Clean this place up?” I asked.
TJ shrugged. “No, we no gonna ever end da crime. Dere too many poor people here. We no gonna stop da girls selling demselves either. Most op da girls, dey gonna go to Manila, or dey go home. Dose dat stay, we gonna move to Barrio Barretto. Da guys who run good sape places on Magsaysay, who take care op dey girls, we gonna let dem buy da Barretto bars. Olongapo por business, Barretto for girls, San Felipe por our surfing resort, right?”
I laughed, but did not commit. This caused Tejada to ask, “You in wit us or what?”
“Still thinking about it, TJ,” I lied.
“What dere to t’ink about?”
“For Christ’s sake,” I started. “It might be a little much for me here. TJ, I was only here for a month. I nearly got killed four times. Then almost died by eating bagoong. We didn’t shit the bed; we practically shit the entire apartment!”
The sergeant roared in laughter. “Yeah, I hear about dat! You guys shit da pish market too! Dat pucking punny! You no almost die prom bagoong, dough.”
“I sure wished I was dead.”
“Ha! I bet you did! I bet da girls who clean your apartment wish you dead too!” When he stopped laughing, Tejada looked at me and said, “Hey, dose guys who go apter you? Dat shit all over. We got dem all. Dere no one lept por you to worry about.”
“What about the Master Chief? Is there anyone left that he needs to worry about?”
“You no have to worry about anyone goin’ apter da master chiep.” I noticed that TJ did not bother looking me in the eye when he said that. He knew it was a lie as much as I did. It would be a long time before the Philippines became a place where Olongapo Earp did not have to look over his shoulder again.
That was why I was not coming back with him. Ever.
*****
As expected, the streets in front of the base were complete chaos. Every American military man not on duty was out there, as was every one of their girlfriends. A throng of pickpocket street urchins added to the unruly mob. So did the broadcast journalists of a dozen different countries. There were also several conspicuous groups of young delinquents walking the crowd, looking to stir up trouble.
Tejada and I met the rest of my division at the Captain’s Mast. Tony Bard, who had a new girl on his arm, shoved a glass of Bullfrog into my hands. “Last chance to drink, Doyle! Bottoms Up!”
Looking to dull my separation from Tala and Mari, I did as asked and then ordered another. I looked around and, not seeing my other roommate, asked, “Where’s Dixie?”
Bard grinned and pointed his thumb up in the air. “Upstairs. In one of the boom-boom rooms.”
Of course he was. I scanned the crowd. Claude Metaire was at the Mast with a couple of his girls, as was Clay Fordson with his. Steve Kent was further back into the bar, in a dark corner, with another. John Palazzo was closer to me, sitting by himself. I walked over to him while collecting my third drink. “You alone here?”
Palazzo grinned. “Yeah.”
“How did that happen?”
“I’m on the Injured Reserve List,” he laughed. Palazzo was sloppy drunk, unable to even sit upright. “I got friction burn. Bad.”
After getting a drink for Tejada and me, I walked back outside to find him speaking with Master Chief Darrow and Lorna. My boss was a mess. He was even drunker than Palazzo, pressing his face up against his son’s as he held him up high, crying like a baby in plain sight of everyone. It was too much for me to take in, so I took a few steps up the block and lit myself a cigarette.
As I smoked, I saw a woman walking toward us in the street, bawling even harder than Darrow. She was pulling a boy about Little Bradley’s age behind her. It was evident that his father was American. “Mama, where is daddy going?” I heard him ask in Tagalog.
“Away,” she sobbed.
“Where?”
“He’s going home.”
The little boy looked confused. “Then why is he not with us?”
“He’s not going to our home, Micky. He’s going to his home.”
I could see the look of confusion flash across the boy’s face. His little head was trying to reconcile that his father’s home was now in a different place than his was. Before he had a chance for it to sink in, though, a group of young toughs called out to his mother. “Hey, whore! Whose dick are you going to have to suck to feed your little monkey man now!”
As the punks busted out in laughter, I took a step to go after them, but Tejada reached out and stopped me. “What? You no have enough trouble here, Doyle?” the sergeant asked. “Don’t worry about it, we gonna get to dose maddapukkas tomorrow.”
He was right. What was I going to do anyway? As they passed, I glared at them. One of the hoods spotted me staring and shouted out in Tagalog, “What, tough guy? You have something to say to me?” He had no idea that I understood every word he said.
“Oo!” I called out to him. “Halika sa tabi ng kalye na ito! Mag-uusap tayo!” I was inviting him over to my side of the street so that we could talk.
Except for Sergeant Tejada, none of my friends within earshot understood what I had said. They recognized my tone of voice, though. One after one, they set their drinks down and stepped up beside me to let the thugs know that I was not there by myself. When the punks saw the odds were about nine-to-four, they reconsidered taking me up on my offer. After realizing that Tejada was with us, they gave up completely and sauntered off in another direction.
When Dixie joined us fifteen minute
s later, we ordered a final round of drinks, toasting Olongapo one more time. We then guzzled them dry. After the last glass was drained, Tony Bard looked at his watch and announced, “It’s seventeen forty-five, boys! Time!” We said our goodbyes to Sergeant Tejada and set to herding our men toward the Shit River Bridge.
We were only a couple of blocks away from the base, but getting there was not easy. The sidewalks were so packed that the mob spilled into the street, gridlocking the traffic enough to bring it to a complete stop. All around us, women were bawling. They wept not so much for sweethearts gone, but for the realization that their last hope of starting a new life was leaving with us. As the ladies cried, the roving bands of young men taunted them. The derelicts mocked their tears and made lewd comments about what they were going to do to them after we left.
A reporter from the BBC stuck a microphone in my face as I pushed my way through the crowd. “Sir! Sir! Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share about the American military leaving the Philippines after nearly a century?”
“Sure,” I answered. “This is a beautiful country and, aside from this stuff you see here, it’s full of beautiful people. They deserve the right to determine their own path. I'll miss this place, though, and I wish them the best.”
“Thank you,” the pretty young English reporter told me. “Can I ask you another question? What do you think of President-Elect Bill Clinton’s plans to allow homosexuals into the American military?”
The question caught me completely off-guard. The status of homosexuals in the Navy had nothing to do with the closure of Subic Bay. The inquiry was out of place, but what floored me was something else entirely. “What? Did you say ‘President-Elect Bill Clinton?’ Clinton won the election?” George Bush just won the Gulf War the year before. I figured that he would ride the wave of post-victory patriotism right into a second term. I never even considered the possibility that he could lose.
The reporter laughed at me. “Yes, Bill Clinton won the election.”
“Holy shit,” I said, ruining the chances of the footage ever making the airwaves. “When did that happen?”
“About a month ago. Where have you been?”
Shaking my head, I looked at her and said, “Lady, you have no idea.”
Delayed by the reporter, I was one of the last of us to cross Columban Road. Finding Bard, Dixie, and Metaire huddled in a group at the foot of the bridge, I asked, “Have we got everybody?”
“All except one,” Dixie said, staring across the street back at the crowd, his mouth agape.
“Who are we missing?”
“Zhe mastair cheef,” Claude answered, staring off in the same direction as Kevin.
I tried to see what they were looking at, scanning the crowd.
“Doesn’t Master Chief’s wife watch a lot of CNN?” I heard Tony Bard ask.
“Yeah,” I answered. “She uses it to learn English. Why?”
Tony didn’t have to answer. I found what they were looking at. On the edge of the mob, illuminated by a camera crew, Master Chief Darrow was talking to a CNN correspondent. Those reporters hit the jackpot with that guy. He was a hulking man, standing over six-feet-tall and covered collar bone to ankles in old school Sailor Jerry tattoos. They knew he was as tough as he looked, and they had him on record, howling like a baby. With his Filipina girlfriend crying on one shoulder and his son sobbing into the other, they could not have found a more touching visual.
After seeing that, I was pretty confident that Jung Darrow would have divorce papers filed before the USS Belleau Wood even left the pier.
*****
The following morning was a lot like leaving San Diego. There were bands and there were speeches. One flag was lowered and a different one was raised. There were more speeches and handshakes, more photo opportunities, and several rounds of accolades. Then we were called to man the rails, the mooring lines were lifted, and the tugboats arrived to push us away from the pier.
It was a somber occasion, and the sailors manning the rails were pensive and silent. Hearts were very heavy. Most of the men had fallen into lust for a few weeks, but many genuinely believed that they were in love. Some of us were somewhere in between and had not had enough time to decide. We were losing forever the opportunity to come back and figure it out.
Most of the crew felt like they were going to miss someone in Olongapo, but Master Chief and I had people there that we were abandoning. He was leaving behind a little boy of mixed race, thus vulnerable to harsh ostracism as long as his father was not there to shield him from it. Mari was not my flesh and blood, but I feared for her future as if she were. Tala had a new job for now, but what if it did not work out? What if she had to go back to working the bars? How long could she keep a path open for Mari to escape that life if she could not escape it herself?
As the city of Olongapo faded into the distance, my heart sank. I realized that I had missed an opportunity to make a big difference in a little girl’s life. I could have saved her from a grim future, but I blew it. I blew it because, deep down inside, I simply knew that I would never get over the things her mother did to survive. Now that it was too late, it was occurring to me that what Tala did for Mari did not make her unworthy of me at all.
It was I who was unworthy of them.
*****
CHAPTER 28
W e were somewhere between Luzon and Taiwan when we heard the boatswain’s whistle pipe through the 1MC. That was our signal that the captain was about to make an announcement. After a pause to give the crew a chance to give him their attention, Captain Fleming’s voice filled the air.
“Good evening Devil Dogs. This is your captain speaking. First and foremost, I want to thank you for a successful mission in providing support to personnel shutting down the Subic Bay Naval Station. We completed our task far ahead of schedule. It was a historic moment where you were under the eyes of the nation, and you carried yourselves accordingly. I know everyone also enjoyed some great liberty and acquired some memories that will last you a lifetime. I am also proud to say that liberty incidents were minimal, and I want to thank all you Devil Dogs for your good work.” I managed to keep myself from laughing out loud at the part where he praised our conduct out in town.
Before continuing, the captain cleared his throat. “Men, with the mission to Subic Bay now behind us, I want all of you who are not on watch to get in front of a television set within the next fifteen minutes. It’s important that you see firsthand what is being said about us back home. The eyes of the country are always upon us, every day and every minute. We must always remember that and act with professionalism, courage, and kindness. That is all I am going to say for now. I want everyone to see the tape we are playing at 18:30. We will play it again on Channel 5 every two hours to ensure everyone has the chance to watch it. I will address you again tomorrow. Good evening, Devil Dogs.”
I was in the hangar bay when the announcement sounded. The EMO was the closest CSE division space that had a television in it, so that's where I went. It was dinner time, so most everyone else was in their berthing areas or eating in the galley. Lieutenant Krause, Darrow, and I were the only ones in the division’s office. “You know what this is about?” I asked my master chief.
“Not a clue,” he answered. “What about you, Lieutenant?”
Krause looked at both of us and grinned. “I’ve got an idea. You’ll see.” With that, he reached up and turned on the TV.
As advertised, the show started right on time. It was the tape of an American news program made with a low-quality VHS recorder back in the US. The first thing it showed was footage of our ship leaving San Diego on our way to Sasebo. I guessed it was pulled from one of the network’s Southern California affiliates.
A familiar female reporter’s voice was narrating. “The USS Belleau Wood has a reputation as being the Pacific Fleet’s floating ‘Animal House’…”
The rest of her sentence was drowned out by the entire ship erupting into cheers and applause at once.
The radio room next door was so loud that I could not hear what was being said, but I did not have to. The scene they were broadcasting showed Macklemore punching GM2 Crowley out on the pier as we were getting ready to leave San Diego. Darrow and I both buried our faces in our hands. I recently wondered if I would ever get to see that footage, and there it was.
As the noise subsided, we heard the reporter continue. “…sparking a massive melee in Tijuana, Mexico, a few months before leaving California. The crew was also involved in a bar brawl at the Enlisted Man’s Club in Japan shortly after their arrival that caused extensive damage. The antics of the Belleau Wood’s crew took a deadly turn on October 27th, however, when two sailors brutally assaulted one of their own, beating him to death in the public restroom of a Japanese park.”
The cheering stopped abruptly. The story on the television was about David Miller’s murder.
The report was hard to watch. I could not point out anything in it that was factually incorrect, but its viewpoints were biased against us to an enraging extent. For instance, we later heard from friends in San Diego that the crew went to a sports bar frequented by 32nd Street sailors. They interviewed scores of them about what they thought of Clinton’s plans to allow homosexuals in the military. The response to that question was almost universally along the lines of, “We don’t like it, but we’re in the Navy. We follow orders and will have no choice but to accept it.”
None of that was broadcast, however. What they showed was footage of two inebriated knuckle-draggers stupid enough to go on camera and say, “I guess I’ll have to start killing fags.”
The reporters then trotted out a Belleau Wood fireman I had never seen before. He spoke at length of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his fellow engineers after he had fallen under suspicion of being gay aboard our ship. The reporter then interviewed another former sailor who left the military years before after being outed. That man expressed some pretty outrageous claims. He made it sound as if murdering gay men by throwing them overboard was an everyday occurrence.