18
Manila
Saturday Night, June 15, 1991
Weekends at our home in Manila combined much-needed family time with a chance for Carmen and me to socialize with friends and neighbors. During the week, I’d be wearing field gear, jumping in and out of helicopters with Bernie and Ernie to get SIGINT gear where it was most needed. On the weekends, the fatigues and combat boots went in the closet, traded for a pair of khaki pants and a sports shirt. These were the best moments, coming back from all the chaos in the countryside to find a little oasis of peace and family in our little neighborhood of ex-pats and diplomats. Playing with my boys or heading out for a nice evening with Carmen on my arm—this was the way I unwound and found a little balance to the pressure of always being “switched on Orange.”
By the late spring, we were getting ready to head back to the United States. After four straight overseas tours in exceptionally dangerous places, I think we were all ready for a break. A short one, for me, as without the good fight to be fought, I knew myself well enough to know I would get restless.
The good fight was being won at last here in the Philippines. The pressure the Philippine Army put on the NPA was growing daily. Raids were taking down entire cells.
Leaders were defecting the ranks and trying to set up their own rival movements. The ABB even split off to become their own urban Marxist insurgency. The ranks—once almost thirty thousand strong—dwindled as the less committed walked away from the revolution. Throughout the world, Marxism had collapsed. The ideology seemed morally and practically bankrupt to an increasing number of its former devotees.
The Philippine Army was finally winning. We’d be leaving the country on a high note. Even better, our country made the long trek back from its post-Vietnam weakness to a place of strength and success once again. The Gulf War ended in a hundred hours in February, our Cold War adversaries were throwing in the towel, and it appeared the world stood poised on the brink of a new era where the threat of nuclear war no longer lingered over our heads.
It was a heady time for sure.
So on one of our last weekends in Manila, Carmen and I headed out to celebrate and enjoy life a little. Along with some other friends, we hit a party in our neighborhood that went late into the night. At the end of it, Carmen and I said our goodbyes, then started walking to our car.
The whole neighborhood lay under a dusting of grayish powder. The cars, parked only a few hours before, were covered with the stuff. I watched as a friend walked over to a car to write “Wash Me” on the trunk with one finger.
Doing so permanently etched the words into the paint.
Unsure but unconcerned about what was going on, we walked the few blocks home within our gated neighborhood. Shortly after we arrived back at the house, our embassy radio net started crackling with a mandatory radio check. Then came the formal announcement: a volcano was erupting north of Manila. Clark Air Base lay less than nine miles from it. Our largest naval base in Southeast Asia, Subic Bay, had been deluged with ash and debris. Clark Air Base had been evacuated. The last people there were just pulling out.
This started back in April when 4,800-foot Mount Pinatubo began venting steam. Until then, the heavily eroded, jungle-covered mountain peak in the Zambales Mountains was not even recognized as a volcano. Several thousand Aeta indigenous people lived on its slopes, and when it began to vent steam, they reported the phenomenon to a Catholic nun, who passed the information along to some governmental officials. A joint American-Filipino team of geologists went and investigated Mount Pinatubo and discovered evidence of a massive eruption some five hundred years before. Deeply concerned, they emplaced sensors around the volcano and set up shop in a building at Clark Air Base to keep watch over this restless giant.
Earthquakes followed through April and May, and the geologists grew alarmed. They gained the ear of the base commander and warned him that a major eruption was probably imminent. The air force stood by and made plans to evacuate the base should it become necessary.
On Monday, June 10, the volcano blew clouds of ash into the air. Magma boiled to the surface. The writing was on the wall: Clark Air Base needed to be evacuated. At 0500, the call went out to get nearly fifteen thousand people—servicemen and -women, their dependents, civilian employees, and so on—out of harm’s way. Long columns of vehicles slowly moved south for Subic Bay while every flyable aircraft took off and redeployed to bases outside the volcano’s reach.
Two days later, the volcano erupted with inconceivable power and ferocity. In a matter of seconds, millions of tons of ash boiled skyward, creating a mushroom cloud twelve miles high. Clark had been abandoned just in time. The ash swirled into the atmosphere, dusting most of Luzon through the rest of the week.
On Saturday, June 15, Typhoon Yunya made landfall on Luzon’s east coast and swept across the island with winds peaking at 120 miles an hour. The heavy downpours triggered flash floods, drowning families as rivers suddenly jumped their banks and swept buildings away. Some 320 people died.
At the same time, Mount Pinatubo exploded with the force of two hundred atomic bombs, proving the eruption on June 12 was just a preshow. The main event blasted volcanic ash and pumice twenty-four miles into the atmosphere. The mushroom cloud created in seconds looked positively apocalyptic.
It continued to erupt throughout the day—six times, in fact. As more ash and ejecta were flung skyward, the eye of Typhoon Yunya passed right by the volcano. The swirling winds flung the ash even farther into the atmosphere, spinning it in all directions. Clouds of ash were blown clear into the Indian Ocean, where unsuspecting airliners flew into them, choking their engines. At least sixteen jetliners suffered a total of $100 million in damage from those unexpected encounters thousands of miles from Luzon. The ash cloud ultimately circled the globe several times, creating a barrier in the atmosphere that not only damaged the earth’s ozone layer but cooled global temperatures by more than a degree for three years.
Simultaneously, the rain soaked the ash still blowing out of the volcano, creating balls of pumice-ash-mud that plunged down on Luzon for miles in every direction. As the storm raged, the wet ash acted almost like wet falling concrete, crushing rooftops and buildings and destroying vehicles. Later estimates concluded that a cubic foot of this stuff weighed thirty-six pounds. In some places, it accumulated so quickly on rooftops that the people below had no chance to get out when their structure collapsed under the sudden weight.
The rain poured down in biblical torrents, creating titanic walls of volcanic mud known as lahars. Sliding down Pinatubo and other peaks at over forty miles an hour, some of these lahars were at least six hundred feet high. They mowed down anything in their path, filling entire river valleys while killing hundreds of villagers. The lahars acted almost like chain saws, slicing through bridges and buildings, tearing apart anything made by man. When the rains ended, the lahars hardened, just like concrete, burying entire stretches of fertile farmland for decades to come.
All the while, earthquake swarms by the thousands rocked Luzon, causing even more damage and misery.
Dave and I counted many friends among the SEAL team stationed at Subic. We made some phone calls over to the base to see what the situation was over there. Our friends reported a sky darkened by ash, widespread destruction, and few supplies on hand. They had no power, no access to cash, and no place functioning where they could cash a check. To compound things, the typhoon slammed into Subic with incredible force.
Things were getting desperate for them.
A few days went by with no relief. Our best friend, “Master Chief Bailey,” called me that morning and said, “Hey, man, we’re really screwed here. We still have no electricity, every business is closed or destroyed. Half the base is evacuated. We’re almost out of groceries.”
“Okay, we’ll take care of it,” I told him.
We put $500 in cash into envelopes for each of the guys, then went around to all the bars and restaurants in Manila that the SEALs liked to frequent, asking for donations. The Filipinos jumped at the chance to help. They gave us cases of beer, canned food, Cokes, and contributed more cash, meat, and other supplies. By the time we were done, both trucks were piled with stuff. We convinced two young policemen to ride shotgun to ensure their safety. We got them on their way to Subic by the end of the afternoon.
At the same time, we received disturbing news that widespread looting had broken out in the towns around Clark Air Base. We used Clark to store our gear. We could not let that fall into the hands of a desperate mob. Sooner or later, it would be sold to the NPA.
I volunteered to take a crew to recover the gear. We used armored vehicles with diplomatic plates, which we kitted up with weapons, ammo, and fuel. With Ernie and one other Agency officer, we again joined forces with a unit friendly to us (I’d been made an honorary member).
We used armored vehicles with XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX with weapons, ammo, and fuel. With Ernie and one other Agency officer, we set off for Clark.
We drove into a monochromatic, apocalyptic landscape of gray ash. It covered everything, including the palm trees, which were bent and squashed under the weight of the stuff. Bandits raided the remaining roads, robbing those just trying to escape. Entire villages had been scraped away by tsunamis of volcanic mud. The roads were torn up, and we had to divert around destroyed bridges. We found one that looked like it had been perfectly cut by a gigantic pair of scissors. A chunk remained on our bank, entirely intact. On the opposite bank, we could see another chunk, equally unharmed. It was bizarre.
The Philippines is a verdant, colorful country. Outside of the cities, the jungles are emerald green, the farmers’ fields striped and lush. The eruption smothered all those colors with layers of grim, gray ash several feet deep in places.
We used to drive to Clark a couple of times a month to shop at the USAF Base Exchange (BX). Carmen and I had become very familiar with the route up. Now, I couldn’t recognize anything. This was an alien place, filled with ruined, abandoned towns, flattened jungle, destroyed vehicles—all coated by that sickly gray “cement.”
We drove through this hellscape for hours until we finally reached Clark Air Base. As we entered the post through the base housing area, we peered through our dirty windshield at a community totally destroyed by looting. Every single house had been stripped down to the studs. Window frames had been pulled out. Drywall yanked out.
Refrigerators dragged off, furniture gone, plywood torn out and hauled away. In places, the houses were little more than skeletons—a few support beams, a wall or two, and part of the roof. We stopped to investigate and discovered that even the copper wiring had been ripped out and taken.
We passed hangars squashed by piles of ash. They looked like giant Coke cans smashed by Thor’s boot. A few aircraft that could not be moved remained. One DC-10 transport jet had been tipped off its nosewheel onto its tail by the accumulation of ash on its horizontal stabilizers. A couple of Vietnam-era F-4 Phantom fighters stood derelict beside an equally ancient F-105 Thunderchief attack bomber. They were sheathed in volcanic mud and ash.
This was a scene straight out of an end-of-the-world Hollywood epic. Not a soul remained on post. The looters evidently had cleared out before our arrival without getting to the warehouses yet. When we reached ours, we found it buried in hardened ash. To open its roll-up door, we had to dig it out with axes, picks, and shovels. It took hard work to clear enough to access the door and roll it up. Inside, we found our gear and truck miraculously intact.
We started loading everything onto the flatbed sometime around noon. As the guys got a handle on that, I decided to recce the area and take some photos for the embassy to document the extent of the damage.
I took one of the armored trucks and drove around, snapping photos. When I came to the base’s auto dealership, I discovered a lahar wave had pulverized it. Cars lay on their sides, thrown atop one another in a violent jumble. Others were simply crushed and smashed, and all of them trapped like giant dead ants in dried ash as hard as concrete.
Similar scenes of destruction existed everywhere. Clark Air Base had simply ceased to exist. There was no way this level of damage could ever be practically repaired. I returned to the warehouse to find two-thirds of the gear loaded onto the truck.
I’d just joined back into the effort when a sound like rolling cannon fire thundered in the distance. We looked around. “What the bloody hell was that?” somebody asked.
A colossal spout of ash rose over Pinatubo. It had erupted again. We stood watching the plume rise higher and higher, spreading out into another mushroom cloud. The awesome power of Mother Nature was never clearer to me than in that moment. It made us feel insignificant, like fleas on an angry elephant.
We humans like to think we’re in control. We’re not. All our creations, our technology, and our firepower paled in comparison to the destructive force of that one volcano.
I made a command decision. “Guys,” I said as the mushroom cloud towered over us and started to block out the sun, “whatever’s on the truck, button it down. We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
Nobody protested. We didn’t get all our gear, but we got most of it. Now we had to save ourselves. The team piled into the armored trucks. I climbed into the flatbed’s driver’s seat and took station in the middle of our convoy.
We rolled out through the ruined base, racing for the main gate even as ash balls and pumice fell around us. Ash piled up on the windshield so quickly I had to turn the wipers on to see enough to drive. They grated and scraped across the glass and screeched in protest like a wounded animal. We kept going, but even as we made it through the gate and onto the main road for Manila, the ash cloud above us blotted out the daylight. We were bathed in eerie darkness, gray pumice and black, snow-like ash falling all around us. Our headlights guided us south through the demolished countryside.
Somehow, we got back to Manila unscathed. When we returned, my spirits were soaring. Here I was, the orphan kid from Cuba, rolling through what became the second-most powerful volcanic eruption of the twentieth century. I’d dreamed of adventures from my meager bunk in the Colorado orphanage. Those fantasies were my escape. I never stopped dreaming as I grew up in Miami. The horizon always looked better than the ground I stood on. Yet in all my daydreams of world travel, my imagination never took me into the teeth of an exploding volcano.
As we reached the safety of the Philippine capital, which besides an ash-dusting was unaffected by the disaster, I realized I’d just done something only a handful of Americans would ever experience. I knew I’d never experience anything like it again.
The best part of that crazy adventure? Dave didn’t go along. He remained behind in Manila and missed all the fun. I got to rub that in for years.
Clark Air Base was never reoccupied by the USAF, which deemed it too expensive to rebuild. The aircraft and personnel stationed there redeployed to Guam. The U.S. Navy decided to rebuild Subic Bay, investing millions of American taxpayer dollars to return it to functional status by September 1991. Two weeks later, the Philippine senate refused to ratify the treaty that included the extension of the leases for Clark and Subic. At the end of December, Cory Aquino formally ordered the U.S. military to leave by the end of 1992.
It was a tense, sad end to a close working relationship that ultimately broke down over money. The Filipinos wanted $825 million a year for the base leases. Washington wouldn’t budge from $360 million. Tensions ran high, and when the navy completed its pullout, the economy in the area around Subic collapsed.
The NPA continues to fight the Philippine government to this day, making it history’s longest-running Marxist insurgency. It is a fraction of its former self and poses no substantial threat to the Philippine government anymore. In 1992, its leaders embarked on what became known as “the Second Great Rectification Movement.” In the previous five years, the NPA had been crushed, driven deeper into the countryside, its leaders captured or exiled. The Second Great Rectification Movement was designed to recommit the movement to its founding principles and learn the lessons from its recent defeats to pave the way to victory.
Instead of leading the NPA to victory, the rectification served only to further fragment the Marxists into competing groups that began attacking each other, assassinating or executing their leaders. This Marxist civil war within its revolutionary insurgency demolished the NPA. From its peak of nearly thirty thousand members, it could barely count a few thousand by the mid-1990s. A decade later, the Islamic radical groups creating chaos on Mindanao overshadowed the Marxists and became the focus of the Philippine government.
The Prado family left the Philippines in the summer of 1991, not long after my encounter with the volcano. From out of Mount Pinatubo’s fire, I landed back home right in the proverbial frying pan. After years of dedicated service to a cause and country I believed in with all my heart, my past welled up to put my career in temporary stasis right as the Cold War came to an end and a new world order, complete with new threats, began to emerge.