Spooks, long flights, and machine gun nests

 "He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Story time.

During the latter years of the cold war, I was stationed aboard a 'fast attack' nuclear submarine named USS Barb.  It was a small ship, even by the standards of that era.  From time to time, the ship would be sent on forward deployment in what was called a Western Pacific Cruise, or "WestPac".  These cruises would typically last six months, and the cruise would involve a few brief ports of call, joint exercises with other countries's Navies, and at least one Special Operation or "SpecOp".

The SpecOp portion of the cruise required the ship to carry additional personnel who were not normally assigned to the ship - spooks.  These guys were fluent in foreign languages and had special gear that they brought on board the ship.  I won't say more than that about them, except for this: They used limited bunk space, consumed limited food, and breathed what limited oxygen that the ship could carry.

As a result of these spooks being on board, part of the ship's crew had to remain behind - there simply wasn't enough room for everyone.  Those left behind attended secondary training schools that were appropriate for their jobs.  At the halfway point of the cruise, people who had been left behind would fly on a commercial airline to reunite with the ship overseas.  At that point different crew members would leave the ship and attend training during the second half of the cruise - all to make room for the spooks. 

In 1984, the ship I was stationed aboard went on a WestPac, and I was one of those left behind in San Diego for the first half of the cruise for training.  Each training class lasted 1-2 weeks, and I attended, among other classes:  Vibration analysis, rotational equipment balancing, variable speed controller repair for large motors, advanced voltage regulator training, damage control school with time in the wet trainer (flooding!), and a couple of leadership classes that have thus far in my life, never been needed.  

Eventually the ship put in to port at the halfway point, and it was time for us to make our way back to it.  The flight was ungodly long.  It was an hour longer than it needed to be, because of a temporary flight exclusion zone.  The US was conducting a live-fire missile test with a target and an anti-missile over the Pacific Ocean on that particular day, turning our 12 hour long flight into a 13 hour long flight.  After a very long and difficult time relaxing, I was finally able to cat-nap.  Shortly afterwards, a toddler on his mother's lap behind me had a screaming tantrum and began kicking the back of my seat - a pretty alarming way to wake up. 

After what seemed like an eternity in hell, the plane landed at Tokyo-Narita airport, where we boarded a second plane for a shorter four hour-long flight to Manila.  I was dead exhausted at this point, barely awake, but unable to sleep.  Most of the others had managed to get a bit of sleep.  The plane arrived in Manila at around midnight local time.  Once you stepped out of the airport terminal, the air was muggy and heavy with the odor of half-burnt gasoline fumes - really thick, dark, and (in my condition) disorienting.

An open-air Jeepney awaited us.  The ship had made arrangements from the airport in Manila to where the ship was docked, in Subic Bay.  Subic bay was another two-hour drive away, which would become much longer than that.

The Philippine Islands had been under martial law between 1973 and 1980 under the authority of dictator Ferdinand Marcos.  Following 1980 there had been an economic collapse in that already very poor country.  The opposition leader, Benigno Aquino, had been assassinated the moment he got off the airplane in August of 1983 after returning from exile - at the very same airport we had just flown into.  Politically the place was very unstable.  But even as a semi-informed foreigner just passing through, I could sense tension just under the surface.

The Marcos government was feeling pressure due to public unrest toward the end, and there was a lot of police and military activity at the time - as well as human rights abuse and torture - within a 1-1/2 years, an uprising would send Marcos into exile - in Hawai'i.  We were traveling through the countryside during that period of time, just needing to get from the airport to the ship.  

Along the route, our Jeepney had to stop at check-points about half a dozen times, where armed guards would speak with the driver in Tagalog.  The driver would ask us to show our US military identification to them.  At either side of each roadblock were piles of sandbags, with foreign soldiers pointing tripod-mounted heavy caliber machine guns at us.  Had I not been so exhausted from the previous lack of sleep, I probably would have been nervous about foreign soldiers pointing machine guns at me.  I was so exhausted at that point that I honestly didn't care whether they shot us or not. 

Finally at long last we reached the US Navy base at Subic Bay, and were re-united with our shipmates, just about 4 hours before morning muster and the work day started.  Fun times!