Soldiers

I HAVE a vivid memory of the coffee we sipped.

It was bitter, somehow off-kilter, as if whoever made it didn’t know their stuff. None of us said anything as we sat stiffly in the dimly lit restaurant near my Zamboanga City hotel.

“So,” I finally began, “what’s it like serving in Zambo?”

“It’s ok,” one of my two companions said, “though we rarely leave the base.”

They were military men, part of a small contingent of US forces stationed in Southern Mindanao to help fight rising Islamic terrorism. Except for the uncanny neatness of their appearance, however, they looked like typical American tourists dressed in casual civilian clothes. It was 2005, and I was on assignment for the Los Angeles Times.

“So tell me,” I went on, adopting what I hoped was a friendly tone. “What the heck are you guys doing down here?”

And so the conversation began.

It continued last week with the announcement that the United States and the Philippines have agreed to allow US forces access to four new military bases nationwide, bringing the total to nine.

“It’s a big deal,” US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at a press conference in Manila.

Added Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.: “The United States has always been our longest partner and ally…the future of the Philippines will always involve the United States.”

Quite a shift in tone from that of former President Rodrigo Duterte, who once famously called the US president “son of a whore” and vowed to distance his country from America while cozying up to Russia and China.

What drives the latest agreement isn’t Islamic terrorism but the Western fear of China’s rising power, especially in a potential attack on Taiwan.

“This effort has had high-level White House attention,” a senior administration official said in Washington.

Austin, meanwhile, continued south to Zamboanga to meet some of the estimated 150 rotating US Special Operations forces based there since Sept. 11, 2001. Which, naturally, reminded me of my own experiences in that city just four years later.

I had gone specifically to do a story about a group of former Zamboanga residents from Los Angeles and around the world who staged a massive return to show it was safe to go home. “We wanted to set an example,” California organizer Randy Degalea explained. “If even we Zamboanguenos are afraid to go back to our own city, how will other people feel?”

It was a colorful assignment. Met at the airport by the provincial tourism director accompanied by Miss Zamboanga bearing flowers, I enjoyed a personal tour. But there were also moments of darkness, as when I interviewed a woman in her kitchen riddled with bullet holes from a terrorist shootout. Or got invited on an American medical mission to an Abu Sayyaf island stronghold.

“Don’t try this on your own,” the commander warned when the trip got canceled because of bad weather. The next day, a Muslim friend, who also was a Philippine National Police officer, offered to arrange a meeting with a terrorist. But his easy confidence made me suspect that the radical was a relative. And so, remembering the story of a fellow Californian kidnapped by his terrorist in-laws, I politely declined.

These days the Islamic terrorism once rampant in Southern Mindanao seems to have abated. There are even reports of former rebels being trained as tour guides.

Ah, but now comes China. How do I feel about the imminent return of my countrymen in uniform? Frankly, mixed. On the one hand, there’s something appealing about an independent Philippines beholden to no one. On the other, the threat China poses is real. So, if push comes to shove, I suppose it’s better to be protected by enormous American guns than by simple Filipino charm.

Let’s just hope China behaves. As should the determined soldiers behind those big guns.

(David Haldane’s latest book, “A Tooth in My Popsicle,” is available on Lazada. A former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, where he contributed to two Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, Haldane is an award-winning author, journalist, and radio broadcaster with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Surigao City.)