Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

^{CHAPTER FOUR} PACOM ^{THE PHILIPPINES, SUMMER 2003 WITH NOTES ON THE PHILIPPINES, 1898–1913}

Few vistas are as laden with fateful patriotic memory as the one seen from the grounds of Camp H. M. Smith outside Honolulu, Hawaii, home of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM).[29] From the cluster of yellow World War II buildings that served as PACOM headquarters until 2004, when a new building opened on the site, I saw in one sweep the whole tragic landscape of December 7, 1941.

From left to right I gazed down upon Hickam Field; Pearl Harbor, with the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial off Ford Island—a mass grave for 1,177 sailors and marines; the shadowy lava peaks of the Waianae Range, behind which Japanese bombers hid in the moments prior to their assault; Wheeler Air Force Base; and Schofield Barracks, the forward post of the 25th Infantry Division, memorialized by James Jones in From Here to Eternity.

The Hawaiian island of Oahu, like the Deep South and the Great Plains, screamed military. Uniformed Americans were ever-present, so different from the Northeast where I lived. There, with the exception of Fort Drum in northern New York State, home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, the major bases had been closed and scaled back decades before. It was one of the lesser noted causes of the Northeast’s anti-militarism, in comparison to the rest of the country.[30]

I had stopped at PACOM for briefings en route to the Philippines. While in Mongolia, I received a message from Maj. Gen. Geoff Lambert at Fort Bragg, asking if I wanted to be embedded with Army Special Forces in the Philippine islands of Mindanao and Luzon. It was an easy call. While the media was focused on Afghanistan and Iraq, the southern Philippines had quietly become a laboratory for drying up an Islamic insurgency, as well as for small-scale nation-building.

As the majestic view from its headquarters indicated, PACOM enjoyed all the grandeur that poor little SOUTHCOM lacked. PACOM had its roots in America’s old Pacific Army, which existed from the 1899–1902 Philippine War to World War II. The Pacific Army had arisen from the ashes of the Indian fighting force of frontier days. It was as close to a British colonial institution as the U.S. had ever produced. Its snappy uniforms were made by Chinese tailors, and were worn by men who talked of jungle marches, of the treacherous Moros of Mindanao and the Sulu Islands, and of the headhunters of Luzon. America’s Pacific soldiers of the early twentieth century belonged “to the Bamboo or Carabao or Pineapple armies” of the Philippines and Hawaii. They had their own marching songs like “The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga.” Their officers played polo with the local Pacific island elites, while the lower ranks kept exotic village maidens as mistresses. When their ships docked in Honolulu the troops were serenaded by regimental bands and decked with flower leis.¹

The character and ambience of this colonial-style army was brutally captured for posterity in Jones’s From Here to Eternity, a saga of thirty-year lifers rather than of citizen soldiers, for whom the military is simply “The Profession.” Robert E. Lee Prewitt, Jones’s main protagonist, is inspired to join the Army out of Harlan County, Kentucky, not because of the stories he heard from older men about World War I, but because of the ones they told him about fighting the “Goddam” Muslim Moros in the Philippine insurrection.²

The surviving remnants of that world were visible in the open-porched quadrangles at Schofield Barracks and the line of wood-framed, hip-roofed houses at nearby Fort Shafter, with their mint green facades and screened porches, encased in a graceful clutter of flowering trees and venerable palms. Through the early twenty-first century, Army general officers assigned to PACOM in Oahu were still living in these elegant termite-infested structures, listed on the National Historic Register.

America’s Pacific troops still accounted for the bulk of its overseas soldiery, just as they had a hundred years before. Whereas SOUTHCOM had a paltry 1,271 dedicated troops, CENTCOM 22,046, EUCOM 112,000, and NORTHCOM 133,407, PACOM had a whopping 280,840 troops in addition to 75 warships, 35 submarines, and 1,679 combat aircraft.³ CENTCOM fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with troops borrowed from PACOM.

History and current reality accounted for the extreme imbalance among the area commands.[31] The Pacific, specifically the Philippines, had been the setting of America’s first great overseas war. The Pacific theater had been one of the two great components of World War II. Afterwards, the only large-scale and sustained conflicts in which Americans fought and died were in the Pacific—Korea and Vietnam. The very size of the Pacific Ocean meant PACOM bore responsibility for 51 percent of the earth’s surface. India, the two Koreas, China, and the numerous archipelagoes of the South Seas, including Indonesia—the most populous Muslim nation—also meant that PACOM’s area included 60 percent of the world’s people. And these were mainly highly educated, high-technology populations with expanding militaries, difficult relations with each other, and increasing dependence on imported oil.

Moreover, America did a third of its trade with the Far East. The Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra was the busiest waterway in the world. There were nuclear standoffs on the Korean Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent. Islamic fundamentalism infected the bigger archipelagoes, while some of the smaller ones were failed states like the Solomon Islands. Looming over all of this was the rising power of China. The Pacific theater could make a grand strategist’s head spin.

The briefings at PACOM packed the following theme, even if the briefers themselves did not fully spell it out. Forget central governments and national sovereignty. The Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia constituted one vast, interconnected archipelago, whose innumerable remote islands made it a crossroads for international terrorism. Terrorists used these poor, shantyish, unpoliceable islands as hideouts for training and rest and rehabilitation. Combating Islamic terrorism in this region carried a secondary benefit for the United States: it positioned the U.S. for the future containment of nearby China.

Keep in mind that this was largely the Army’s perspective, and that of the Special Forces in particular. PACOM had other realities and points of view. The overriding fact of the Pacific theater was oceanic distance, which led to a reliance on the Navy and Air Force. Following the destruction of the Japanese navy and merchant fleet in World War II, critical SLOCS (sea lines of communication) had to be maintained for U.S. commerce and potential military operations against the Soviet Union. Though the Soviet threat became irrelevant, the sea lane threat from China continued to grow.

Thus, except for the Korean theater, the Army had always been the minor element in PACOM. The PACOM commander was traditionally a Navy admiral. The head of SOCPAC (Special Operations Command, Pacific), with operational control for Army Special Forces in the theater, was often an Air Force brigadier general. The Navy and Air Force thought more abstractly than the Army. They put more emphasis on fleet diplomacy in the Taiwan area and in the containment of North Korea than in unconventional wars in the Philippines and in collapsed states like East Timor. Indeed, because North Korea was still a major threat, PACOM remained somewhat in a Cold War mode of nuclear Armageddon.[32] Finally, there was the pall of the Vietnam experience, which made PACOM particularly averse to land adventures in Asia. As one Army officer complained in mid-2003: “CENTCOM lives and breathes the unconventional post–Cold War world. So does EUCOM, with its peacekeeping and humanitarian rescue operations in the Balkans, Africa, and the Stans; while the biggest deal in SOUTHCOM is Special Forces in Colombia. But PACOM is twenty years behind the times, afraid of messy little wars and of a transparent humanitarian affairs role for SF. As for North Korea, it’s liable to melt down in the most unconventional of ways.”

September 11 eased PACOM out of its Cold War–era torpor. When President George W. Bush and his advisors scanned the world for places to get down and dirty with Islamic terrorism, the stark fact of the Philippines, a pathetically corrupt and heavily populated archipelago ridden with Islamic insurgents, became impossible to ignore. And that was a job for Special Operations Command.

In historical terms America had come full circle. It was in the Philippines where America’s epic experience in the Pacific had begun in earnest the century before, when President William McKinley dispatched a naval expedition to Manila Bay from Honolulu. The victory over Muslim insurgents in the Philippines at the start of the twentieth century—a corollary to the Spanish-American War of 1898—constituted the second milestone in the imperial progress of the United States, following the consolidation of the American West.

Throughout the nineteenth century, side by side with westward expansion, the United States Navy and Marines had been establishing, to quote Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward, an “empire of the seas.”⁴ Built on trade and influence much more than on outright occupation, America’s mercantile, seaborne empire bore a certain resemblance to that of Venice. Driving it was the same pioneer optimism and bravado that had been expanding the borders of white settlement into the south and west of the continent, encouraged further by the economic dynamism that ensued from the industrial North’s victory in the Civil War.

U.S. sailors and marines staged repeated landings in Argentina, Peru, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, and Panama (then part of Colombia). The aggressive incursions in Latin America, designed to prop up and topple governments, and to protect American diplomats and the trading interests of an expanding nation, were replicated in the Caribbean, and also in the Pacific.

In 1887 the U.S. Navy gained exclusive access to Pearl Harbor, following the economic integration of Hawaii with post–Civil War America. The Navy also raided China, and great and small islands from Sumatra to the Marquesas. The United States opened Japan to American trade, purchased Alaska, charted and claimed the Midway Island group. And after a drawn-out series of sea engagements and negotiations, it acquired an island in the Samoas.⁵

America’s entry into the Philippines began at dawn May 1, 1898, when Commodore George Dewey’s nine ships, having passed Corregidor Island off the Bataan Peninsula under cover of darkness, entered Manila Bay and destroyed a slightly larger Spanish flotilla. Like so many signal episodes in history, Dewey’s victory was both the culmination of vast political and economic forces and an accident of circumstance that might easily have not occurred, for it was not instigated by events in the Pacific at all, but by those in the Caribbean, where Spain’s repression of Cuba led President McKinley—urged on by expansionists including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt—to declare war on the Spanish empire.

The invasion of the Philippines marked the first time that the U.S. had deliberately set out to conquer a large piece of territory overseas in order to occupy it. That would not happen again until the invasion of Iraq more than a century later. Though it began with Commodore Dewey’s glorious overture, the first major conflict for the United States outside its continental limits descended within a few months into a military nightmare, as well as a domestic trauma of a kind not to be seen again until Vietnam.⁶ The mistakes that the U.S. made in the Philippines, the varied experiences that the U.S. military had there, and the plethora of tactical lessons that American troops learned in the course of years of jungle warfare offered a far richer repository of information in terms of the war, peacekeeping, and nation-building challenges of the turn of the twenty-first century than the experiences of World Wars I and II combined. And had the U.S. military paid more attention to its successes and failures in the Philippines—what worked and what didn’t—it would have dealt with Vietnam better than it did.

The Philippine War was a gory, real-world experience writ large: the kind that both the American media and public, both then and now, could not and cannot bear. As a result, the military’s overall performance in the Philippines gained an undeservedly bad reputation. The instances of brutality committed by American troops, partly a response to the brutality of the Filipino insurgents, allowed a somewhat naive and muckraking press in the U.S. to smear the entire campaign. Thus, the painful military lessons gained in the Philippines were either ignored or forgotten by the same Army that would have to fight later in Vietnam, writes Brian McAllister Linn in The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902.⁷ Nevertheless, the larger truth, in the words of Max Boot, in The Savage Wars of Peace, is that U.S. actions in the Philippines constituted “one of the most successful counter-insurgencies waged by a Western army in modern times.”⁸

Following Dewey’s successful entry into Manila Bay, the American military assisted Filipino insurgents in their takeover of the Spanish-run archipelago. But just as they would in Iraq and elsewhere, the Americans wrongly assumed that because local elements welcomed the ouster of a despotic regime, they would automatically remain friendly once the regime was toppled. Freedom was “understood in differing ways,” explains the Filipino historian Samuel K. Tan. The United States “pursued the quest of empire in the name of freedom to civilize the world,” while for Filipinos freedom had little to do with elected government and everything to do with a “mystical relationship between the people and the natural environment.”⁹

After the Spanish were defeated, tensions mounted between the new Philippine government headed by a young ethnic Tagalog, Emilio Aguinaldo, and the American liberators, even as Aguinaldo was losing control over his own faction-ridden armed forces. By February 1899, Philippine anarchy and misplaced American idealism ignited into a full-scale war between American troops and a host of indigenous guerrilla armies.

The collapse of central authority led to the complete regionalization of the conflict, with various guerrilla leaders transforming themselves into local warlords.¹⁰ The American strategy was to pacify each region and turn it over to a civilian commission for reconstruction, to be headed by an Ohio judge, William Howard Taft, recently appointed by President McKinley. But it was this very civilizing strategy of the American occupiers that accounted for much of the war’s brutality, for it was a direct threat to the warlords’ authority over their own populations.

The American expeditionary force would peak at 69,000 Army, Navy, and Marines, commanded by Army Gen. Arthur MacArthur, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner from the Civil War. Most of Gen. MacArthur’s officers and troops were volunteers from states west of the Mississippi River, whose predominant military experience, if they had any, had been fighting the Indians. Of the thirty American generals in the Philippines, twenty-six had been in the Indian wars.

As with the Indian wars, in which tactics were somewhat different for each tribe, the American forces in the Philippines, scattered among four hundred isolated garrisons on different islands, fought many separate conflicts. Middle-level American officers in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, lacking radios and helicopters, often had no possibility of following instructions from general headquarters. Thus, they became policymakers in their own patch of jungle, acquiring area expertise, and developing their own counterinsurgency campaigns specifically suited to the political, military, and cultural situation in each micro-region. They improvised by trial and error. By reporting their successes and failures to their superiors, they influenced policies up the command chain.

It became a war of company commanders impatient with paperwork and routine. William H. Taft told Secretary of War Elihu Root that “the pacification of the Islands seems to depend largely on the character of the military officer in charge of the particular district.”¹¹

That was the military the way it was supposed to be, with generals backing up decisions of subordinates who were closer to the action. Tom Wilhelm had told me much the same thing.

For example, in the extreme north of Luzon, Lt. Col. Robert L. Howze, a Texan who had won the Medal of Honor in the Indian wars, set up a school system and a local government, making the transition from a combat commander to a provincial governor.¹² Yet it was Lt. Col. Howze’s very success, along with the paucity of troops at his disposal—there were only five companies confined to a few towns—that led the guerrillas to cut telegraph lines, attack convoys, and threaten civilians who cooperated with the Americans. Howze’s response was decisive. He organized aggressive patrols that ravaged the whole region, killing and surrounding the guerrillas, allowing them to die of hunger and disease, even as he offered amnesty to the simple villagers who had been coerced into helping the insurrectos.

In one instance, Howze told his commanders: “warn [civic officials] that the feeding, sheltering and harboring of the Insurrecto element must at once cease, or the vicinity will be laid to waste, even to the extent of destroying their crops.”¹³ Howze created a local intelligence service like the native scout units being set up by the British in India, even as he established village governing councils, which were the first rudimentary step toward self-rule.

The native intelligence services that the Americans established were “hard to beat,” in the words of Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston.¹⁴ A Kansas native with trekking experience in the Dakota badlands, Gen. Funston, the commander of a district in another part of Luzon, set up his own spy service, which he rewarded with large payments. When some of his spies were kidnapped, he would kidnap the family of a prominent guerrilla. He even organized a native strike force that he personally led into battle. “By conciliating powerful ethnic and social groups, using native auxiliaries, and conducting military operations which struck at the guerrillas but left the populace relatively untouched, he was able to destroy opposition in slightly more than a year,” Linn writes.¹⁵

While in some parts of the archipelago the U.S. military was able to exploit ethnic divisions, in other parts it was foolish to try. In some parts a purely military strategy was called for; in others a civil affairs and humanitarian component was an absolute necessity. There was one constant, though: both military victory and social reform were possible only when, as Linn observes, “the Army could separate the guerrillas from civilians,” thus preventing the guerrillas from obstructing civic organizations.¹⁶ It was this overriding truth that would form the basis for the Army Special Forces plan to undermine international terrorism in the Philippines a century later.

On July 4, 1902, when President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over, 4,234 American soldiers had been killed in the conflict and 2,818 wounded.¹⁷ Overall, 200,000 people died, mainly Filipino civilians.¹⁸ Fighting in the Muslim south would go on for years. One could well argue that it was all unnecessary in the first place, a political blunder of the highest magnitude by the McKinley administration, in which America’s idealism and naÏveté led it on a path of destruction and brutality. But the strictly military part of the equation looked different. As Max Boot writes:

The military victory, however messy and brutal, was followed by decades of American rule that the journalist and historian Stanley Karnow calls “a model of enlightenment” compared to European colonialism.²⁰ Samuel Tan, the Filipino historian who is critical of American policy in other respects, concurs, describing American rule as the historical engine that brought modernity to the Filipino masses.²¹

The Americans forbade themselves to buy large tracts of land. They avoided schemes like opium monopolies. They redistributed land to peasants from wealthy church estates, and built roads, railways, ports, dams, and irrigation facilities. American expenditures on health and education led to a doubling of the Filipino population between 1900 and 1920, and a rise in literacy from 20 to 50 percent within a generation.²²

The Philippines, in turn, affected the destiny of twentieth-century America to a degree that few faraway countries have. Taft’s leadership of the Philippine Commission propelled him to the presidency of the United States. Capt. John “Black Jack” Pershing, who would head the expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico and command American forces in World War I, was promoted to brigadier general over nine hundred other officers after his stellar performance in leading troops against Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines. Douglas MacArthur, son of Gen. Arthur MacArthur, came to the Philippines to command an American brigade and returned for a second tour of duty as the indigenous government’s military advisor. One of Douglas MacArthur’s aides in Manila was a middle-aged major, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who honed his analytical skills for World War II by attempting to organize a Philippine national army. The Japanese victory over Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces on the Philippines, MacArthur’s last stand on Corregidor Island in Manila Bay before retreating to Australia, the subsequent Japanese atrocities committed against both American and Filipino prisoners of war during the Death March on the nearby Bataan Peninsula, and MacArthur’s triumphal return to the Philippines in the battle of Leyte Gulf, all became part of the Homeric legend of World War II that bound Americans to their military, and gave the American and Filipino peoples a common bond.

Indeed, anyone who doubts that America is, or was, an imperial power should come to the Philippines, where the white baronial U.S. Embassy fronting Manila Bay occupies the most beautiful downtown real estate in the same way that British and French embassies do in their former colonies; where the Americans have their own hill station for cool weather retreats, like British hill stations in India; where leading local military officers, businessmen, and politicians are graduates of West Point just like the leading personages of former British colonies have been graduates of Sandhurst; and where the country’s romantic hero is not a Filipino but the protean figure of Douglas MacArthur, who, in the Filipino mind, rescued the country from the butchery of the Japanese occupiers.

Yet there is a deeper, less appealing truth about American colonialism in the Philippines: As far as the life of the average Filipino has been concerned, it may not have made much of a difference at all. Throughout the twentieth century, the Philippines remained among the most dysfunctional, intractable, and poverty-stricken societies in Asia, with African-like slums and Latin American–style fatalism and class divides. The journalist James Fallows bluntly observes that a damaged culture, not Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorial rule from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, was the root cause of the country’s problems.²³ In the early twenty-first century, almost two decades after Marcos had been overthrown, Philippine democracy had become so corrupt and inefficient that Filipinos complained constantly that “at least under Marcos you knew who to bribe.”

Karnow notes that Filipinos were easily co-opted by the Spaniards and later by the Americans because they had little sense of their own identity—something that is in stark contrast to the Vietnamese and Indonesians, who could gaze at stone temples that symbolized an indigenous historic grandeur. The only real history the Philippines had was a colonial one.²⁴

Before the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan fell upon the archipelago in 1521, flying the flag of Spain, the Philippines (named for the Spanish king Philip II) had merely been a jumble of Malay tribes, eight different languages, and seventy Tagalog-related dialects spread over 7,107 islands, without a central governing authority. Spain more or less invented the Philippines, providing it with a lingua franca and a common religion, Roman Catholicism, practiced by all save for the Muslim minority in the south. By giving land grants to Spanish settlers, which were passed on to rich mestizo families, Spain also created an oligarchy that has ruled the country ever since, whether it was under American auspices, dictatorial fiat, or democratic constitutionalism. Indeed, the closer one looked at how the Philippines actually functioned, and the closer one got to the Muslim areas in the south, the less important the advent of democracy in the mid-1980s seemed.

I arrived in the Philippine capital of Manila late at night, and left at noon the following day to link up with American forces at Zamboanga in southwestern Mindanao, the same Zamboanga that American soldiers had sung a song about a hundred years earlier.

It has been said that with its strip malls and faux-classical architecture reminiscent of Washington, D.C., no place—not even the cities of India with their Victorian Gothic buildings—is stamped with a colonial legacy to the degree of Manila. I had a few hours to walk around. Outside the Spanish walls of old Manila, I found teeming poverty, white pristine mansions, and fast-buck Americanization that bore eerie resemblance to cities in northern Mexico. It was a testament to just how much America had imposed itself on this capital, almost seven thousand miles across the ocean from San Francisco and Los Angeles.[33]

Manila is vast and sterile, despite its location on a magnificent historic bay, with yawning, ruler-straight boulevards lined by faded and sharp-angled concrete towers, reflecting the alienating modernism of the 1970s. The spaces between the skyscrapers are filled by squalid hutments plastered with ratty and rusting signage. The beggars wear flip-flops and oversized ball caps. The Philippine capital conjures up the tackiness and vegetal gaudiness of Mexico and Central America grafted onto the demographic immensity of Asia.

Flying south to Mindanao, I stared through the plane window at a dazzling emerald squiggle work of islands and bays defaced by a torn mosaic of human habitation. The Philippines comprises 84.5 million people, about 40 percent of whom are under fifteen years old, with Muslims growing disproportionately to the rest of the population. There is a look to poverty from the air. Rather than the finely wrought, computer chip complexity of post-industrial Western cities, third world cities and towns seen from ten thousand feet up appear more like a ragged psoriasis. Dennis Downey, a Green Beret lieutenant colonel, would later tell me: “Below Luzon it’s the Odyssey. In the eyes of people from Manila the area to the south is ungovernable, uneducated, and unchristian, with small islands changing hands daily.”

Approaching Zamboanga, a break in the dense, ashen cloud cover of a monsoon rain revealed a shattered coast barely rising above the turquoise mirror of the Sulu Sea. Then came a glassy trapezoidal tilework of rice fields and seaweed farms, the mossy felt of well-jungled, broccoli-colored hillsides, and a seemingly unending concentration of sloping corrugated iron roofs painted in various loud colors. Unlike Colombia’s tropical badlands, the Zamboanga peninsula of Mindanao was thick with humanity.

While Manila was heavily marked by Spanish and American colonial influence, that was not the case with Mindanao and the Sulu Islands. The dozen or so Muslim sultanates that had dotted the southern Philippines were never completely subjugated by the Spanish. It took the Americans until 1913 to quell large Muslim uprisings, even as smaller ones never ceased. The problem that the U.S. had with Islamic terrorists in the Philippines and elsewhere in the early years of the twenty-first century was simply the most recent chapter of a very old story. The first so-called clash of civilizations between America and the Muslim world occurred here in the southern Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Islam, which had spread across the world from the Middle East, implanted itself in Malaya and the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra in the thirteenth century, with Muslim missionaries arriving in the southern Philippines from Borneo in the fifteenth century. When the Spanish arrived a hundred years later, they grouped the various tribes and ethnicities practicing Islam under the appellation “Moro,” or Moor, for with the reconquest of Muslim Spain a recent memory, the Spaniards looked down upon these southern Filipino Muslims and beheld their historic enemy. The word “Moro” remained a pejorative until the mid-twentieth century, when Moro nationalists transformed it into a symbol of collective identity.²⁵

Although a distinct Islamic ethnicity had arisen as a reaction to the Christianizing influence of Spanish rule, Islamization was undergirded by deep cultural ties among southern Philippine Muslims that surmounted barriers of dialect and jungle terrain.²⁶ Islamization was further reinforced in the early twentieth century by the Americans, who, as part of an attempt to modernize the Philippines, refused to recognize traditional sultans. The undermining of the local headmen—by erasing differences between the various Moro communities—unwittingly united the Muslim Moros as never before. From 1902 to 1913, America’s attempt to impose democracy here led to a more militant Islam.

Because of their fierce adherence to Islam coupled with their exotic dress, blood feuds, and love of hand-to-hand combat, the Moros became a truly romantic opponent in the eyes of America’s Pacific soldiery. The Moros were America’s own colonial equivalent to the fierce and individualistic Pushtuns whom the British fought on the Northwest Frontier of India.²⁷ The Moros had suicidal warriors called amoks and religious fanatics called juramentados. The Americans developed the .45-caliber pistol (the Colt .45) in 1911 because the .38-caliber pistol, it was said, “would not take a Moro down.” Moros attacked at night from the high ground so they seemed invincible. They were emboldened by hallucinogens and amulets that they believed offered special powers.

The Moros’ last stand against the Americans took place in 1913 on the island of Jolo in the Sulu chain; it was not unlike that of the Indians at Wounded Knee in South Dakota twenty-three years earlier. Women and children deserted their villages to join the menfolk in battle. Capt. John Pershing conducted a series of troop withdrawals and negotiations to isolate the noncombatants, even as he planned for a decisive assault that would lead to the Moros’ defeat.²⁸

Yet the Moro spirit of rebellion against the Christians in Manila never died, even after elected Filipino politicians replaced American imperial overlords. Following World War II and Philippine independence in 1946, young Moros went to study in the Middle East, particularly at the al-Azhar University in Cairo. They returned home to become religious teachers, often in slum communities, channeling their economic and theological grievances into a political cause.²⁹ The Muslim separatist movement got a further boost with President Marcos’s declaration of martial law in 1972. Between 1972 and 1977, Muslim insurgents fought the Philippine military to a stalemate. The fall of Marcos ultimately led to an autonomous region ruled by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

In 1991, Moros who had fought in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union founded a more radical Islamic group in the southern Philippines called Abu Sayyaf, or Bearer of the Sword. Thus did the Philippines emerge as a central spoke of international terrorism, with terrorists moving in small boats across a broad area from Indonesia and the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo, north through the Sulu Islands to Mindanao.³⁰ Many, if not most, of the major al-Qaeda attacks on the West were planned here in Southeast Asia.³¹

It was in Afghanistan that Abu Sayyaf’s founders, Abdurajak Janjalani and Abdul Murad, befriended Mohammed Jamal Khalifa—Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law—and Ramzi Yousef, the organizer of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In 1995 in Manila, Abdul Murad and Ramzi Yousef planned an attack on Pope John Paul II during the pontiff’s upcoming visit to the Philippines. As they were mixing explosive chemicals for the operation in their Manila apartment, a fire erupted that led to Murad’s capture. The Philippine security services “tortured the dog meat out of him,” an American military source told me. “But it wasn’t until they threatened to turn him over to the Israeli Mossad that he cracked.”

Murad gave Philippine investigators the password to his computer that was recovered from the burned-out apartment. On the hard disk they found the details of several terrorist plots, including one to use eleven jetliners to crash into CIA headquarters and other prominent buildings in Washington and New York. Ramzi Yousef was eventually captured in Pakistan. Both he and Murad were later extradited to the U.S. and sentenced in district court in Manhattan to 240 years in prison.

Meanwhile, back in the southern Philippines, the al-Qaeda–aligned Abu Sayyaf had launched a campaign of ritualistic beheadings, kidnapping, and rape against Filipinos and foreigners. Its victims would include two American Christian missionaries from Kansas, Martin and Gracia Burnham. Martin Burnham was killed and Gracia Burnham freed during an American-assisted Philippine rescue operation in 2002. Abu Sayyaf was given safe havens and camp facilities by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. It got money and trainers from al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah, a transnational terrorist group that operated throughout Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Jemaah Islamiyah would be linked to the nightclub bombing in 2002 in Bali that killed more than two hundred people.

Besides Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, the southern and central Philippines were also plagued by guerrilla outfits like the communist New People’s Army and the Misuari breakaway faction of the Moro National Liberation Front. In truth, like Yemen and Colombia, the Philippines was a country that was not really a country, with the central government unable to project its power in part because of a difficult geography. Moreover, in the 1990s the decay of security structures that came with the advent of democracy, both in Indonesia and the Philippines, provided an opening for international terrorism.

The inability of a democratic Philippine government to govern large areas of its own territory—with al-Qaeda-related terrorism the result—became a principal concern of the United States in the wake of September 11, 2001. The response was Operation Enduring Freedom, which, while predominantly focused on removing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, also had a Philippine component.

Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan combined conventional military elements with Special Operations Forces and a militarized CIA. But the effort in the Philippines was almost exclusively a Special Operations affair. It was run by Special Operations Command, Pacific, a division of PACOM in Honolulu, which brought in assets such as the Marines and Army Special Forces from Okinawa, Japan, and Fort Lewis, Washington; Navy SEALs and Special Boat Units from Guam; and Air Force Special Operations units and regular Army helicopter crews from South Korea.

The Americans referred to the arrival of these combined assets as “Joint Task Force 510.” The democratically elected Philippine government had a different name for it: Exercise Balikatan (Shoulder to Shoulder), to give its public and local media the impression that it was all part of a normal joint maneuver. That was true to an extent: As in Colombia, the Special Forces operation was exclusively “by,” “through,” and “with” the host nation. That gave the operation political legitimacy among Filipinos. But it also imposed severe limitations on the Americans, which would result in international terrorists remaining at large.

The base of operations was Zamboanga, the center of the Spanish colonial administration in Mindanao, and of the American effort against the Moros a century earlier. September 11 had brought American troops south of the main island of Luzon, and into the Muslim south of the Philippines, for the first time since World War II.

Enduring Freedom—Philippines began in earnest in January 2002. The “force cap” negotiated by the American and Philippine governments limited the number of uniformed American personnel to six hundred (compared to four hundred in Colombia). The focus would be on expelling the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas from Basilan, the large and strategic island to the south of Zamboanga. It would be accomplished less by military actions than by an unusual kind of humanitarian assistance program. By the time I arrived in July 2003, the operation had been successfully completed, with a number of Abu Sayyaf leaders killed and the group scattered to smaller islands, reducing Abu Sayyaf to the banditry from which it had first emerged. Yet the joint task force was still in place in Zamboanga when I got there, and various Special Forces A-teams were still training Philippine units nearby and in Luzon to the north.

I came to the Philippines to tell the story of what had taken place on Basilan, and to observe what was still going on.

I was met at the airport in Zamboanga by two U.S. soldiers in full kit and body armor, inside a van with darkened windows. They took me to Camp Navarro, a Philippine military base that was the headquarters of the American Joint Special Operations Task Force that had officially replaced the larger Joint Task Force 510, following the successful ejection of Abu Sayyaf from Basilan. The Americans treated all of Zamboanga outside of Camp Navarro as hostile, hence the guns and flak jackets. A large Muslim population coupled with an incompetent government police force of “Barney Fifes” made Zamboanga a perfect venue for the kind of terror attacks on American soldiers that would generate headlines around the world for a day or two. The local Chinese business community, the city’s only real middle class, had its own private security force.

From inside the van I found Zamboanga (Malay for “land of flowers”) a generic third world city: ratty, smoky with pollution, and jammed with trishaws, jeepneys, and mopeds. Roads were completely flooded from the monsoon rains; bright flowers sprouted like weeds. People were texting on cell phones while dodging water buffaloes in the streets. Vast, seemingly impenetrable mazes of wooden shacks led incongruously to a shopping mall similar to that in a middle-sized American town. With more than six hundred thousand inhabitants, Zamboanga was a somewhat less overwhelming version of many cities in India that I had seen, with the following distinctive features that I would get to know better:

• Much of the city was a warren of slums resting on stilts in the water, connected by narrow channels plied by wooden bancas, boats with bamboo outrigging. Out in the Basilan Strait sat houseboats inhabited by Samas, the Bedouin of the Sulu Sea and Moro Gulf. These fishermen moved back and forth between the southern Philippines and the Indonesian and Malaysian coasts of Borneo. They provided a convenient means for slipping terrorists in and out of the three countries.

• Zamboanga is located astride the fault line between Christianity and Islam. From inside the fungal black walls of Fort Pilar here, the Roman Catholic Spaniards had, for hundreds of years, governed the Muslims of Mindanao and the Sulu Islands. Three thousand Moros had stormed Fort Pilar in 1720. The Americans occupied it in 1898. It was taken by the Japanese in 1942, and liberated by the U.S. Army’s 41st Infantry Division in 1945. Fort Pilar now constituted an open-air Catholic church decorated by the Stations of the Cross and other overt Christian symbols. It was maintained in pristine fashion by the Philippine government, even as it overlooked one of the city’s poorest Muslim slums.

Just as Fort Pilar faced one Muslim slum, Camp Navarro faced another, this one with known Abu Sayyaf sympathizers. “Forget the crap about it ain’t being a culture war,” one American master sergeant told me; “in tactical, operational terms, we have no choice but to treat those people as the enemy.” That translated into clandestine infiltration on one hand and deliberately maintained paranoia on the other. People drove in and out of Camp Navarro in nondescript vans. A Special Forces A-team in civilian clothes roamed the port, nightclubs, and other hangouts, quietly developing local intelligence assets.

The first thing I noticed about Camp Navarro was how spacious and well maintained it was compared to the rest of Zamboanga, with meticulously cut hedgerows and parade grounds. In the third world, military bases often mean a step-up in economic well-being and social prestige, a refuge from the surrounding poverty and chaos. To wit, coups were a symptom of the early and middle stages of political development, in which the military offered the most organized and effective means of modernization. Because civilian governments in the two decades since Marcos’s overthrow were characterized by extremely high levels of corruption and incompetence, military coups remained a distinct possibility here.

Camp Navarro was headquarters for the Philippine military’s Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM. In standard colonial fashion, the Philippine armed forces had been organized on the model of the American one, with geographical areas of operational control. Advising Philippine SOUTHCOM in its war on terror was the American Joint Special Operations Task Force, or JSOTF (the acronym was pronounced “jah-SO-tef”). The JSOTF was a crowded jumble of prefabricated “cheeseboxes” and “blue gooses,” or modified shipping containers, each functioning as barracks for two soldiers. Because the monsoon tended to come at night, getting up to use the bathroom meant going from a freezing, air-conditioned shipping container to intense heat and pouring rain. The mess hall served institutional American food, inferior to the spicy seafood found at sidewalk stands all over Zamboanga. The fruit wasn’t even fresh. Because of hygienic rules set by American doctors, the fruit had to be flown in from the American base at Okinawa, Japan.

I didn’t like the JSOTF. It was claustrophobic, sterile, and impersonal, unlike the cool Green Beret hootches I had become accustomed to in Colombia, which interacted culturally through music and food with the local environment. As a joint command, the JSOTF had Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel, both men and women, often young and unsophisticated about the world outside Camp Navarro. They were guarded round-the-clock by U.S. Marines, distinguished by their high-and-tight haircuts and digital camouflage uniforms, a more complex design than the woodland camouflage of Army and Air Force BDUs.

“Thank God for the Marines,” muttered my roommate in the two-man cheesebox, a Green Beret master sergeant from Detroit. “Without them, this place would be a security nightmare. Few of the kids around here would know how to handle themselves outside the base perimeter. The Marines keep them locked up.” Though only a high school graduate, the master sergeant was a man of the world. He kept me awake the first night at the JSOTF talking about the execution of policemen in Nepal, ethnic problems in the Aceh region of Indonesia, the robbery of Russian soldiers returning from peacekeeping duties in Bosnia after they had crossed the border into Ukraine, and the old-fashioned esprit de corps of Australian commandos with whom he had trained.

Green Berets like my roommate disliked the unnecessarily big American footprint that the JSOTF represented. “It’s what happens when a Navy four-star and an Air Force one-star get to tell Army Special Forces what to do,” another Green Beret told me, referring to the PACOM and SOCPAC command structures. The Green Berets felt that the “Washington political correctness in favor of joint commands”—a reaction to the interservice rivalries of previous decades—had simply gone too far in the Pacific theater, and that in the jungly southern Philippines, the Navy and Air Force “aristocracies” were out of their depth.

In fairness to the Navy and Air Force top brass, the JSOTF had a large footprint because it was built and staffed with the assumption of a larger operation than the one which ultimately materialized. After the liberation of Basilan from Abu Sayyaf, PACOM expected the Philippine government to grant permission for U.S. forces to actively comb the other islands of the Sulu chain for remaining guerrillas. When electoral politics in the Philippines closed that option, the PACOM commander, Adm. Thomas Fargo, kept the JSOTF up and running in the hope, which seemed realistic at the time, of Manila’s decision being reversed.

In fact, with the closure of the two large and historic U.S. bases in the Philippines in the early 1990s—Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station—the JSOTF had succeeded as a political mechanism for getting an American base-of-sorts up and running, even as it earned the goodwill of the local population by providing free medical care in villages near Zamboanga. “Remember,” an Army colonel told me, in defense of the Navy and Air Force approach, “China is nearby and presence in the region is everything. The longer the JSOTF can stay here the better.”

The JSOTF concept was problematic, though. It indicated how forgetful the U.S. defense establishment could be about successful Cold War efficiencies, such as simply enlarging the ambassador’s country team inside the embassy, in order to handle periodic operations like Enduring Freedom. For example, Plan Colombia was run from within the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá without the need for a separate base elsewhere.

Everything inside the JSOTF, from the construction items to the soldiers and marines themselves, was maintained by a lifeline of C-130 cargo planes flying in from the American base at Okinawa. Few sights offered by imperial America were at once more mundane and stirring than the arrival of a C-130 with supplies and reinforcements for U.S. troops in officially hostile terrain. In the moments prior to landing, an MSE (Marine security element) in full kit drops down into the weeds and elephant grass, and secures a perimeter. Then the big bathtub toy of a plane lands and taxis to a halt, its massive propellers never stopping. The hatch opens in the rear and a K-loader quickly drives up to it. Ten-foot-high pallets of food, equipment, and personal belongings are slid off the plane upright. Next comes the long line of soldiers and marines, jogging out of the fuselage in single file and into waiting buses, men and women in BDUs and marine cammies, their expressions green, blank, expectant, nervous, and raceless in their varied ethnicities. Another line, with happier expressions, more comfortable in their surroundings, jogs into the plane, en route home. A John Deere forklift then brings over another assemblage of pallets to slide into the fuselage. The hatch closes and the plane taxis out for takeoff. The whole process takes ten minutes.

During the time I was at the JSOTF, both the commander and deputy commander happened to be Green Berets, Col. Al Walker of Salt Lake City, Utah, and Lt. Col. Dennis Downey from just south of Boston. Col. Walker was a quiet, self-effacing, gray-haired West Pointer; Lt. Col. Downey a delightfully talkative, moon-faced Irishman, a graduate of Norwich Military Academy in Vermont. Both got to the point quickly. There is a saying in the U.S. defense establishment, “Death by PowerPoint.” Well, Lt. Col. Downey put together a PowerPoint briefing for me that was anything but dull or insignificant. It was about how fed up he and Col. Walker were with elements of the Philippine military.

With the operation on the island of Basilan complete and high politics between Manila and Washington preventing future ones, the principal function of the JSOTF was ops/intel fusion. In plain English, that meant producing intelligence which led to American recommendations for specific battlefield operations, to be carried out by the Armed Forces of the Philippines against Islamic terrorists such as Abu Sayyaf. Like Colombia, the Philippines was a constitutional democracy that would not permit American troops to fight alongside its soldiers on its own soil. That was considered an infringement of national sovereignty. Thus, all Col. Walker and Lt. Col. Downey could do was advise the Filipinos. But even when real-time intelligence was handed to the Armed Forces of the Philippines on a silver platter, it rarely delivered.

Take the American-advised operation on Jolo Island in the Sulu chain in late December 2002, the subject of Lt. Col. Downey’s PowerPoint briefing. It occurred in the same part of Jolo where Capt. John Pershing had conducted successful operations in 1906 against the Moros. The Moros had attacked Pershing’s troops with bolos (machetes), Malay krises (wavy-edged swords), and poison darts fired from blowguns.

Downey, a Southeast Asian area expert, who had spent much of his career in the 1st Special Forces Group based out of Fort Lewis, Washington, warmed to his subject: “Jolo constituted the first time in American history that we fought Muslim insurgents. The Moros on Jolo are Tausug speakers, tough and mean-spirited, like the Chechens. When I tell you the details of what went wrong, have some sympathy for the common Filipino soldier—an eighteen-year-old kid paid the equivalent of $35 per month, with $2 extra for combat pay, and poorly led by generals sometimes making fortunes.”

After Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines had ejected Abu Sayyaf from Basilan, five of the ten leading al-Qaeda–trained terrorists in Abu Sayyaf escaped to Jolo, where they conducted kidnap-for-ransom operations to raise money. Facing their tiny army were nine battalions of Philippine Marines and Army Scout Rangers, with helicopters and artillery batteries. On December 23, 2002, an American P-3 surveillance plane identified the terrorists arriving by boat at a Jolo port. The American and Philippine intelligence services tracked them into the interior of the island, to a point where they froze in position. The Americans put forward a plan that had Philippine Marines driving the terrorists into a pocket surrounded on three sides by Army Scout Rangers, thereby setting up a “kill box” without any villages nearby where the terrorists could hide. The Americans established a command operation center for the coming attack at Camp Navarro. But a key Philippine general did not show up. “He was not interested in getting out of bed,” Downey said bleakly.

Meanwhile, the Philippine army units designated to surround the terrorists did not move into their blocking positions, as their leaders had promised they would, even as the Philippine Marines began their part of the operation ahead of schedule. By the time the Army units arrived in position, eight hours late, the terrorists had slipped out of the kill box.

“The Filipino army and Marines just hate each other,” Downey explained. “There was total lack of synchronization. Their orders are communicated by text messages on cell phones, which are subsequently deleted, so there is no record, no paper trail, no accountability. The incentive for all kinds of corruption is great; nor is anyone punished for these kinds of screwups.”

Downey, whether aware of it or not, was describing a typical third world cultural failure, in which a functioning bureaucracy truly doesn’t exist, because there are no impersonal rules of behavior that take precedence over labyrinthine personal alliances and bribes. The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas on Jolo, such as Khadaffy Janjalani and Radullan Sahiron—men trained in the ideological hothouse of Afghanistan—had made an end run around their own culture’s weaknesses through indoctrination into a militant belief system, and by operating in small, tightly knit groups where no bureaucracy was required.

Still, Downey said that he had been encouraged by the ease in which the enemy could be targeted and Philippine troops mobilized, albeit not moved into position on time. Occasionally, this had led to success, as in June 2002 when Abu Sayyaf leader Abu Sabaya had been sighted on a banca off the Zamboanga Peninsula and killed. As in Colombia, despite all the failures, despite all the frustrations with the host country’s military, and the limitations on U.S. power, progress was possible, because the average “indig,” or native soldier, was brave and selfless.

You never gave up. You stayed engaged, no matter at how low a level, in order to keep enough pressure on the terrorists so that the threat did not escalate to a point requiring a much larger effort, an effort that would need to occur under a global media spotlight. A failed operation on Jolo was still better than no operation at all, since it kept the terrorists on the run. Such was the frustrating essence of imperial maintenance.

Sometimes imperial maintenance could be genuinely inspiring, like the MEDCAPS (medical civic action programs) that the JSOTF operated in the Zamboanga Peninsula to win “hearts and minds,” a phrase that officers like Col. Walker, who still chafed a bit at being harassed in New York City while on leave from West Point during the Vietnam War, never used cynically.

The MEDCAP which I observed took place in the village of La Paz north of Zamboanga at an altitude of three thousand feet, an area where the mosquitoes brought dengue fever during the day and malaria at night. Turning inland and uphill into a low montane rain forest, I entered a glittering green world of giant ferns, bamboo and mahogany trees, rattans, tea bushes, and orchids. Pigs scampered beneath coconut leaf houses raised on stilts. Innumerable palms with their sharp fanlike leaves evoked the frightening, nightmarish infinity of nature. In too many places, palm jungles meant either touristic paradises or violent anarchy: St. Bart’s or Liberia. Higher and higher into the jungle we drove in our smoke-windowed van, to where people had never before seen a doctor, even if they dressed in cheap Western polyesters with baseball caps.

The MEDCAP had been organized at a school in a clearing. As Col. Walker and I emerged from the van, I saw that several pockets of U.S. Marines had secured a perimeter. Rain and sunlight sprayed simultaneously through a fine mother-of-pearl mist. In long lines in the rain, people waited to have their teeth pulled, their eyes checked and treated for cataracts, their children examined, and to get medicines for a variety of minor ailments. I overhead a U.S. Navy doctor sadly tell a man that he could do nothing for his daughter’s three-chambered heart. But every child was treated for worms and vitamin A deficiency. Lt. Col. Downey was standing with a microphone before an audience of children, teaching them the hokey-pokey while they waited to see the doctors. None of the posters advertising the MEDCAP mentioned the United States or the JSOTF. The front organization was a Taiwan-based, Buddhist NGO (nongovernmental organization), Tzu-Chi, whose Philippine branch had organized the event. Everyone who came went home with a “peace bag,” filled with slippers, toothpaste, shampoo, and multivitamins. The doctors were a mix of American and Philippine military medics, as well as civilian physicians mobilized by Tzu-Chi.

Downey explained: “The idea is for us to be in the background, so as to build up the credibility of the national government and the national army in outlying villages like this one. Besides, all of these people here know that without the security provided by United States Marines, none of this would be happening. The NGO and civilian doctors would have been afraid to show up, for fear of Abu Sayyaf.”

By late afternoon more than 1,800 people had been treated. I watched one man have twelve teeth pulled. “We do only what we can,” Col. Walker said. “My pets at home get better care than these kids,” he added, not wanting to overdramatize the significance of the day.

The JSOTF considered such MEDCAPS “force protection” exercises, because they built trust and relationships with surrounding communities that, in turn, provided an informal native intelligence network, like the kind U.S. troops had established a hundred years ago here in Mindanao. The MEDCAPS drove a wedge between the people and the insurgents.

The drive from Camp Navarro, headquarters of the JSOTF, to Camp Malagutay, headquarters of two U.S. Army Special Forces A-teams and one B-team, took less than fifteen minutes. But Camp Malagutay constituted a different world. For me it was like being back in Colombia, only nicer. The A- and B-teams occupied two separate hootches made of artistic coconut wood weave, raised on stilts with iron roofs. Except for the barriers of concertina wire, sandbags, and HESCO baskets, they each had the look of a small South Sea island beach house. Rather than the bland American fare at the JSOTF, the Green Berets lived on curried beef, crabs, and hot sauce. Even better was the company.

Maj. Guy Lemire of San Francisco was an articulate and policy-savvy former noncommissioned officer who had gone to Officer Candidate School. He had a few years of community college, and spoke Thai and Mandarin Chinese. His sergeant major, Brian Walsh, an Army brat from eastern Oregon, was a towering Mr. Clean of a man who barked out opinions that were as indiscreet as they were truthful. The team sergeant for one of the A-teams was a sly, wiry, and laconic Mississippian in civilian clothes, who could stare down an empty alley of Zamboanga and know whether it was Muslim or Christian. I will keep his name anonymous because of the job he did.

After about thirty seconds of polite introductions, Maj. Lemire and Sgt. Maj. Walsh got down to business. Once a Fil officer reached the rank of major, he was done, and thought of nothing but his own career, money, and corruption; 25 percent of the Philippine army’s basic weaponry was unserviceable, “because the Fils had no concept of maintenance,” even as the U.S. was providing them with state-of-the-art, frequency-hopping radio technology.

Because American military officers, unlike American diplomats, didn’t feel the need to be hopeful about the human condition, they tended to be more honest and practical in their analyses. To American diplomats, the Philippines was a democracy; to the American military, beneath the level of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, a few of her cabinet ministers, and her military chief of staff, the Philippines was a klepto-oligarchy. But the candor became even clearer and more refreshing as you descended lower through the ranks. In Maj. Lemire’s command and intel room, filled with marked terrain maps and soft porn pinups, the candor was like pure oxygen.

Here was Maj. Lemire: “Because the Abu Sayyaf Group has RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], the Armed Forces of the Philippines says it needs RPGs, too. Bullshit. No it doesn’t. RPGs are useless at close range. The response to RPGs is to lay down suppressive fire, and maneuver closer to the enemy. But moving closer to grenade fire is counterintuitive, which means troops have to trust their officers, which here they don’t. The truth is that the Filipino army is terrified of Abu Sayyaf. The Fil army does little reconnaissance. It will only initiate battle with a tremendous numerical advantage, and won’t do so below the company level. There is no understanding of logistics and maintenance in the Philippine military, of planning for the next day.”

In other words, the Philippine military was like the Colombian military, only a bit worse. Meanwhile, there were stories of Abu Sayyaf guerrillas sharing one rifle among four men in the battlefield, making every shot count. The Abu Sayyaf terrorists wore amulets like the Moros a hundred years before. They believed that the blood of hostages whom they beheaded made them stronger. Their irrationality gave them the battlefield discipline that the regular Philippine military lacked.

Sgt. Maj. Walsh and the other noncoms I met at Camp Malagutay were irate that the Filipinos were so bad at maintenance, yet were getting high-frequency radios and night optical devices (NODs) from the U.S. “First, let’s see if they can clean and zero in their rifles, and take care to do so, before we give them the gee-whiz stuff,” one noncom told me. Another remarked: “Because it’s such a lovely, agreeable culture, there are no internal standards, that’s why you need growling American sergeants to advise them, or else nothing happens.”

At the rifle range one day, I was in the midst of talking with a Filipino lieutenant when a broad-shouldered American sergeant with a commanding glare under a ball cap walked over and stuck his face in the eyes of the Filipino officer and snapped: “Sir, tell your machine gunner that if he wants to break his gun he should keep it on full automatic, just the way he’s doing.” A moment later the sergeant was back in the Filipino officer’s face: “Sir, your man over there is sitting in the kill zone too long, get him out, faster.” I liked this Special Forces sergeant from California’s San Joaquin Valley. He missed no detail. He had served all over Asia, and had taken time off from military service to work as a bounty hunter back in the U.S. I asked him his assessment of the Philippine military.

“Weak noncoms, badly trained, underpaid,” he huffed. “They steal bullets to feed their families. The Thai army is better, and the Koreans and Singaporeans are just plain damn good soldiers. Even with their booze, I found Mongolian troops are superior to the Fils. The Fils are like the Panamanians I’ve worked with. They need basics, not NODs. You can fight at night without NODs if you use SLLS [Smell. Look. Listen. Silence]. The best time to assault is at night in the pouring rain; the mud hides your sounds and the water your scent. Shooting, moving, communicating, that’s the essence of soldiering. You can do it with the most rudimentary technology.”

Because the Green Berets’ expectations were so low, no one was depressed. “We can make some progress identifying talented cadres,” Maj. Lemire assured me, “American-influenced Fil officers who will work their way up the command chain.” To repeat: Despite the Hollywood stuff, the primary focus of Special Forces was not commando raids but the instruction of indigenous armies. “Drop us in, and we’ll train ’em, whoever they are. Gathering intelligence and building relationships are indirect benefits of that.” If the southern Philippines broke away to join a new, radical Muslim state along with parts of Malaysia and Indonesia, or if the Philippine state itself collapsed from within, there would always be an American-influenced cadre here to deal with events. That was the hope.

“As frustrating as things are, if we were not here, somebody else would be, like the Chinese,” Sgt. Maj. Walsh said. “What needs to happen is the proliferation of one- and two-man missions, and twelve-man A-teams embedded directly with the Filipino military; that’s how we can really get things done, and kill Muslim bad guys.”

Hovering over the Special Forces troops at Camp Malagutay was the lugubrious shadow of the JSOTF. The Green Berets provided “security assistance”—that is, they trained the trainers of the elite units of the host nation. As such they were funded under U.S. Title 22, which meant they reported to the State Department and therefore to the U.S. Embassy in Manila, whereas the JSOTF came under the Department of Defense’s Title 10, and therefore, theoretically at least, should not have been able to tell the Special Forces troops at Camp Malagutay how to run their lives. Had the JSOTF not been close by—and Maj. Lemire’s gang truly wished it wasn’t—his troops would have been able to do as they pleased: go out at night, mix more with the locals, exactly what Army Special Forces did everywhere else.

At both Tolemaida and Espinal in Colombia, after a hard day’s training, the Green Berets would hit the town almost every night. Here they had to request permission in advance from the JSOTF, and declare in detail a force protection plan in order to visit the tamest of local restaurants. I insisted on going out every night, and Maj. Lemire’s boys used that as an excuse to get out themselves.

Actually, Maj. Lemire got along just fine with Col. Walker and Lt. Col. Downey, the JSOTF commanders. It was the unwieldy bureaucratic arrangement, made worse by their predecessors, which had given him problems.

Each night about eight of us went to La Vista del Mar, a restaurant and club with a panoramic view of the Sulu Sea. We were accompanied by the girls who did the team laundry for $20 per month. These girls were typical Filipinas: small-boned, symmetrically featured, and walnut-complexioned beauties, with twangy, mellow Spanish-style voices and subservient oriental manners, a devouring mix of South America and Asia. Though one of the Green Berets slyly disappeared for an hour with a girl into the darkness of the beachfront, with its conveniently noisy winds, otherwise, the evenings were innocent, the consequence of the strict JSOTF regulations and the commonplace logistical problems of shacking up with someone. And that was a shame, at least in my opinion, given the number of single and divorced guys in the group, and the stark fact of a six-month deployment. Had this been the old Pacific Army, some of these men would have taken some of these girls as mistresses.

With sex not an option, the evenings at La Vista del Mar were given over to letting off steam, while enjoying the spicy crabs, the San Miguel beer, and the mesmerizing sea winds. “Don’t order the pizza,” one Green Beret advised me. “It’s so dry that biting into it is like taking communion.” A sergeant from Indiana treated us to a grouchy soliloquy about the unfairness of a recent weightlifting competition at the JSOTF. Because the object had been to bench-press a total amount of weight over a large number of repetitions, a certain amount of strategy was involved, and “this narrow-assed, toothpick, pocket-protector-wearing kind of motherfucker,” as he put it, “beat out a marine who had played linebacker at the University of Minnesota.”

“My daddy’s got a new wife,” another sergeant told us. “They keep getting younger and younger. This one won’t fly in planes. She hates cities. But my daddy’s happy. She goes fishing with him. She baits her own hook. That’s all he wants.”

One sergeant had been the veritable mayor of a small town in Kosovo in 1999. He had to inspect a house, he told us. “ ‘Fine,’ this Albanian woman said, ‘but please stay out of my baby’s room. He’s sleeping.’ There was an altercation. The woman became hysterical. I told her I had to inspect the room. ‘I’ll be quiet, ma’am, I’m not going to hurt your baby.’ I picked up the baby and felt under the mattress. There was an AK-47 with the safety off and a blue-tipped armor-piercing bullet in the chamber with a full magazine. When I got to the Balkans, I thought that the Serbs were the bad guys, but the Albanians never ceased to amaze me,” he concluded.

“Jimmy Carter,” yet another muttered, apropos of nothing, “what a fucking loser. He gives away the Panama Canal without even negotiating and now the PLA [People’s Liberation Army of China] is all over Panama with intel operations. Bet your life the Chinese will fight us asymmetrically.”[34]

I raised the subject of Basilan just across the strait, its mountainous outline now a slightly darker ink shade than the night sky. “I was there,” a medic at the table said. “We infiltrated villages, built roads, won over the moms and pops by treating their kids’ skin diseases, and got info on bad guys in return. It was good stuff.” “Only problem with Basilan is that we left,” someone else said. “We had to practically force the Fil government to take over the civilian aid projects that we started for the Muslim community. When you visit there in a few days, I’ll guarantee you that half the wells we built won’t work anymore.”

The women at the table were partly ignored. But their good looks and proximity had been something for the guys to look forward to. The Green Beret who had gone off with one of the girls in the direction of the beach suddenly reappeared. Driving back, someone joked about smelling his finger to see where it had been.

One of Maj. Lemire’s A-teams was allowed the run of the town, though. That was ODA-145, headed by the laconic master sergeant from Mississippi, in white slacks, penny loafers, and a loose summer shirt concealing his 9mm Beretta. ODA-145 was the force protection team for Zamboanga. Over the years and decades, following the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in 1983 in Lebanon, of the Khobar Towers complex in 1996 in Saudi Arabia, and other incidents, the U.S. military had become Israeli-like in its distrust of the local environment and its obsession with security. It was ODA-145’s job to get to know people: to get outside the perimeter, prowl around, find out the normal traffic patterns so that they could spot abnormal ones, develop contacts at the docks and whorehouses, make friends with the local drug-enforcement people for the extra eyes and ears they offered. “No freaking way we’re depending on the Filipino military,” the Mississippian counseled.

“See those shacks?” he said. “That’s Campo Islam. It’s dirtier and less

prosperous than the Christian areas. You could hide a Western hostage in that confusion for years and no one would know. Down the road is where Abu Sayyaf held Gracia Burnham for a while.” The Mississippian had done similar force protection assignments in Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia over the previous year. He made snap cultural judgments of the kind that would burn an academic’s reputation, but which in the field prove right seven out of ten times.

What concerned him most was not falling into a pattern, not showing up at the same place once too often. That was what may have got Sgt. Mark Wayne Jackson, a member of ODA-145 killed outside Camp Malagutay a few months before.

The Mississippian took me to meet a local Filipino business magnate and former Interpol officer who helped ODA-145 with information here and there. He had an estate and target range by the water where we fired off 9mm and 5.56mm rounds for an hour. This man could afford to look somewhat frail and soft-spoken, I thought, because of the blatancy of his wealth and power. “Why was the Philippines such a corrupt place?” I asked him. He responded in a bored manner with a challenge: “Name a place in the world where the Spanish have been for a long time that is well governed.” He added: “Marcos solved the problem of a weak state by creating a huge army. Now the army is such a danger that only a military man can control it and modernize it.”

The day wore on. We hit the docks. We got stuck for an hour in Zamboanga’s jeepney and trishaw traffic. The Mississippian’s sidekick drove the wrong way up a one-way street to finally escape it. We stopped for fast food at a local mall with plate glass windows that had recently been bombed. The Mississippian handed me off to another two members of his team in the evening. They stopped first at a karaoke bar, and later at a whorehouse that the team hadn’t checked for a while, shooting the breeze with the owner and mama-san about strangers who might have been passing through from Indonesia and Malaysia.

Whorehouses can be insightful, particularly in Asia. Some areas of the world contain a truth, or fact, that everybody knows and quietly admits to, but which no one dares proclaim openly. In Africa, at the beginning of the 1990s, “the advance of democracy as in former communist Europe” was the white lie to which all paid lip service, while the dark truth of “chaos and steep decline” was not spoken about, for fear of sounding racist and without hope. In Asia, the unspoken fact was not something dark or pessimistic, just a bit embarrassing. It was “the girls, girls, girls.”

Whether it was journalists or military men, Western men simply loved Asia. I cannot remember how many times I heard an old journalistic hand tell me about how the politics and culture of Asia were “just so fascinating,” while noticing that he had an unearthly beautiful Asian wife or girlfriend several decades younger than he. And who could blame him? Particularly in the Philippines, which was a land of smiling and stunning women, many of whom, unlike in Thailand, spoke English well, and where, again, unlike in Thailand, the prevalence of HIV-AIDS was extraordinarily and somewhat unexplainably low. Filipinas were known to be so clean in their habits that even the common forms of venereal disease were not all that rampant. The temptations were formidable. As one Green Beret told me after I returned to Manila, “This is the only country in the world where the main tourist attraction squirms up and down on your lap. It’s as if the women are kids at a toy store, and we’re the last Cabbage Patch dolls on the shelf.”

It was a far cry from Yemen, where the women were walking sacks and after a few weeks you found yourself staring at ankles.

The whorehouse in Zamboanga was a typical Asian “fishbowl.” The outside was patrolled by shotgun-bearing private security guards. Inside, small groups of men were led by a commanding and buxom mama-san, wearing a corsage on her grand pink gown, into large private salons equipped with their own bathrooms and karaoke machines, where an antlike army of beautiful girls in their early twenties, in skimpy black negligees, were led in for the men to choose from. The karaoke machines encouraged a wholesome sing-along kind of popular music—the Beach Boys; Peter, Paul and Mary; the Carpenters—unlike the hard punk rock that made similar places, in prewar Yugoslavia for instance, so unbearable. We were gone in under an hour. I marveled at the self-control of my companions.

At dawn the next morning I found myself on a broken chair under a vast iron shed in rotting heat and humidity by the ferry dock in Zamboanga. The water was a tableau of fishing nets and bancas. The floor in front of me was crowded with garbage and sleeping street people. Next to me were two new traveling companions from the JSOTF, Special Forces Master Sgt. Doug Kealoha of the big island in Hawaii and Air Force Master Sgt. Carlos Duenas Jr. of San Diego. They were the force protection team for my trip to Basilan: Injun Country in the view of the JSOTF, though Abu Sayyaf guerrillas had largely been routed from the island.

I felt the familiar excitement of early-morning sea travel. From here in Zamboanga you could hop cheap and broken-down ferries all the way south along the Sulu chain to Malaysia and Indonesia. Had I been by myself, I might have been tempted to do it. I would certainly have had no qualms about going to Basilan alone. I had gone on my own to far more dangerous places many times. But being embedded with the U.S. military meant giving up some of your own freedom in return for access. Thus, instead of taking a taxi to the dock and jumping aboard the first ferry south across the Basilan Strait, I rode in a darkened van with three soldiers in full kit, in addition to Sgts. Kealoha and Duenas, who, while in civilian clothes, carried Beretta pistols under their loose shirts. Troops of the 103rd Brigade of the Philippine army would meet us at the dock in Isabela, the main town in Basilan. It was all part of the operations plan for my excursion of a few days.

The reasons for this seemingly absurd level of paranoia and organization were several:

• The American military planned and organized for all contingencies, without distinction. That was just the way it operated, and how it minimized risk in a media age when commanders in the Philippines labored “under the tyranny of one casualty,” as they put it. For example, one night in Zamboanga, I had left the JSOTF with Col. Walker to have dinner at a local hotel with a visiting U.S. diplomat. En route he packed a cocked Beretta and wore body armor, which he removed only at the last minute, quickly changing into a barong tagalog.

• U.S. soldiers were more valuable hostages than civilians, and simply being embedded made me likewise more valuable, and more of an embarrassment if anything went wrong.

• Special Forces Sgt. First Class Mark Jackson had been killed in a bomb blast outside Camp Malagutay not too long ago, and the JSOTF was simply being extra careful.

Still, I felt that Dana Priest of the Washington Post was correct in her observation that the military could get just too protective. For example, she tells about being forced in East Timor to keep her shirtsleeves rolled down and to take malaria pills for a visit of only one day there, even though a Danish humanitarian relief worker had been in the area for months and wore a sleeveless blouse.³² Force protection had simply gotten out of hand.

Sgt. Kealoha, whose mellow demeanor and wide permanent grin masked a smooth attention to detail, didn’t like the fact that the girl at the ferry counter called someone on her cell phone the moment after she had sold us our tickets. “She could have been calling someone in Basilan saying that foreigners were on the way.” In this case I couldn’t really blame him. Western faces from this point south meant dollar signs for kidnap-for-ransom gangs.

The three of us sat apart on the ferry’s upper deck, which was filled with well-groomed middle-class people, giving me yet again the sense that the security precautions were ridiculous. Then a typically good looking Filipina carrying a medical textbook sat next to me and asked, “You’re not afraid to visit Basilan?”

“Should I be?” I replied.

“Yes, you should. Foreigners get abducted there.”

She told me that she was a nurse in the northern part of the island but now lived in Zamboanga and commuted to Basilan a few days a week, afraid to spend the night there. I told her not to worry about me, that I would be met by Philippine soldiers at the dock in Isabela. I was slightly taken aback. In almost every previous instance as a journalist, the moment I had actually arrived somewhere that the outside world considered dangerous, I immediately encountered the most ordinary people going about their daily lives, making me ashamed of my fear.

“Whatever you do,” the woman added, “don’t go to Tuburan, avoid that area,” referring to the anarchic, Muslim-inhabited eastern finger of Basilan that Col. Walker had said was off limits. In the middle of the strait she pointed out the islet of Santa Cruz. “Foreigners were abducted there,” she said.

Meanwhile, I was benumbed by the purity of the scene. Beyond the lacquered blue strait crowded with bancas, Basilan emerged as a vast line of extinct volcanoes rising sheer above palm jungles. It was a coast of terror as beautiful as could be imagined, with few signs of human habitation. Amid the screen of uninhabited atolls, a perfect white sandy beach came into view that stretched for miles, empty. “Nobody goes to that beach; they’re afraid,” the woman told me. I noticed a small settlement of thatched, coconut-leaf huts; it looked like a vacation village, but it was an outpost of the 103rd Brigade. Traveling with the military, and particularly with Special Forces, had brought me to the last unspoiled places on earth, the places still too unstable to be touched by tourism.

A tangle of boat-strewn channels and hutments on stilts, with overlapping scrap iron roofs, heralded Isabela. At the dock, hundreds of pairs of eyes stared wondrously and suspiciously at me, their fingers busy texting on cell phones. Again, I was struck by just how off limits this beautiful place was. In almost every other remote and war-ravaged part of the world, I had always come across at least a few intrepid backpackers and relief workers; not here.

Three Filipino soldiers in a Humvee met us at the dock. Suddenly I was careening through crowded and decayed streets, jammed with trikes and motorcycles, and cleansed by fresh sea breezes. Isabela seemed noisy and sleepy at the same time, a backwater in the way that I had found Freetown, Sierra Leone; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and St. George’s, Grenada, many years and decades before: places whose violence and instability were partly a consequence of their isolation. Soon we arrived at the 103rd Brigade outpost, the one I had seen from the ferry. Up close it looked no less idyllic, the kind of place where you expected to find nude Scandinavian holiday makers. Instead I found Philippine Army Col. Bonifacio Ramos and his troops.

Col. Ramos had been the Philippine defense attaché in Washington. As an up-and-comer he was afterwards given a field position in a volatile area, which is where I found him prior to his promotion to brigadier general. “In Basilan,” he told me, the sweat pouring down our faces on a rain-darkened veranda, “you cannot define the battlefield, so you might as well organize every community to defend itself.”

The Abu Sayyaf guerrillas, Col. Ramos began, had been routed from the island. They were now holed up on Jolo and elsewhere farther south in the archipelago. All that remained in Basilan were a few lawless remnants bent on piracy and kidnapping. The Americans had built roads, schools, and water wells the year before, but they could not stay indefinitely. There was no police force to speak of. And the Manila government had taken two of his five battalions away from him to fight Islamic terrorists in Mindanao.

“Firearms are a prerequisite for living here,” Ramos told me. “And as long as people are armed, you might as well organize them into support groups, for defense and intelligence gathering.” The vehicle for this was the Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Units, vigilante outfits of the kind that the ethnic Chinese had organized in Zamboanga. It was not as sinister as it sounded. Civil defense is crucial in a counterinsurgency, because it allows individuals to cast their lot in favor of the existing order and against revolutionary upheaval.³³ But these units could not operate in a vacuum. “Without economic development,” Ramos warned, “Basilan will die a natural death. It’s only when you care for people that you are credible.”

Later in Manila, the Philippine foreign minister, Blas Ople, a veteran of the World War II fighting against the Japanese, would have a similar message for me. “The Muslims of Basilan strongly appreciated the humanitarian assistance provided by the U.S. military. Now it is our responsibility to integrate and consolidate Mindanao and Sulu, socially and economically, for the sake of our own national security.” The foreign minister referred to the threat of a radical, breakaway Muslim state that could emerge to the Philippines’ south, were Indonesia to weaken further.[35]

But was there any evidence, I asked myself, that the Christian oligarchy in Manila, which ruled under the brand name of democracy even as it presided over corrupt and ineffectual institutions, would actually do that? Almost none at ground level. Yet, in the aftermath of September 11, as PACOM began to plan Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines, U.S. military officers understood that getting the Philippine government to assume responsibility for its own Muslim citizens would be decisive.

When I was in Honolulu, a Special Forces officer at PACOM recapped for me the significance of what happened in Basilan during the first eight months of 2002: “We were an enabler. We tried to help get the Philippine government to look more benignly on its southern, Muslim population: to treat them as real citizens. The American Joint Task Force set out to be a spine donor. That is, it tried to put some backbone into the Manila authorities so they would better take care of their own people. Success meant that we couldn’t take credit for anything. We had to give the credit to the Philippine government. We didn’t want credit; that would have ruined the operation. In SF, all we ever want is more missions. For us it is always about access, not publicity. Anyway, speaking personally, getting my name in the paper—even for something good—would make my skin crawl.”

PACOM decided to focus on Basilan because it was the northernmost and most populous island in the Sulu chain—the link between the southern islands and the mainland of Mindanao. Were Abu Sayyaf and other Islamic insurgents to be ejected from Basilan, they would be instantly marginalized. Basilan, with a population of 360,000, was important enough to matter, yet small enough for the U.S. to achieve a crucial victory in a short amount of time.

The first thing that Army Special Forces did about Basilan was conduct a series of population surveys. Special Forces surveys are a bit like those conducted by university academics; indeed, many a Special Forces officer has an advanced degree. But there is a difference. Because the motive behind these surveys is operational rather than intellectual, there is a concrete, cut-to-the-chase quality about them that is uncommon in academia. Months are not needed to reach conclusions. Nobody is afraid to generalize in the bluntest terms. Thus, conclusions do not become entangled in exquisite subtleties. Intellectuals reward complexity and refinement; the military, simplicity and bottom-line assessments. For the Green Berets, there was only one important question: what did they need to know about the people of Basilan that would help them kill or drive out the insurgents?

Special Forces officers teamed up with their counterparts in the Philippine army to question local chiefs and their constituents in the island’s forty barangays, or parishes. They conducted demographic studies helped by satellite imagery. They found that the Christian population was heaviest in the northern part of Basilan, particularly in the island capital of Isabela. Abu Sayyaf’s strongest support was in the south and east of the island, where government services were, not surprisingly, the weakest. The islanders’ biggest concerns were the lack of clean water, basic security, medical care, education, and good roads, in that order.

Democracy or self-rule was not especially critical for the Muslim population: There already had been elections, many of them, which had achieved little for the average person. The government was elected, but did not rule. Abu Sayyaf had shut the schools and hospitals, and kidnapped and executed teachers and nurses. The survey indicated that, just as I had seen in Colombia, the most basic human right is not freedom as people in the West conceive of it, but physical security.

Next, under the auspices of Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines, the Zamboanga-based joint task force dispatched twelve Green Beret A-teams to Basilan, backed up by three administrative B-teams. Their mission was to train Philippine army units, which would then conduct military operations against Abu Sayyaf. Doing that meant digging water wells for American troops and building roads so that they could move around the countryside. The Americans also built piers and airstrips for their operations. The Green Berets knew that once they departed, all of this infrastructure would be left behind for the benefit of the civilian population, which was the whole point.

It was precisely in the Abu Sayyaf strongholds where the Green Beret detachments chose to be located. That, in itself, encouraged the guerrillas to scatter and leave the island without firing a shot. By guaranteeing security, the American military was able to lure international relief agencies to Basilan, as well as some of the teachers and doctors who had fled. The American firm Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, built and repaired schools and water systems. Special Forces medics conducted medical and dental clinics, at which villagers casually volunteered information about the insurgents while their children were being treated for scabies, malaria, and meningitis, and having their teeth pulled.

The objective was always to further legitimize the Philippine military among the islanders. The Americans went nowhere and did nothing without Philippine troops present to take the credit. When ribbons were cut to open a new road or school, the Americans made sure not to be around.

With discretionary funds the Americans also built several small neighborhood mosques. “We hired locally, and bought locally,” a Special Forces officer explained, referring to the labor and materials for each project. The policy was deliberately carried out to the extreme. Repairing roads meant clearing boulders off them. When the Green Berets saw peasants chipping away at these boulders to make smaller rocks, they bought the small jagged rocks (called “aggregate”) from these peasants and used them to lay the new roads.

The ostensible mission was to help Philippine troops kill international terrorists. But that was accomplished by orchestrating a humanitarian assistance campaign, which severed the link between the terrorists and the rest of the Muslim population—exactly what successful middle-level American commanders had done in the Philippines a hundred years before. “We changed the way we were perceived,” one Green Beret told me. “When we arrived in Basilan, Muslim kids made throat-slashing gestures at us. By the time we left they were our friends. That led them to question everything the guerrillas had told them about Americans.”

The Green Berets saw no combat on Basilan. Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines was an example of unconventional warfare, which, according to Special Forces Lt. Col. David Maxwell, is about “solving complex political-military problems through creative means.”

When I arrived in Basilan the Americans had been gone for almost a year. Were their accomplishments long-lasting?

The hospital in Isabela was a short drive from Col. Ramos’s headquarters. Prior to Enduring Freedom, there were twenty-five beds and most of the staff had fled to Zamboanga. Now there were 110 beds plus a women’s clinic. There was drinkable water and electricity, and the grounds were being landscaped. “Tell the American people that it is a miracle what took place here in 2002,” the hospital director, Dr. Nilo Barandino, told me. “What the American people gave to us we will do our best to maintain and build upon. But there is still a shortage of penicillin. We get little help from our own government in Manila.”

Dr. Barandino said that Basilan used to be a “paradise for kidnappers,” but since the American intervention, kidnapping stopped and the inhabitants of Isabela were going out at night again. A decade earlier he himself had been a kidnap victim.

“I was kidnapped along with my wife and children on November 27, 1992, and released December 24 after the ransom was paid. I’ll never forget those dates. All that we had worked and saved for was gone in a day. We were not molested, tied up, or beaten. The Muslim guerrillas were still in an infant state then, just local bandits. The cruelty, the rapes, and the beheadings were techniques they learned from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan later in the decade.”

From Isabela, the two American sergeants and I headed southwest in a Humvee loaned to us by Col. Ramos. Everywhere we saw bailey bridges and sections of new roads built under the auspices of Enduring Freedom. If there was an island paradise on earth that surpassed all others, it was here, I thought, with rubber tree plantations and pristine palm jungles adorned with breadfruit, mahogany, and mango trees under a glittering sun.

In Maluso, a predominantly Muslim area on Basilan’s southwestern tip, I met a water engineer, Salie Francisco. He jumped in the Humvee with us and took us deep into the jungle to follow the trail of a pipeline constructed by Kellogg, Brown & Root. It led to a new dam, water filtration plant, and school, built under the auspices of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The area used to be a lair of Abu Sayyaf. The terrorists were gone. But as Francisco told me, there was no tourism, no jobs, no communications facilities, and yet lots of expectations raised by the Americans.

I saw poor and remote villages of the kind that I had seen all over the world, liberated from fear, but with a new class of Westernized activists beginning to trickle in. “The Philippine military is less and less doing its job here,” Francisco said. “We are afraid that Abu Sayyaf will return. No one trusts the government to finish building the roads that the Americans started.” He went on: “The Americans were sincere. They did nothing wrong. We will always be grateful to their soldiers. But why did they leave? Please tell me. We are very disappointed that they did so.” His smiling, naive eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism.

We continued in the Humvee out of the bush and into the port of Maluso, a picturesque firetrap of a town without regular electricity. The aquamarine water was filled with bancas stabilized by bamboo outriggings; fishing was the only economy and it wasn’t much. A tattered assemblage of unemployed men in Muslim skullcaps milled about. Women wore black scarves. Out in the Sulu Sea I saw a seascape of small islands with beautiful beaches that were reportedly infested by pirates and Abu Sayyaf. A mosque dome shaped like an Ottoman turban caught my eye.

Once again, the most prosperous and well-maintained part of the landscape was a military base, a large Swiss Family Robinson–style tree house of a complex, with fine prospects on the edge of town, inhabited by the 36th Philippine Army Special Forces Company, a combat dive unit trained by the Americans which patrolled the nearby coast. The Philippine base was decorated with inspirational sayings by famous American authors:

“I use the quotations to boost morale,” the commander, Capt. Peter Navarro, told me. He said that since assuming command he was concentrating on the beautification of his post. His company was composed overwhelmingly of Christians from Luzon. Like every other Philippine military encampment I had seen, this one was marked by overt Roman Catholic symbolism. Grace was said before meals. In Basilan, amid the helmet-shaped Muslim headscarves that determined the human landscape of the southern Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the Christian Philippine military seemed like an occupation force.

As I continued around the island over the next few days, especially in the Muslim region of Tipo-Tipo to the southeast, local officials were openly grateful to the U.S. military for the wells, schools, and clinics that had been built, yet critical of their own government in Manila for “corruption,” and for not providing funds for development. True or not, that was the perception.

In southern Basilan, the material intensity of Islamic culture became overpowering for the first time in my journey south. There was a profusion of head scarves, signs for halal food, and a large new mosque in Tipo-Tipo paid for by Arabian Gulf countries. Mindanao and the Zamboanga Peninsula had contained pockets of Islamic civilization, and were generally poorer than Luzon to the north. It was the same in northern Basilan. But it was only in Maluso and Tipo-Tipo where it became clear to the traveler that he had entered an Islamic continuum, in which the large Indonesian islands of Java, Borneo, and Sumatra seemed closer to him than Luzon.

While I would learn more about Operation Enduring Freedom—Philippines in the course of my travels, one thing was obvious: America could not change the vast forces of history and culture that had placed a poor Muslim region at the southern edge of a badly governed, Christian-run archipelago nation, just as America could not clap its hands and give governments in the mountains of Colombia and Yemen complete control over their lawless lowlands.

All America could do was insert its armed forces here and there, as unobtrusively as possible, to alleviate perceived threats to its own security when they became particularly acute. And because such insertions were often in fragile third world democracies, with difficult colonial pasts and prickly senses of national pride, American forces had to operate under very restricted rules of engagement.

Humanitarian assistance may not have been the weapon of choice for Pentagon hard-liners, who preferred to hunt down and kill “bad guys” through “direct action” rather than dig water wells and build schools—projects which, in any case, were likely unsustainable because of the lack of resolve of national governments like that of the Philippines to pick up where the U.S. had left off. But in a world where nineteenth-century-style colonialism was simply impractical and where the very spread of democracy for which America struggled meant that it could no longer operate with impunity, an approach that merged humanitarianism with intelligence gathering, in order to achieve low-cost partial victories, was what imperialism demanded in the early twenty-first century.

Even that was problematic, though, because any overt connection between humanitarian relief and intelligence gathering was illegal, and could put all Western relief charities under suspicion. But the key was not to get hung up in old-fashioned bureaucratic distinctions. There was nothing illegal or immoral about U.S. military officers simply keeping their eyes and ears open at the same time that they were engaged in civil affairs; it was part of what building normal relationships with the locals is all about. The best intelligence gathering is often done passively, not actively.

From Basilan I returned to the JSOTF in Zamboanga, then traveled on to Subic Bay in order to link up with another Green Beret A-team.

Subic Bay is separated from Manila Bay by the Bataan Peninsula. It was while briefly transiting Manila, en route to Subic Bay, that the full force of the poverty and underdevelopment in the Muslim south of the Philippines struck me. Following almost two weeks in Zamboanga and Basilan, I found the modernity and cleanliness of the domestic terminal in Manila simply stunning. The taxi journey from the airport to the ferry station took me past fancy car dealerships and luxurious malls with flashily dressed men and women. Here’s where all the money was, I realized, made in one street in Manila and spent in another. In the U.S., the capital and principal cities were wealthier than the countryside, but the countryside was still a seemly place to live, with basic services. In the Philippines there was garish luxury in Manila and its environs, and African-level underdevelopment in the Muslim south. In truth, the Philippines was only Luzon, with Mindanao, Sulu, and the other island groups mere offshore possessions, to greater and lesser extents.

Getting to Subic Bay required a ferry journey across Manila Bay to Orion on the Bataan Peninsula. On the dock at Orion I was met by Master Sgt. Mark Lopez, the former team sergeant for ODA-125, a combat dive squad, and his sidekick, Sgt. First Class Jim Irish. I was drenched in sweat just standing there. Looking up at the black-green, heavily jungled peaks of Bataan, I imagined what the Death March of April 1942 must have been like, in which as many as ten thousand American and Filipino troops died from disease, starvation, and the wanton brutality of the Japanese conquerors.³⁴ The drive across the peninsula to Subic Bay took us along part of the route of the Death March, announced by historical markers.

Sgts. Lopez and Irish had just finished conducting a month-long exercise with a Philippine Special Forces unit, and were preparing to return to Okinawa. Mark Lopez was next slated to deploy with the South Korean special forces on a one-man mission. He had just been replaced a few days earlier as the ODA-125 team sergeant. Jim Irish planned to retire soon from the Army. Their Okinawa-based A-team had spent several months on Basilan the previous year.

With his deep tan, baritone voice, bulky muscularity, and beach attire, Lopez, a former surfer from California, fit the stereotypical image of a Special Forces scuba diver. He was self-consciously macho and authentically personable, picking up my train of thought on Manila’s colonial attitude toward the Muslim south with the following: “In the Philippines you see the legacy of Spain versus Ottoman Turkey. Luzon is Spanish Roman Catholic; it’s where all the Ford plants and other foreign factories are. Mindanao—all the way south to Indonesia—constitutes the Muslim world, influenced by Arab traders from the Ottoman Empire.”

Lopez had earned a political science degree from the University of Maryland in his spare time, but was perfectly happy as a noncommissioned officer and had no desire to go to Officer Candidate School. Jim Irish, a fair and towering guy from Pasadena, California, sporting a new tattoo, was the scuba team’s technical support sergeant, the equivalent of an auto mechanic for every piece of diving gear. The two drove me to a townhouse-style complex inside a Philippine naval base to meet the other members of ODA-125, who were planning an underwater combat insertion on an offshore island the following night.

In the meantime, I ensconced myself at a small resort hotel on the beach in Subic Bay. The offshore insertion, I knew, was incidental to my purpose here. Training exercises are essentially technical and abstruse; the real purpose of my observing them was the venue they provided for conversation: the “bull session,” the “soldier’s greatest hobby,” as James Jones writes.³⁵

I would have a lot of bull sessions at Subic Bay. The setting was perfect for them, and deserves to be described in detail.

Subic Bay features scintillating tropical grandeur: a steamy panel of blue and chemical green water trapping the heat, bordered by the junglescapes of Bataan and western Luzon. Subic Bay is testimony to the old saw that nobody acquired nicer real estate than the U.S. Navy and the Catholic Church. A legacy of the Spanish-American War, it was a major U.S. naval base until 1991, when a vote of the Philippine Senate closed it: an assertion of national sovereignty that put thousands of Filipinos employed by the U.S. out of work.

The U.S. Navy loved Subic Bay. So did its Australian counterparts. After the base closure, retired U.S. Navy SEALs and Australian SAS veterans began settling here as expatriates, opening bars, discos, and dive shops.[36] Australians were particularly prevalent, with leathery tans, rugged musculatures that were beginning to crumble with age, and so many tattoos on their arms they approximated weird shirtsleeves. The Aussies had the game beat.

As one American observed, “Say you’re Australian, just retired from the police or military and divorced, with a pension. You’re in your late fifties. You move here and set up with a twenty-something-year-old Filipina. Living here is inexpensive. Even with alimony payments you’re financially better off than if you stayed in Australia.”

They were hard workers, though, and quite a few did not fit the stereotype. Take one Australian I met, Brian Homan, had bought a wrecked coaling station with nothing left to it but the rusted iron pierage. He poured three concrete slabs over the pierage to make an enormous deck and opened a bar straightaway. Meanwhile, he built a proper restaurant and scuba center, which included a small museum filled with the remains of old galleons and Chinese junks, as well as sixteenth-century Chinese and Vietnamese pottery he had salvaged from these and other nearby shipwrecks. His next project was an adjacent hotel fronting the bay, with bedposts in each room made of old U.S. Navy telephone poles he had found: “Authentic Douglas fir from Washington State,” he told me, banging on one with his hand.

The place where I stayed, though not as inventive in its construction,

boasted an atmosphere in which, as somone had told me, “the rules of middle-class society simply didn’t apply, provided no one infringed on anyone else’s peace and security.” Families were welcome but not encouraged. The beach bar had no closing bell. It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Couples would drift out of their rooms in the middle of the night to have a quiet drink by the sea. What you did was your own business, although there was a security guard on constant patrol against thieves. I left my valuables beside my bed and never worried. There was little random crime in the area anyway.

My hotel and others in the area constituted mildewy, somewhat seedy, pre-luxury-era paradises that were able to go on existing because there was just enough terrorism and political instability in the Philippines to keep global tourism and its regulated standards of behavior far, far away.

There were nearby strip joints with names like Muff Divers. Walking into them was like entering an octopus. Several sets of hands would suddenly be all over you, offering massages and more. The women were not down-and-out as one might expect. I interviewed Filipinas in their forties who looked considerably younger and had turned to sex to put children through good colleges and boarding schools. They had specific strategies for investments, future jobs, and cushy retirements. They were not strippers or prostitutes per se. The Philippines offered something subtler: “the girlfriend experience,” it was called in Manila. There was an entire class of attractive Filipinas who made an excellent living, relative to the standards of the local economy, by becoming companions of Western men. Relationships lasted days, weeks, or months even. Couples were often loyal to each other. Such overtly sex-for-money relationships sometimes evolved into marriages. It was crude by the standards of the middle-class West, and yet quite sophisticated and discriminating by the standards of conventional prostitution.

While the Philippines was an Eden without rival for Western males, for the same reason the wives of American servicemen harbored “a visceral hatred of the place,” as one soldier observed. When Subic Bay and Clark Field were in operation as American bases, female spouses who came out here were often in an uproar when they saw what was going on. It led to real “morale problems,” as the U.S. military would euphemistically put it: spousal screaming matches, divorces, and the like.

With the bases gone, soldiers interacted more with the locals. It wasn’t like the days of the old Pacific Army prior to World War II. But the situation had moved back a bit in that direction. The result, actually, was a better relationship with the immediate environment, a phenomenon which, in fact, has a basis in imperial history.

In Armies of the Raj, British military historian Byron Farwell writes that the opening of the Suez Canal, by allowing the wives of British officers in India to conveniently join their husbands, cut the officers off from native society, and became one of the contributing factors leading to the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58 against British rule. “In all societies women have been the conservators of culture,” Farwell explains. “When British women began to arrive in India in numbers, they brought with them British attitudes, British fashions, and British morality; they were soon imposing their ideas, standards, and customs upon their new environment.”³⁶ Consequently, British soldiers, many of whom had preferred to be orientalized themselves rather than to Christianize the Indians, now no longer went native, and a new divide opened between them and the locals.³⁷

The situation in the Philippines posed a particular dilemma for the American military. Rudyard Kipling noted that “single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints.”³⁸ Or as one American serviceman whom I met briefly in Manila put it: “I’m thousands of miles from home, I’m away from the base for a few days with a nice hotel room. Do you really think I should go back to my hotel alone tonight?” Another serviceman angrily derided the “Bible-thumpers” in the U.S. military, who, he said, employed all kinds of budgetary and procedural reasons for getting R & R locations moved from Manila to Okinawa, because in Okinawa “everybody knew it was a bit harder to get laid.”

In fact, I concluded that the U.S. military was handling this aspect of the Philippine reality fairly sensibly. It was a version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, applied to heterosexual activity. For example, I noticed that quite a few soldiers got passes periodically, for one reason or another, to visit Manila. One officer whom I would meet there, with many years of experience in sexually charged places like Thailand and the Philippines told me: “I always make sure the medics have lots of antibiotics for venereal disease. I don’t go crazy against a guy as long as he doesn’t go overboard, as long as he shows up on time for formation, and as long as his wife doesn’t start calling and complaining to me. But once it becomes a family problem, then it’s a team problem, and an Army problem. And I’ve got to take action against him.”

“The Army was my own idea. Nobody encouraged me in that direction. Nobody was a role model for me while growing up,” Mark Lopez explained. Now I was on the beach in Subic Bay, sipping beers at sunset, and he and I spent hours talking. He was part Mexican, part American Indian. He was born in Sacramento, California, and grew up in Yuba City to the north, where “everyone became farmers, loggers, or contractors. I just felt I had to escape that. As a junior in high school I got permission from my parents to join Army ROTC. At first I wanted to become a drill instructor.”

Lopez’s early years in the Army were spent with the 1st Ranger Battalion (Airborne) at Hunter Airfield in Savannah, Georgia, then with U.S. forces in South Korea, and with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York. In 1992 he was accepted into Special Forces. From then on, his only goal in life, he told me in his burly voice, “was to one day become an SF team sergeant. No other job in the world gives you the opportunity to be such a role model and molder of men. You’re the glue of the whole squad. Nobody has as much freedom or as much responsibility.”

I didn’t laugh. Since meeting Mike Fields at Tolemaida in Colombia, I had never ceased to be impressed with the workload carried by Green Beret team sergeants, most of whom held the rank of master sergeant. Later in the Philippines I met a sergeant major, Steve Gregurek, of Navasota, Texas. When Gregurek had been at sergeant majors academy in El Paso, Texas, he was asked what his goal in the military was. “I told them that I had already been there. After being an SF team sergeant, there was nothing left to attain in this world.”

Team sergeants spent years with their Special Forces detachments, and often never left Special Forces, whereas captains and majors would serve a few years on a team and then transfer elsewhere in the Army, returning to Special Forces only later in their careers, if at all. Sergeants, particularly team sergeants, or master sergeants, were the true repositories of Special Forces tradition.

All Lopez wanted to do was talk about his experiences in Basilan. He and his team had lived in the bush there, marched full pack through mangrove swamps and triple canopy rain forest, rebuilt a mosque, and held medical clinics twice weekly in villages threatened by Abu Sayyaf. His medic, Sgt. Keith Pace of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had, among other exploits, saved a seven-year-old girl’s life with a Gatorade enema. “She had spinal meningitis,” Pace explained to me. “She was dehydrating fast. I couldn’t find a vein for an intravenous solution. I filled an enema with a bottle of Gatorade, lifted her butt, and rammed the Gatorade up her anus. It got into her bloodstream and rehydrated her.” Sgt. Pace was personally commended by the Philippine government for his work on Basilan. “I pulled teeth. I treated farm animals. There was no lab nearby. You treated everything empirically. You didn’t wait for proof; by that time someone would be dead. If you thought someone had this or that disease, you treated them for it immediately.”

Lopez felt that everything his team did on Basilan could have been done at less risk and more effectively without a joint task force. Unloading his frustration under a laterite sunset, he said: “The whole JTF-JSOTF concept violated much of what was taught at the Q course in Fort Bragg,” referring to the Green Beret qualification course. “There was relatively little the JTF did that could not have been handled more quietly, efficiently, and with a smaller signature by a Special Forces B-team. The whole point of a B-team is to serve as a forward operating base for several A-teams many miles from their home base.

“The problem,” he continued, “wasn’t just the PACOM mindset, it was Washington. The Special Operations mission in Basilan was the only hot item in the Pacific theater at the time, so we became the plaything of larger forces. Everybody wanted a piece of it, so it became bigger than it needed to be. Instead of rolling with two-and-a-half-ton trucks into Isabela, we should have come in quietly at night on Zodiacs [inflatable boats used by combat divers] and infiltrated into the countryside with CAFGUs [Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Units]. The JTF represented the kind of heavy-handed approach that had made Vietnam go drastically wrong, and which ignored the lessons of the Philippine War a hundred years ago. It’s a good thing that Abu Sayyaf didn’t have the teeth or balls to sabotage us.”

Everything Lopez told me was backed up by other noncoms from other detachments. Furthermore, Lopez’s commanding officer in Basilan, Lt. Col. David Maxwell, would tell me later in Washington that Enduring Freedom—Philippines had operated “ass backwards.” The joint task force in Zamboanga “had supposedly set the conditions for our deployment, but there were no conditions to set up until the A-teams were actually deployed on the island.”

Tactically speaking, Lopez and Maxwell made sense. But it could also be argued that the larger-than-necessary base complex at Zamboanga delivered political benefits that fell outside a purely tactical analysis; it got the U.S. semi-permanently established south of Luzon for the first time since World War II, positioning it for a future conflict with China.

It wasn’t far from Subic Bay to Fort Magsaysay in the interior of Luzon, where more Green Beret teams were deployed training Filipinos.[37] The atmosphere inland was totally different. Subic Bay was exhilarating, Fort Magsaysay depressing. Fort Magsaysay, located near the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp of Cabanatuan, where American survivors of the Bataan Death March had been incarcerated, was flat, with no views or breezes. The heat was crushing. A typhoon system had arrived, submerging the landscape under constant torrential downpours.

The “typhoon blues” had set in around the barracks. Rain lashed the windows. Frogs leapt through the latrines. Some training exercises were canceled. I had plenty of time to talk with Maj. Robert E. Lee Jr. of the Panama Canal Zone and later of Mobile, Alabama, the commanding officer for all Americans at Magsaysay.

Maj. Ed Lee spoke in quick, staccato bursts. He was pale and a bit scrawny compared to the others, with brown hair and a mustache. He was the first member of his family to attend college, at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. His oldest son was named Stonewall, after the Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. He told me that his right-of-passage experience was working for a year as a volunteer for the Southern Baptist mission in a poor African-American section of Wichita, Kansas. “It was my first real exposure to blacks, I mean not from afar. It was a year of learning, day after day, that folks are just folks.”

Maj. Lee had conducted training missions all over Asia: South Korea, Singapore, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines…. He judged cultures and political systems by what he saw of their armies, which wasn’t a bad idea. At least it was ground truth rather than abstractions. Armies are usually accurate cultural barometers. America had among the best noncommissioned officer corps in history because the U.S. was the epitome of a mass middle-class society. Poorly led and corrupt third world countries tended to have militaries in which weapons and other equipment were not maintained. Maintenance—a dull, unpleasant, and yet necessary task—is an indication of discipline, esprit de corps, and faith in the future, because you maintain only what you plan to use for the long term.

Lee, barely audible above the loud typhoon rain, spoke about each Asian army that he had helped train, with the memory of it lingering in his eyes. He was most impressed with Singapore’s. “They had a state-of-the-art shoot house. Whenever a soldier got hurt in training, there was an investigation and a detailed explanation given to the family. Life wasn’t cheap there. It was valued. Officially, Singapore’s a dictatorship, and people in Washington and New York disparage it. Unofficially, it’s a civil society.

“Their noncommissioned officer corps is real good,” he went on. “Singapore’s a meritocracy; lots of future officers are identified out of the ranks in basic training. Chinese, Malays, Indians, they’re all mixed together in units. I went there with the idea of Big Brother. But you just cross the border into Malaysia or especially Indonesia from Singapore, and you’ll see hordes of beggars and people defecating in the streets and you’ll realize why Singapore has those strict rules. You can walk into a movie theater in Singapore without your feet sticking to the floor. Going into Malaysia and Indonesia put things into perspective for me. After those countries, the Big Brotherisms don’t bother you much. Anyway, people in Singapore get around the rules. It’s not as bad as people write about. You just have to be there.”

One kind of training did not halt at Magsaysay because of the bad weather, and it was the most important. It was the CQC (close quarters combat) training conducted by a Special Forces team for a Philippine army light reaction company.

Special Forces soldiers are generalists. They can do everything from digging water wells to negotiating with diplomats to breaking into a house to save hostages. They can infiltrate by water with scuba gear, or from the air with parachutes. They are often in situations of training for one kind of mission, and then have to perform another. Consequently, there are always units in the military that perform specific tasks better than any Special Forces team can. But nobody rivals Special Forces when it comes to their original, classic function: infiltrate an area, and organize and train the indigenes.

Take Charlie Company at Fort Magsaysay, a cluster of Special Forces teams designated for commando-style raids. Whatever one may think, commando training is not interesting. It’s the dullest form of repetition. The rifle range may be fun for an hour or two. But spend a day there “transitioning”—that is, switching from an M-4 assault rifle to a 9mm Beretta pistol in one smooth movement, while always hitting the target exactly where you want—and you will see how monstrously tedious it can be to keep your reflexes primed, in order to be a hero. That is what Charlie Company did. By the standards of the Army’s Delta Force and some of its Ranger units, of the Navy SEALs, and of the Marines’ Force Reconnaissance units, this Special Forces Charlie Company might have been slightly substandard. But those other units only had to fight. Charlie Company could teach indigenes of different cultures how to fight the way it did.

The shoot house used by Charlie Company was a ruined hospital with indoor and outdoor stairwells, and specially constructed movable plywood partitions overseen by a catwalk. Above the catwalk was a corrugated iron roof on which the rain created an uproar. “All units dance,” said the sergeant over his hand-held commo gear. “Dance, dance, dance. I have control, I have control. Five, four, three, two, one…” Then det cords and flash bangs exploded, breaking down doors with blinding light and smoke, and concussing the air against my chest, as several “stacks” of Philippine soldiers flooded the rooms, firing blue plastic simulation rounds.

The Sim Sit, or simulated situation, was a hostage rescue. The operative concept was DEC (Dominate, Eliminate, Control). To an outsider it looked and sounded like sheer chaos, made worse by the smoke from the flash bangs. But after you observed the same drill a number of times, you began to ignore the sounds and shudder of the det cords and flash bangs, and concentrate instead on the evolving narrative of the rescue, which the sergeant was constantly, calmly critiquing.

Rescuing hostages from an apartment or hotel is a matter of technique, broken down into complex parts that have to be translated into muscle reflex actions. You find as many “breach points” as possible and flood them simultaneously, cutting off escape routes. When you “infil” a room you try to avoid the “bad guy” or hostage who might be directly in front of you challenging you or crying for help. Instead, you go immediately to “the point of domination,” a corner from where you can cover half of the room, while your partner goes to the opposite corner to cover the other half. Only when you secure the two points of domination do you deal with the person in the room, friend or foe, because what’s in front of you is not the problem. The real problem may be lurking in a corner behind the door.

Because this runs against natural instinct, it must be taught and retaught, over and over again. Because two are needed to dominate a room, you do not enter a room until your partner squeezes you on your shoulder, to indicate silently that he is right behind you and ready. “Don’t wave your hand. Don’t say a word to your buddy. Just squeeze him quietly from behind,” the sergeant kept repeating. “Each pair can only take one room at a time. So be deliberate. Let the adrenaline subside and think clearly. On the exfil you reclear each room in the same way that you cleared it.”

In succeeding Sim Sits, I left the safety of the catwalk and followed a stack through the warren of typhoon-darkened partitions. I listened to the sergeant criticize and encourage his Filipino acolytes with a distinct voice of authority.

“That wasn’t too bad. It was pretty good this time. But I still see too much talking and jostling. And when you find a hostage or a bad guy, you may not know who is whom. So don’t just pat him down. Squeeze him all over. Squeeze, don’t rub. That goes for his package [groin area], too. Don’t be shy. Daba? It’s your life, remember,” he said, using the Tagalog word for “get it, understand.”

He concluded with, “And remember, guys. We always win. We never lose hostages. We’re the good guys. We kill the bad guys.”

The clichés were spoken with utter seriousness, without irony. Only to me were they clichés. That’s ultimately why these guys liked George W. Bush so much, I realized. He spoke the way they did, with a lack of nuance, which they found estimable because their own tasks did not require it.

At the end of the day, the sergeant and his Charlie Company team demonstrated what a correct Sim Sit looked like. It was beautiful to watch. They became like streams of water, quickly and silently, with an economy of movement, branching off and flooding several rooms simultaneously, squeezing shoulders and advancing, squeezing and advancing, like one seamless muscle reflex.

Away from his job, the sergeant barely talked to anyone. He perked up only when discussing types of bullets, types of infiltration techniques, and so on. He wasn’t comfortable talking about much else. He was the perfect policy instrument.

Observing him, I was reminded that the job of diplomats who wear expensive suits and communicate in complex phrases in exquisitely furnished settings is to periodically negotiate arrangements, whereby the ultimate aim, though never spelled out, is to get someone like this sergeant, with tattoos and several bench-press records to his credit, to teach others like himself how to do what he does, for the training in that wreck of a hospital with its gangrenous walls represented the fingertip point of America’s security assistance policy for the Philippines.

The sergeant and his team were assets of such importance to the U.S. that the Philippine light infantry company they were instructing had been cut off from the Philippine military’s normal chain of command. It had been placed under the direct control of the Chief of Staff, Gen. Narciso Abaya, a West Point graduate known for his upright character. Only by removing whole levels of bureaucracy was it possible to guarantee the integrity of anything here.

My final days in the Philippines were spent at the World War II shrines around Manila. At the American Cemetery and Memorial at Fort Bonifacio (formerly Fort William McKinley) stand the graves of 17,206 American servicemen killed in the Pacific theater in World War II. In addition, on two extensive limestone hemicycles, are inscribed the names of 36,282 Americans missing in action. From the tower of the devotional chapel bells continually peal the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

On the fortress rock of Corregidor, at the head of Manila Bay, stand the monumental remnants of the Topside and Middleside barracks, home to thousands of American servicemen and bombed in 1942 by the Japanese. Each year the moldy wall fragments become more and more like the medieval ruins at Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Because the Philippines stood at the heart of the fighting in the Pacific in World War II—and because the Japanese occupation was so brutal—the Americans have always been seen here not merely as colonialists but also as liberators. The words inscribed on the Pacific War Memorial on Corregidor may explain why, ultimately, Americans gave their lives in such numbers in the Philippines and lesser known archipelagoes:

Yet, it was a long way from those lofty words to the reality of freedom in the Philippines at the time of my visit. Coup rumors dominated the headlines for weeks. The last day that I was in Manila there was a mutiny by 296 junior officers, who seized a shopping mall in the financial district of Makati and ringed it with explosives. Their rage was directed against the rampant corruption in President Arroyo’s government, in which senior officers were accused of selling ammunition to both communist and Islamic insurgents. Moreover, an international terrorist associated with Jemaah Islamiyah, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, had simply walked out of his cell at a maximum security facility in Manila after the requisite payoffs had been made to high-ranking Philippine officials.[38]

Those young mutinous officers were arguably the most idealistic people in the country. They knew that democracy was only a procedural definition for how the Philippines actually functioned. Almost six decades after liberation from the Japanese, and almost two decades after dictator Ferdinand Marcos had been toppled, the Philippine political system was more accurately defined by the compadre network of sordid personal contacts than by any notion of Western civil society. But those young officers were also incredibly naive, for the worst dictatorships can emerge from an excess of idealism.

Not one American noncom or middle-level officer whom I met spoke to me in terms of “saving” or “improving” the Philippines. Rather, these men saw their charge in terms of developing a cadre of Westernized officers and useful contacts in both the Christian and Muslim communities who could be influential even in the event that the state broke up. None of the Americans were cynical, yet all of them were aware of America’s limitations amid vast and roiling cultural and political forces. But they persevered, finding deep personal meaning in their jobs. Soon after I left they found a way to embed individual Green Berets into Philippine units at the battalion level, thus stretching the rules of engagement, so as to better coordinate the hunt for terrorists. Imperial powers know no rest.