Where an old U.S. Air Force base once stood, a fairly quiet suburb now sits. Even with an international airport, Clark Freeport Zone is still the kind of place where the most you’ll notice in the afternoon is an extra wave of heat in the not-frequent-enough breeze.
But lately, giant aircraft have been spanning the sky, as if pilots are trying to break the sound barrier.
Just weeks after President Barack Obama made his first trip to this country, a hotel lobby in Clark looks like this:
They’re not taking over, of course. The U.S. maintained Clark Air Base from 1947 until 1991, as well as Subic Bay Naval Complex through 1992. U.S. forces are currently train in the country, which is all that military men would tell me.
The Subic Bay area has also had an influx of men who look like non-locals. For the first time in the past three months, I saw the restaurant of a particular hotel more than a quarter full (and I never thought it would be by a bunch of Americans). It was good to see that these guys were also finding time to drink beer at the hotel and take advantage of the waterslide that winds down into the pool. That is, when they weren’t piloting some seriously scary looking aircraft through the sky.
This Side of the World 
I remember watching our senators privilege speeches one patriotic day in 1991. Eviction day for the US bases. 23 years later, China is showing what the senators did was wrong