However, the base loses approximately $140,000 in theft and pilferage each month. In a single night eighteen hundred iron crosses were lifted from the military cemetery for scrap iron. On another, five two-and-a-half-ton trucks and six jeeps were stolen from a motor pool and driven on boards over that high, well-patrolled fence. Still another time an imaginative thief stole a fireman's uniform, then a fire truck to go with it. He drove the truck out of the station with siren and flashing lights going full blast, raced the five miles to the Main Gate as seven Air Policemen stopped traffic for him.
Tetrick pointed out all these events should have been expected once the Army allowed their personal Air Corps to become something he called the "Air Farce" – unfairly, I'm sure. "Three old ladies with blowed-up rubbers could take this place," he grunted.
If the base, as we agreed, existed only because intelligent thieves were leaving something for next time, the base didn't seem excited about the danger. Conditions were calm, situations normal at the seven swimming pools, the PX shopping center, the Officer's and NCO's and Airman's clubs, the veterinarian's office and the golf course (where every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon Tetrick baked his bald head and managed to get drunk before the sixteenth tee). The residential sections were as cool and unruffled as if they were in Indianapolis and Vietnam on the dark side of the moon. Everywhere was order, lawns just so high, geometrically trimmed hedges and trees, clean sidewalks, uncluttered roadsides. As Tetrick drove me around base, I was reminded of the just completed campus of a mammoth junior college in Southern California. "I don't know what it is," Tetrick said again as we drove toward the Main Gate, "but it ain't soldiering."
About half a mile from the gate, just as I could see the guardhouse through the heat haze, Tetrick swung the jeep left down a side road toward a distant group of large frame buildings. "Central Exchange," he explained. "They keep the scrip there," he said, referring to the Military Payment Certificates, MPC, Scrip, or Funny Money as it was called, which was paid instead of green backs as a courtesy to the Filipino economy. "When what's left of the Huks don't steal it. They got $60,000 three years ago. They'll be back when it runs out." He turned left again about half a mile from the Exchange on a gravel road leading toward a square, windowless building. He parked next to the double hurricane fences with the challenging barbed wire strands leaning out along the tops.
"This it it," Tetrick said as if it were. "Seven hundred twenty-first Communication Security Detachment Temporary Operations Building." He pulled a security badge out of his shirt pocket and gave me a temporary one. At the gate he waved to the guard on the roof of the building, then inserted his badge into a waist high slot in a black box next to the gate. "That checks the badge. If it is right, a light comes on up there and he opens the gate." A buzzer sounded, and Tetrick opened the gate. "The second won't open until the first is locked again." Another buzz and we were in the compound. As usual the grass was just so, the sidewalks bordered in neat, ankle-high hedges, and a yard-boy, a jolly-eyed, bent, old man peeking from a floppy straw hat, leaned on a hoe. I glanced back at the elaborate gate system, at the yard-boy, then at Tetrick.
"Don't let it trouble you," he chuckled. "The girls in Town know more about what we do than we do." He opened the steel door by inserting his badge in another slot, then led me into the electronic murmur of secrecy. Behind me I noticed that the old man had, with polite discretion, turned his back.
I took the ease of the afternoon after Tetrick's tour, swimming and resting in the sun. The pool was mine except for a middle-aged dependent wife sitting on the edge of the pool, three loud children, the golden-fuzzy lifeguard, and two airmen. The woman alternately heaved one massive leg then the other through the water as tiny whirlpools in the chlorine-tinted water sucked vainly at her massive flesh. She sat under the lifeguard stand and chatted with golden-fuzzy. She seemed to be trying to peek up his trunks, and he down her blue suit, though why, I did not dare guess. The children were hitting each other, the meek waters of the kiddie-pool, me twice with rubber toys, and their mother for attention. At times all three balled at her passive shoulders, yammering and pounding their flesh of flesh. Mrs. Leech would shrug, laugh and shake her brown hair like a starlet, and fling the children away like so many dirty drops of water off an angry dog's back, then turning up to golden-fuzzy again, grin up his skinny leg. The two airmen were quiet. One spent the whole afternoon rubbing iodine and Johnson's baby oil into his already brown-black skin, while the other swam the length of the pool twenty times at an eight beat crawl, rested for five exact minutes, then swam again.
From the towel I communed in the broad open plain, bowing to Mount Arayat, the lifeless volcano squatting like an altar on the level distance, a ruined memory of ancient sacrificial fires, the tip of its cone crumbling into a snaggle-toothed decay as hordes of jungle clamored upward, hand over fist, pulling down the tired slopes. It was told that Huk bandits and headhunters shared the distant giant, secure in his hairy trunk, lost to man and his reckoning of time.
At five it rained for eleven minutes, sudden heavy drops, and at five-thirty the sun disappeared into a deep purple mass of clouds rising soft and curved against a shell-pink sky. I paused to watch the sunset, the purple reaching for black, the pink easing to purple, as I strolled back from the pool, toasted, hungry, tired.
After a silent meal I laid out a uniform, read for a bit, then dozed, awaking to the tickle of laughter, talk and the ringing of bottles. Never having been one to either stuff wax in my ears or tie myself to a mast, I slipped into my trousers and nosed down the hall toward the open door of Novotny's room. As I passed, he called an invitation to me for a beer. I nodded, guessed that I would, and went on to the latrine.
As I entered, I nearly stumbled over someone crawling toward the urinals. He had that odor and slept-in look which I assumed to be Town. In spite of the dirt, the stubble and the glasses, he appeared to be a clean-featured young man of perhaps twenty or twenty-one, handsome in a tall, muscular manner, but his unkempt face hung like a bad smell over his dirty clothes. I offered to help however I could. He stared at me for a moment as if he knew who I was, then looked very bored with me.