In 1967, I was a 20-year-old Air Force radio operator assigned to a communications squadron at Wallace Air Station, a remote aircraft control and warning site on the northwest coast of the Philippine island of Luzon.
The base sat on the very tip of a peninsula that jutted into the South China Sea. Its most prominent feature was two large white radar domes that sat on the crest of about a 100-foot cliff. The rest of the site consisted of cinder block one- and two-story housing barracks, a chow hall, a recreation hall, various administrative offices, and the combined enlisted/noncommissioned officers/officers club called the Cliff Club.
About 100 Air Force staff and a small army of Filipino workers ran a 24/7/365 operational schedule of rotating eight-hour shifts with one day off each week. There was a very small BX that sold toiletries, candy, cigarettes, and liquor. About a quarter mile away was Poro Point, which was nothing more than the intersection of two dirt roads. On each of the four corners sat a nipa hut bar and not much more.
In short, it was a relentlessly intense and boring paradise.
As an airman, I was paid $106.20 a month. After taxes, a savings bond deduction I was coerced into taking, and the payback of my student loan that the Chase Manhattan bank garnished, I had $67 a month to spend on haircuts, laundry, toiletries, cigarettes, wine, women, and song. A carton of Winstons went for $2, a bottle of San Miguel beer for a nickel, and a shot of Chivas Regal was a quarter. The money always ran out before the month did.
In search of something free to do, I was told that the base had a library, but no one seemed to know where it was. I wandered around looking and finally someone told me to check out a closet at the end of a long hallway stacked with broken furniture. There, I found the base library. It was either a very large closet or a very small room. It contained a desk, two folding tables, and three broken chairs. Piled or thrown in heaps were hundreds of paperback books in various stages of disrepair.
A quick survey of the titles revealed the typical airman literary fare with a few exceptions: Zane Grey Westerns and H.G. Wells science fiction novels, with a sprinkling of dog-eared Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Valley of the Dolls. I took my discovery to my commanding officer, Lt. Hunter, and asked who was the base librarian. After a very short pause, he gave me the answer: “You are.”
He was being pestered by the base librarian at Clark Air Base, our parent facility some 120 miles to the south, to organize the library and start ordering more uplifting titles. He gave me the woman’s name and phone number and said to call her and introduce myself as the newly appointed base librarian.
Her reaction to my call can only be described as a “prodigal son” experience. When I told her I had been an English literature major in college, she practically swooned. When I described the state of the base library, she became indignant and vowed immediate remedial action. True to her word, a few days later, a truck showed up with enough bookshelves, posters, chairs, and lamps to outfit a regional library. The books soon followed.
While she felt that no airmen could resist the allure of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or The Norton Anthology of English Literature, she also understood the attraction of a story well told and included complete collections of Hemingway, Bradbury, Salinger, and the Western fiction of Tom Curry and William Heuman.
Lt. Hunter was so impressed that he assigned me an empty dorm room to replace the closet, and the Wallace Air Station Base Library came to life. My new mentor was the wife of the Eighth Bomb Wing commander and a passionate librarian, and she simply could not tolerate the idea of her airmen being deployed without proper access to good books.
After questioning my personal reading inventory, she put me on a steady diet of classics that she felt I had missed. The first book she sent me was her own copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius with her handwritten comments in the margins. When I admitted that I had only read the Cliffs Notes of Don Quixote, she immediately sent me the Rutherford translation. When she felt our circulation was too low, she simply called our base commanding officer and got him on board to promote the library. Circulation picked up dramatically.
Our intense workload supporting the war efforts in Vietnam left little time to relax, and Wallace Air Station’s small footprint made us feel like we were living in a small maze, where one moved from duty station to chow hall to barracks and back again.
This, coupled with a sense of isolation from friends and contemporaries “back in the world,” added to a deep loneliness.
The one bright spot was my bunk area, where I set up a private space not much bigger than the length and width of my bed. Using towels and spare blankets borrowed from empty bunks, I created a tiny oasis from the noise and friction of living among 20 or 30 men coming and going at all hours. Inside my rack, I had a tape deck and headphones, a reading lamp, a fan, and my stash of books.
Even after all these years, I can remember the delicious pleasure of escaping the pressure of the job and the boredom of the place by dropping into my bunk with a great book and leaving everything else behind, if only for a few hours.
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Kim Vo wrote the headline.
