Untitled Document

11 February 2001

The Navy Club

It was a Saturday, a Saturday in Asia, on Staff Delegation time. So the leader of the delegation dragged everyone in on Saturday for hours of intense discussions on the many significant problems confronting America's interests in the region. It was painful. I look at my notes and they slowly lose focus. At one point I see that I am calculating interest rates on new trucks, then the notation: "This is absolutely the worst. These endless sessions. This is almost more than I can stand. No, it is MORE than I can stand! I'm going insane! ARRRAGH…."

The wear and tear of the last few days has begun to sink in.

The meeting eventually grinds to a conclusion at around 1:30 in the afternoon. We leave the headquarters and slide across the ice to Grace, the mini-van whose heater is so inadequate and whose entry window pops open each time the door is opened.

From Yongsan Garrison, the slope of Namsan Mountain is gentler than on the Hotel side, and little apartment buildings hug the slopes that rise to the crest below the ubiquitous TV tower. Itae-won is up there, where we used to party when not standing the watch in the Command Bunker. Wherever you are in Seoul, you can tell where you are by your relation to the mountain and its spire, since the capital surrounds it.

The afternoon stretches before us under brilliant and bitter cold skies. We take lunch at the Navy Club on Yongsan Main Post. It is much different than I recall.

It has been twenty years, give or take a month, since I served here. In my day, the Navy Club's primary advantage was that it was not associated with the Army Club system, and the heavy-handed guidance of the puritanical Eighth Army. The Navy ran its cinderblock hooch with cheerful abandon under the guidance only of the Chief's Mess, and that guidance was restricted to having ice-cold beer and the best pizza in Korea.

In those days that was something to strive for. Today there are Pizza Huts all over town, and even if the double-cuttlefish topping isn't for you, there is at least a semblance of home to be had.

That wasn't true twenty years ago, save for this little corner of America. There was widespread despondence in late February of 1981 when the truck carrying mozzarella was high-jacked between Pusan and Seoul, and there was no cheese to be had on any pie. They had to ship another load from the States. It was an eternity.

The old Navy Club had a porch to keep the monsoon off, and a barbecue pit out back. It was the scene of many a Hail and Farewell as sailors finished their one-year assignments in the Land of the Morning Calm. It was also the scene of one night of something else, but there are people involved who may still be on active duty, and I must leave those memories at rest, where they belong. Those were different times. And the guilty have earned their peace.

The Club today is something else altogether. There are two Navies that exist today in uneasy coexistance. One remembers when the Bases in the Philippines were sovereign U.S. soil, and a week of liberty in the P.I. (as the Philippine Islands had been known in colonial times) was as much as a single brain, liver, and reproductive system could handle.

The common wisdom of the day was that the life expectancy for a Chief Petty Officer who retired in the P.I. was about eight months. The other Navy is the one that is too young to have been there before the Mt. Pinatubo eruption that buried Clark Air Force Base in thirty feet of smoking ash, and we took the opportunity to slink ignominiously away from Subic Bay after nearly a century.

I look in wonder at the Navy Club, because sitting in front of it is a gleaming piece of Olongapo City: a gleaming stainless jeepney-bodied bus. A phalanx of wild-horse figures with ruby eyes are bolted to the hood. Reflectors and sculpture adorn all flat features of the bus, and the license plate reads "SUBIC 01."

Odd that the bitter end of the tropical hothouse of the P.I. should wash up here, in the ice of the Korean winter.

The gateway to the Club is approached by a covered walkway fronted by a Hoshi gate and flanked by improbably brightly colored fiberglass sculptures of pirates and sailing ships. It looks joyful and slightly confused, just like things used to be in Korea and the P.I., lands of the not-quite-right.

Inside, the place is unrecognizable. It is clean, something the old club never was, and the walls and fixtures are rich polished wood. The walls are covered by rock n' roll memorabilia. It looks as thought they are striving to bring back the look and feel of the Subic and Cubie Point Naval Air Station clubs. Those places were all dark tropical wood, festooned with hand-carved squadron and ship plaques of fantastic shape.

The tradition was that each deployment would bring the commissioning of a new and elaborate object d'art, with the names of the officers carved thereon. The walls were covered with them, newest to oldest. Some of the Plaques were saved, carted off on the last ships to leave the base before it was returned. They are now in museums. The clubs themselves are gone, some returning to the jungle, others converted to more mundane uses by the commercial occupants of the former base.

It is sad to think of the demise of the Red Horse Cat House. It was home to the famous little trolley that deposited drunken aviators in a muddy pond if they failed to engage a makeshift arresting hook on the track. The bar-stools were once bolted to the floor to prevent them- not always successfully- from being hurled through the plate glass windows that overlooked the lovely bay. A common reflection of trouble brewing was the innocent question to the Club manager of the current market value of the window. Or the 25-cent Stinger night would never be observed by an owlish junior officer fresh from Yankee Station, stumbling up to Romie the imperturbable Philippine bartender and uttering the famous line: "A hundred Stingers for my Friends!"

Today's iteration of the navy Club is one of the classic American Sports Bar. Five big-screen TV's are showing basketball games that no one is watching. Val, our escort officer, orders the pizza, for like me she is a veteran of this place and must honor memory. The rest of the delegation orders sandwiches and enjoys the ambiance of a place that could as easily be in Omaha as Seoul. A brightly lit place, with good food. A place you could bring the family.

Except for the jeepney out front. And the fact that if you squinted just right, past the snow and the sheet ice, you could hear voices faintly, voices raised in exhilaration and relief at being alive, and the sound of someone trying to rip a barstool out of the floor….