About that time I got banned from the Pacific Rim

When I fight authority authority always wins

Editor’s Note: Perfecting Equilibrium is on vacation February 5-11. Please enjoy this issue from the PE archives while we’re off.

Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, October 10-14

They like to get you in a compromising position
Well, they like to get you there and smile in your face
Yeah, they think they're so cute when they got you in that condition
But I think it's a total disgrace
And I say When I fight authority, authority always wins

Somewhat Off-Topic: About that time I got banned from the Pacific Rim

What’s the worst trouble you’ve ever gotten yourself in?

Ever been told to leave town?

Ever been asked to leave a club and never return? A city? A state? Ever been declared persona non grata and been thrown out of a country?

I wrote a story that so enraged the Pentagon that they banned me from the Pacific Rim. They also chiseled my name off the newsroom wall.

They also fired my publisher, which is a lot less funny. Though very little of it was funny at the time.

The real irony is that this huge fuss was over a feature story covering a 19th Century event. My editor assigned it to me as a break after I covered the 1986 protests and riots at the US military bases in the Republic of the Philippines.

I was the only reporter in the Subic Bay Pacific Stars & Stripes bureau just then, so I spent three weeks sleeping and working in that little office to be sure not to miss anything. Afterwards, my editor called and told me to spend a week or two writing a little feature story about the anniversary of Philippines Independence Day.

Two weeks later I turned in a five-part series that started with Philippines independence from Spain, and then covered the Philippine-American War.

Filipinos had been fighting the Spanish for independence for years when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. Filipino General Emilio Aguinaldo negotiated a joint attack with the Americans, with the Filipinos attaching by land while Commodore George Dewey lead the US Navy through Manila harbor.

What they agreed to remains in dispute. What happened is this: The US Navy plowed through the Spanish ships with barely a scratch, while the Filipino Army drove the Spanish troops back into the walled city of Manila. Where the Spanish said to the Americans “Hey! Don’t make us surrender to those guys – we surrender to you!”

At which point the US accepted and annexed the Philippines. And the Filipinos said “Well, back to work.”

The ensuing war stretched into the 20th Century. It was the Vietnam War almost a century earlier: American soldiers fighting a guerrilla army in trackless jungles; war crimes and charges of war crimes on both sides; a US general court-martialed for ordering everyone over the age of 10 shot on site.

I was fascinated and so wrote and wrote and wrote. My editor loved it and sent it all to the main newsroom in Tokyo. They loved it so much they commissioned radio and tv ads to promote the series.

CinCPac – Commander in Chief US Forces Pacific – did not love it.

I was on leave – that’s Army for vacation – when the series started. By the time I got back the Air Force colonel who was publisher of Pacific Stars & Stripes had been fired, and my name was chiseled off the award wall of the PS&S newsroom.

Oh, and I was banned from the Pacific Rim.

I had been worried about backlash while covering the base workers. I was writing about riots, international agreements – lots of stuff that was way about the purview of an Army sergeant. I hadn’t worried about the feature story at all.

How mad could anyone get about events in the 19th Century?

Plenty mad, as it turned out. The brass argued that Filipinos would be enraged when they found out what happened, leading to American servicemen murdered in the streets.

This was extremely silly. The reason for the feature story is that Aguinaldo’s birthday is a national holiday. He is, literally, the George Washington of the Philippines: he led the army of liberation, won, and then was president of the first republic.

Here's the George Washington version of what happened to Aguinaldo: Imagine if British General Cornwalis at the battle of Yorktown had said to the French navy commander “Hey! Don’t make us surrender to those guys – we surrender to you!”

And then the French spent years conquering the colonies.

In any case, an admiral was mad and the military bureaucracy swung into action against me. First they stamped my travel orders “Not eligible for travel in the Pacific Rim.” This did not work out well, because I was in the Philippines and they needed to get me back to Tokyo headquarters to deal with me.

So they suspended the ban, flew me back to Tokyo, then reinstated it.

And transferred me to Panama.

I had orders to spend the next three years as the chief of the Pacific Stars & Stripes Philippine bureau. They had torn those up and cut new ones transferring me from Stripes – a daily newspaper serving the Pacific Rim – to an office writing press releases for the Panama Canal Zone.

Unfortunately for them, they hadn't gotten my re-enlistment papers finished before I went on leave. So I told them what they could do with the Panama orders...at which point they asked if I'd be willing to sign the re-enlistment papers. So they could send me to Panama.

Ummmmm...nope.

Instead I got out of the Army, called Congress, and — with a bunch of other Stripers — got a Congressional investigation rolling into censorship at Stripes that ended up with the news coverage for both Stripes being overseen by a civilian ombudsman who didn't report to the military. There were a lot of crazy censorship incidents, many worse than this.

And as far as I know, I’m still not eligible for military transport in the Pacific Rim.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Editor’s Note: Perfecting Equilibrium will be on vacation February 5-11

February 12th (Substack): The Daily Me sets sail and promptly runs aground on the shoals of targeted advertising. Part III of the occasional series Pandora’s Program-What exactly is Web3, anyway? How is it different from Web2 and Web1? How did we get here, and what does it all mean?