Olongapo... what else?!
By: David Etheredge
d.etheredge@worldnet.att.net

Does anyone remember the bar in Barrio Barretta where they had a monkey chained to a tree? Little sucker would leap out and try to land on your shoulder when you went out back to the can. That monkey hated filipinos but loved Americans! He had a piece of water hose where the chain rubbed his belly so he wouldnt rub it raw or get it pinched. I saw him go full tilt OFF on a Filipino dude, that I thought that monkey was going to kill. The owner comes up with an armalite from behind the bar that was as big as she was! Scared the hell out of me, but it was a shit gun and wouldnt fire,Thank God, because she was steadly pulling the trigger! Finally everyone settled down and they slipped this guy a drink with something in it because the PC's were there to get him 5 minutes after he passed out. They dumped out his pockets, and along with the standard valium and weed, he had a pocketful of small bones that I am told are from the knees of corpses and are used in some ritualistic type stuff. Whooee... I was glad to get out of that place!

About that time, there were a lot of "cults" in and around Subic. Of course, you would regularly see NPA walking around extracting "war tax" from jeepney drivers. When I did JEZ training with the negritos for 4 days (all a squid can take!), we snuck up on a camp that supposedly had 15,000 NPA soldiers in it. There was another cult of all girls, they wore red head bands or bandanas and they would cut themselves "Badly" in clubs, on the streets, they would slash veins in their arms and neck sometimes bleeding out and dying. I stopped and tried to stop the bleeding when I first saw it thinking it was an assault and almost got killed. This girl had a razor between her teeth, and as I bent over her she bowed up and tried to cut my nose off! So much for the "milk of human kindness". Luckily, an armed bank guard kicked her square in the forehead and her head bounced off the cement (once) like a baseball, (second) like wet spaghetti. I had no idea why he did it until I saw the razor in her mouth, which was by then, stuck in her upper palate. Oh Lord! All that came back in a rush after I saw that monkeys picture on the site.