First came the earthquake, one of the most powerful the Philippines had ever seen. Then, almost simultaneously, Typhoon Diding and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo killed more than 800 people, wiping out Luzon’s Clark Air Base in the process. And finally, just three months later, came the coup de grace; the Philippine Senate sent the US military packing after a presence of almost 90 years.
“I think of it every day,” Mark R. Clifford, 59, says of the June 15, 1991, volcanic eruption that just turned 33. “It’s the kind of experience that makes you believe in life after death.”
Back then, Clifford was a 26-year-old US Marine from San Francisco, California, stationed near Subic Bay to provide protection from the communist National People’s Army. Suddenly, on Philippine Independence Day, a superior officer called to alert him and the 19 marines he was commanding of an impending danger.
“It wasn’t on my radar at all,” Clifford recalls. “I looked up and saw this huge white cloud like somebody had spilled milk across the blue tropical sky.” Before long, he says, “ash was covering our uniforms and we could barely breathe.”
By the time the main eruption occurred a few days later, Clifford and his men were hunkered down in a Quonset hut: a small, prefabricated metal shelter. “The eruption turned the ski black for more than 24 hours,” he remembers. “The ash was so heavy it defoliated the jungle around us. We were being buried alive, preparing for death and we knew it.”
Despite being a brash young man sequestered with others of the same ilk, Clifford prayed. “It was like sitting atop the gallows,” he says, “just riding out the blackness. I remember lying in my rack, thinking of my fiancé back home who I thought would never see me again. Then it stopped.”
Glad to be alive, the men dug their way out through the hot ash, singeing their fingers as they did. Then remained in the Philippines for several weeks to help Filipinos deal with the aftermath.
Clifford eventually left the military, returned to Northern California, married the fiancé whose image had sustained him, enjoyed a long career in law enforcement, and raised two boys and a girl. But he never forgot that day of darkness in the Philippines.
“I died in that Quonset hut,” he told me shortly before the anniversary of the cataclysmic event that shaped the country’s future. “When you have lots of time to review your life, it causes a spiritual awakening. When I went to sleep that night, I was at peace believing I would never wake up.”
In 2020, the same year he retired as a police sergeant, Clifford published Typhoon Coast, a novel inspired by his near-death experience in the shadow of Mt. Pinatubo. “There is a mix of magic and mystery that…hold[s] the story together,” one reviewer wrote. The book “is an excellent psychological journey.”
Later the budding novelist described the experience further in a published short story. “Pinatubo’s eruption brings darkness as we trudge through the streets of Olongapo,” Clifford wrote. “Olongapo is why God invented purgatory. Under the volcano’s gauntlet, I hear Tagalog cries and shouts. I imagine they are prayers for help, wishes for death. Silent was the music that blared from bustling strip bars. The ash is too thick to smell the wafts of sewage that once mixed with the barbecue smoke…The jungle cracks under the weight of Pinatubo’s eruption.”
Clifford has never returned to the Philippines, a situation he intends to remedy soon. “I have to go back,” he says. “It’s a non-issue, I don’t have a choice.”
One of his main goals is to scale Mt. Pinatubo. “It will finally give me some closure,” the former Marine explains.
Just as it did for the Philippines so many decades ago.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
