Officials question wisdom of sailors' excursion to Mount Pinatubo
By Carlos Bongioanni,
Stars and Stripes
When five U.S. sailors used armed escorts for a hiking trip to a
volcanic tourist attraction in the Philippines, they were asking for trouble, some U.S.
and local officials say.
Sending the sailors on the tour with armed escorts was like sending a
teen-ager dressed in expensive designer clothes and a sports jacket into a crime-ridden
neighborhood, said a U.S. Embassy official in Manila.
“You’re just asking for trouble,” said the official,
who did not want to be identified. He didn’t know who authorized the use of armed
escorts, but he said it should have raised a red flag.
A U.S. military investigative team is looking into the incident and
why the sailors had armed escorts, the embassy official said.
Communist guerrillas ambushed the group last Tuesday. No one was
injured, though one sailor hunkered down in the jungle for 35 hours because he thought the
bandits were going to take the group hostage.
‘Why and who’
“Why and who allowed these servicemen to trek the area with
armed escorts?” asked Michael Bennett, the managing director of Dreamtreks, a tour
agency that offers excursions to Mount Pinatubo, a volcano that erupted 10 years ago.
Complaining that reports of the incident have severely damaged the
tourism industry in the area, Bennett said the presence of armed guards was an open
invitation to a confrontation.
That confrontation came June 5, when armed bandits surrounded the
hikers and demanded their escorts’ weapons: two M-16s and two .45-caliber pistols.
It was the first such reported incident involving tourists hiking in
and around the Pinatubo area, U.S. officials said.
A news release from the U.S. Embassy in Manila reported Friday that
“eight armed people claiming to be members of the New People’s Army,” a
communist insurgency group, ambushed the hikers. But that number has been in flux since
the incident. Filipino officials initially said five, then 20, then 30, and some reports
say as many as 100 armed guerrillas ambushed the group.
Lt. j.g. Scott Washburn was separated from the group and hid during
the attack. After the encounter, the four other sailors and their escorts tried
unsuccessfully to find Washburn and returned to the former Clark Air Base, where they
began the tour, Philippine military officials said.
The Philippine military was unable to find Washburn after a massive
air-and-ground search Wednesday. From his hiding place underneath dense vegetation, he
tried to flag down the helicopters. Upon realizing they didn’t spot him, Washburn,
who was being drenched by a torrential downpour, decided to hike out.
He then met two Aeta tribesmen, indigenous pygmies of the area sent
to track him. They escorted Washburn to Clark, where military officials said he arrived
late Wednesday night; he was dripping wet, haggard and hungry, but otherwise in good
spirits.
Tribesmen apologize
The night of the rescue the tribesmen apologized to the hungry
sailor, because they didn’t have any food to give him.
“We couldn’t give him anything to eat because we
didn’t have anything,” one of the tribesmen said, according to local news
accounts of the rescue.
But they scrounged up all the money they had that night to buy the
sailor a soda.
“He was so thirsty he almost swallowed the whole bottle,”
one of the tribesmen said. “He was hugging us, telling us how much he loved us. He
was so happy.”
For their part in the rescue of the missing sailor, the two tribesmen
have been rewarded with permanent jobs at Clark’s economic free trade zone.
The Aeta people around Mount Pinatubo are typically very poor and
survive off whatever temporary jobs they can find from day to day. The permanent jobs,
which will pay them anywhere from $4 to $5 per day, are considered a huge economic boon
for them.
The sailors who were hiking on Mount Pinatubo are deployed to the
Philippines for an annual Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training exercise with their
Philippine counterparts.
The sailors and their Philippine navy escorts were returning from a
trek to the Lahar Canyons of Sapang Bato, an area not far from the former Clark Air Base.
The massive ash-pile canyons formed by the 1991 eruptions lie about 12 miles south of
Pinatubo’s crater lake, the volcano’s main tourist attraction.
Embassy staff personnel regularly go on Pinatubo tours — without
armed guards, the embassy official said.
“If I was one of the hikers, I would have been concerned if they
said I needed an armed escort,” the official said. “I would have been asking,
‘What do we have out there to be concerned about? Bears … wild animals …
what’s the threat?’”
U.S. troops deployed to the Philippines are supposed to maintain a
low profile when they leave their assigned training areas to go on tours, said Elmer Cato,
a spokesman for the Visiting Forces Agreement Commission, which oversees the U.S.
military’s presence in the Philippines.
Warnings unheeded?
It is usually the commission’s policy to warn servicemembers not
to carry their military identification or anything that would give them away as being U.S.
military personnel, he added. It’s not certain whether servicemembers heed that
advice, because they’re always supposed to carry ID cards, officials say.
A recorded travel advisory from the U.S. Embassy in Manila warns
Americans to “exercise extreme caution,” to be careful in outdoor areas, avoid
large unruly crowds and demonstrations, and to keep a low profile.
Officials from the Philippine Department of Tourism in Manila said
they had no idea why armed escorts would be needed for tourists in central Luzon.
“It’s relatively safe to travel around the
Philippines,” the official said. “Just don’t go to the southern outskirts
of Mindanao.”
On May 27, three Americans were among nine tourists taken hostage by
the Abu Sayyaf Group from a beach resort on Basilan island.
Despite the fact that three Americans are already hostage to
insurgents in the Philippines, the Navy’s trip to the mountain summit was considered
safe, said Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman.
Safe tourist area
The hostage situation in the extreme southern Philippines is more
than 1,200 miles away from Mount Pinatubo.
Mount Pinatubo has been drawing several thousand tourists per month
and that number is growing, said Bennett. The tours to the area are very safe, he said.
To get to the volcano’s crater lake, tour groups have to pass
through two Philippines army and one Philippines air force check points. The trekking
sites are actually on a Philippines military reservation. This adds an element of safety
to the tours, he said, because not only is the area under military surveillance, but if
any tourists have accidents, military rescue personnel will be close at hand to help.
As of Friday evening, Bennett said he had received 15 cancellations
for the crater lake tours. It takes several days to hike from Sapang Bato, the area where
the bandits ambushed the sailors, to Mount Pinatubo proper where the crater lake tours
occur.
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