Two years later, at a joint Department of Defense intelligence facility in Germany, I watched pieces of the old Cold War-era footprint being dismantled and shipped home. I have spent much of my adult life watching American power leave places abroad. Last week, from a hilltop above Oyster Bay on the Philippine island of Palawan, I watched it arrive. It did not arrive the way it left Iraq. What I looked down on was a Philippine Navy detachment on the western coast of Palawan, facing the South China Sea — one of the places where boats resupplying the Sierra Madre stage their runs.
A Philippine Coast Guard vessel, the BRP Malapascua, sat in the bay — the ship I was told had carried home the men wounded at the shoal last week, when a Chinese coast guardsman struck a Filipino marine in the head with a wooden baton.