A Divine Wind Stirs the Balacat Trees

Today, East Airfield is just a field.  Every year, a crop of sugar cane is grown there.  When the time is right (like it is at some point every year), the sugar cane is harvested and turned into whatever sweet things it becomes.  And it’s then, when the sugar cane is removed, that the field presents the evidence of its prior occupation.  The outline of a runway.

This airfield, which only peeks out at harvest-time, sits at Mabalacat, with which some of you avid Today’s History Lesson readers are familiar, even if you don’t know it.  Mabalacat is a city in the northern region of the Pampanga Province, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.  Right here.  If you move just a little to the south, you’ll discover Manila Bay.  Once you’ve hit water, if you move slightly west, you strike land again.  That’s the Bataan province…