In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines by Stanley Karnow (1989). The definitive account of the American century in the Philippines, from the 1898 annexation through Marcos and Aquino. Karnow explains the peculiar intimacy and asymmetry of the Philippine-American relationship — why Subic Bay existed, what it meant, and why its closure in 1992 felt so different to each side. Essential reading for understanding why the freeport is the way it is.
Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn (1990). A kaleidoscopic novel set in Manila during the Marcos years, full of movie stars, generals, and half-Americans living in the cultural wreckage of colonialism. Hagedorn captures the specifically Filipino relationship to American pop culture — adoring, sardonic, and deeply ambivalent. The novel's Manila is recognisably close to the world that existed around Subic Bay.
Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides (2001). The story of the Bataan Death March survivors and the January 1945 Cabanatuan raid. The Oryoku Maru — sunk in Subic Bay in December 1944 while carrying Allied prisoners — appears in the early chapters, and Sides's account of the prisoners' ordeal gives the wreck dive a weight that no underwater briefing sheet can replicate.
America's Boy: A Century of United States Colonialism in the Philippines by James Hamilton-Paterson (1999). A sharp, acerbic account of the Marcos years and the American military presence, written by a novelist who spent years living in the Philippine countryside. Hamilton-Paterson is brilliant on the contradictions of Filipino nationalism and the strange afterlife of US power in a country that voted to close the bases and then immediately mourned their departure.