Owing to its prominence and proximity to Saigon, Clark was deemed an ideal temporary housing place for Vietnamese evacuees to complete necessary screening and paperwork (Moos and Morrison 2005, 33). U.S. selection of Clark AFB was steeped in U.S. colonial rule of the Philippines: during the Cold War, Clark grew into a major American air base; at its peak, it had a permanent population of fifteen thousand, making it the largest American base overseas (GlobalSecurity.org 2011). However, on April 23, 1975, fearing that the Vietnamese “would be there forever” (Thompson 2010, 63), President Ferdinand Marcos unexpectedly announced that the Philippines would stop accepting refugees (Moos and Morrison 2005, 33; New York Times 1975). And yet, fewer than five years later, on July 21, 1979, at the two-day, fifty-three-nation conference on Southeast Asian refugees organized by the UNHCR, a Marcos government representative announced that the Philippines would establish a processing camp to house up to fifty thousand refugees (Mullen 1979).