In 1988, I wrote a bittersweet short story, “MacArthur’s Children,” about being an overseas brat and losing touch with my past and all my friends. Three years later, Mt. Pinatubo erupted and destroyed Clark Air Force Base — along with Wagner High School. That removed all hope of ever recapturing that part of my life again.

Or so I thought. The advent of the Internet inspired some fellow Wagner alums to try and reunite us all on the information super highway. They worked on the “Field of Dreams” theory, i.e. “if we build it, they’ll come.” The web page, www.whoa.org, has been a resounding success! We have definitely come — 4,000 strong and counting. The creators, Gary McClellan and John Prunier, tapped into the exact emptiness I was feeling when I wrote “MacArthur’s Children” (www.whoa.org/73/Macchild.html) and discovered that there were thousands of us “overseas brats” who felt the same “where is everybody?” melancholia. What the military and volcano took from us, we’ve gotten back via the web.

It’s been one of the great joys of my life to reunite and rediscover my lost friends — not only those who shared my precise time, 1969-1973, but all those who ever attended Wagner High during its existence from 1948-1991. We have become a close virtual family. Attending reunions has become almost an obsession with me, as they tend to be some of the best weekends of my life.

Trading memories of our unique high school years with my old pals in chat rooms and bulletin boards helped inspire me to write The Island of Passion and Rage. In the year 2000, a couple of 747 loads of us are planning to return to the Philippines for a week of reminiscing — Mt. Pinatubo and Thomas Wolfe be damned. Think there might be a book in that?