It felt like a dream.
The Marines kept flying over us all night long. Their hulking C-130 cargo planes rattled the tarp we'd jerry-rigged above our heads. NPR photographer David Gilkey and I were lying in sleeping bags next to the runway of the destroyed Tacloban airport. We'd arrived a few hours earlier in the back of one of those military aircraft. Now we were just waiting for day break.
Typhoon Haiyan had ripped the airport apart, killed the soldiers based there and left it flooded with seawater. At this point the airport was a make-shift staging area for a relief operation that hadn't yet found its stride.
"This is bizarre," was David's summation of the scene. Filipino soldiers slept in helicopters next to us. American soldiers drifted in and out of the darkness. Black and white 50-gallon drums of jet fuel were strewn across the field around our tent. Refugees huddled by the remnants of the terminal hoping to get airlifted to Manila.
Typhoon Haiyan Devastates The Philippines
What I Saw: A Photographer's Last Dispatch From The Philippines