The Philippine government maintains a small garrison of civil servants on Pagasa, a small 75-acre island in the Spratley island chain, in order to claim ownership. While this may sound like paradise, the truth sounds more like an episode of Lost.

“Sometimes, when the phones were down, I’d lie in bed and think about my girlfriend back home,” said National Police Sgt. Hermar Medina, 27. “I’d get bored and let my mind wander. And then I’d get freaked out.”

Army Lt. Ace Ronald Ampong kept a blog of his eight months on Pagasa in 2008 — entries full of pain and wonder.

Ampong wrote of being “filled with serenity by the exquisiteness of silence and the noise of nature like waves, birds, breeze and even raindrops.”

But nights, he wrote, were hard. Fellow soldiers “learned to compose lyrics in a melody of going home. One of them even cried because of loneliness, hoping that death would soon come.”

(via Boing Boing)