By SETH ROBSON | STARS AND STRIPES Published: April 28, 2021 When the coronavirus pandemic recedes in the Philippines, some children living near its capital city will return to a renovated school thanks to U.S. and Philippine combat engineers. Seventeen Marines and a Navy corpsman from the 9th Engineer Support Battalion out of Camp Hansen, Okinawa, worked over the past month with about 20 members of the Philippine army’s 564th Engineer Construction Battalion to improve Ilosong Elementary School in Quezon City. “Humanitarian assistance projects are the second-best thing we can get besides a combat deployment as combat engineers,” 1st Lt. Julian Taruc, 26, who led Marines involved in the project, said in a telephone interview Friday.