Wit at war

What is it about this eccentric month soaked in the red of war down the Philippine centuries? Foreshortened February with its vanishing leap-year birthdays begins in American-style Valentine’s Day red. Thankfully, commercial clichés glow yellow as the month ends in the memory of Edsa 1986.

But our war generation inherited a far older memory of February—the massive slaughter of relatives and friends by panicking Japanese as Americans bombed their holdouts with monster fires, “liberating” Manila in whole-scale destruction in that unspeakably bloody red February of 1945.

In its aftermath were hunger, ignorance, amnesia and dog-eat-dog rage for survival in the city to which I was born. In my teen years shanties crawled among black ruins with grimy denizens foraging all over Intramuros, Ermita, Malate, Paco, Sta. Ana and Pandacan. Whole squatter colonies crept down the rivers, further fouling waters where war munitions had already claimed the depths.

When dollar-earning tourism swept in with the Marcos years in a hotel building boom, it meant a daily shuttle between two sharply contrasting worlds for the newsgal I had become. Utter human misery lived cheek-by-jowl with five-star hotels and rising gated villages for the rich. The question of my lifetime stared at me: What on earth was my business being born to this terrible contrast?

My own clan offered intimate answers. As February began, I relived World War II in a town mate’s gift of Rudy de Lara’s book, “Boy Guerrilla” (see “Guerrilla in love,” Opinion, 2/2/16). By what happenstance did another book from the Usaffe side of the family drop in my lap days later? “Fight for Freedom,” authored by my dad’s first cousin, writer/lawyer Antonio A. Nieva, brought me full circle with ruins that had haunted me so.

Tito Tony was an Ateneo ROTC cadet barely out of his teens when he was called to serve with the Usaffe in Bataan. Now it seemed his spirit was bent on teaching me more about what WWII had done to Filipinos. Chapter by chapter, he confirmed what I’d already recognized: The war that reduced once comely Manila to ruins had also derailed, if not destroyed, our country’s soul.

Doubly precious, then, was this witness to the transcendent spirit that I, too, believe resides in our history underneath it all. Item No. 1: “invincible” Uncle Sam fleeing the first round of the Japanese invasion, severely testing desperate Filipino faith in his promise to return. Item No. 2: Lieutenant Nieva, intelligence officer, in the battlefield in those crucial four months before Bataan fell, surviving the Death March in Capas followed by months with starving comrades in Camp O’Donnell, skeletons as they breathed their last.

All that is reason enough to call him a hero with the countless unnamed who gave their lives that their country might live.

Nieva’s heroism proved protean. After decades of recreating his memories in this book, while making a living and raising a family, Tito Tony was rounding out the picture in the US Library of Congress for two years. The result is an objective yet compassionate war memoir without a trace of bitterness.

“Fight for Freedom” was published 19 years ago, five years since its author died, speaking for our parents’ generation as it lost its innocence in a world of horror. Before he left for good, he was bent on passing on that precious experience for us to live by.

In din, fire and death, he fought as world history was being made—soaking in gore, firing back at the enemy while analyzing strategy on both sides. Time and again that learning curve ended in awe at beholding Pinoy culture in raw recruits and officers—“outgunned but never outfought”—defending the motherland with courageous ingenuity. Hungry, fearful, ever irreverent, they laughed at their bowlegged banzai enemies in loose trousers who, for the life of them, could never pronounce the letters “f” and “l”!

If I could pin my personal medal of honor on my uncle, it would be inscribed: “In recognition of our ancient reflex in your oft-quoted ‘Bahala na,’ our ancestral memory of ‘Bathala na’—Let the Divine Rule. For wit, heart and faith as a new conqueror obstructed our sovereignty.”

In his own words: “By the end of March 1942 the Usaffe was no longer an army. Just a collection of sick, hungry, forsaken men in defensive positions across the peninsula from Manila Bay to the China Sea. Divisions were down to 1,500 at most; regiments to 500 effectives—if one can call an ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-armed, ill-everythinged civilian-soldier combat ‘effective.’

“The famed Philippine Scouts and the all-American regiment had been whittled down, the Scouts by combat casualties, the Americans by disease…

“Japanese bombing, strafing, machine-gunning and bayonets relentlessly… Tempests of artillery with heavy shells rumbling with deep-throated threats like mediums shrieking hideous curses, arched towards the Usaffe lines, mangling the forest, fortifications, the men themselves. Nothing can compare to the horror and helplessness…

“On April 9, 1942, the hapless General MacArthur made his first and last Command Decision from Australia: ‘Under no conditions should Bataan be surrendered; any action is preferable to capitulation.’ On the situation maps it might have seemed feasible; in the field it was a cruel joke.

“In the face of the anguish around him, General Edward P. King, the newly-appointed Commander of the Luzon Forces … ignored the foolish, unrealistic order to counterattack.

“That Easter Week, the Usaffe Luzon Force died. And Good Friday was a fitting day for the start of its final agony… On the 9th day of April, the ‘largest force the United States had ever lost’ surrendered…

“What is the death of an army like? No cohesive picture, just a series of disconnected rushes of a grade-B horror movie—the obscene grimace of a blackened face peering up from a foxhole; a spread-eagled figure on the ground too exhausted to give a damn; a half-hearted stand atop a vantage knoll, firing without aim or conviction at scattering dolls on the trail below; an old-timer non-com at the wheel of an unstartable truck, teary rivulets of frustration winding down furrowed cheeks; a haggard general brandishing a rifle at zombies with glazed eyes and deaf ears; King Canute trying to stop the tide, still confident in the power of his stars; a bloated carcass bobbing on a lively stream (was it man or beast?); an anti-tank squad calmly dismantling its gun, idly watched by civilians squatting under a shadeless tree; hollow-eyed men beside roadsides munching the visors of their coconut helmets like children chewing handkerchiefs to still the uncontrollable trembling. And white flags blooming in the jungle green…”

This moving book is due for a handsome second edition with the author’s own war sketches on the golden anniversary of the Fall of Bataan in 2017. Those who want it sooner may e-mail his daughter, Pepi Nieva, at [email protected] for the online version in the works.

Bodies go, Spirit lives.

Sylvia L. Mayuga is an essayist, sometime columnist, poet, documentary filmmaker and environmentalist. She has three National Book Awards to her name.