Deserving the future by honoring the past

Araw ng Kagitingan – the national holiday called in translation, I suppose, "Day of Courage" which has replaced our observance of "Bataan Day" – doesn’t impress this old writer. I think we should have kept our hearts and minds focused on Bataan Day, instead of celebrating the courage of our nation’s heroes in such a scattergun fashion --- for by making things vague, we’re never sure whom we’re honoring.

One of the reasons, I suspect, the commemoration of "Bataan Day" was abandoned was because too many foreigners and quite a number of our own countrymen kept on cracking the malicious joke that we were always celebrating our defeats, such as the Fall of Bataan, whose 50th anniversary will be observed tomorrow, although it’s no longer a national holiday.

I may be prejudiced, of course, since my late father fought in Bataan, endured the cruel Death March, was five months in Japanese prisoner-of-war camp – and finally died of malaria.. I firmly believe to this day that our 70,000 boys who slugged it out with the Japanese on that doomed peninsula, then died by the thousands in the Death March and in Camp O’Donnell, the P.O.W. camp in Capas, Tarlac, did something noble and glorious. They stood up to be counted. They gave their all. They didn’t turn tail and run.

When I interviewed American historian John Toland many years ago, I told him that I hadn’t liked his earlier book, But Not in Shame, because he had shown partiality to Japanese "courage" and "bravery", but had given the Filipino-American "Battlin’ Bastards of Bataan" short shrift.

"But I’ve written another book," Toland pointed out. And, indeed, he had. In his subsequent volume, The Rising Sun, Toland saluted the Bataaners and, moreover, spoke movingly of the Death March that followed their surrender. He said that "more Fil-Americans had died on the march than on the battlefields of Bataan. Only 54,000 men reached Camp O’Donnell, but many escaped and no one will ever know the exact death toll. Between 7,000 and 10,000 men died on the march from malaria, starvation, beatings or execution. Of these, approximately 2,330 were Americans."

I’ve always felt in my heart that the voices of Bataan and those who perished on the march and in the Death Camp (where 500 of our soldiers succumbed every day) speak to us from the grave. They remind us that we don’t appreciate what they did, being ashamed of their "defeat". We forget that they were just kids, young men barely out of their teens who suddenly found themselves in unaccustomed combat, but learned on the job --- transforming themselves from ordinary men into heroes in the teeth of disappointment, privation and adversity.

Did April 9, 1942, then mark the collapse of an army - or a triumph of the spirit? We’ve grown soft perhaps in this generation. But we know that, like those young men who grew up into warriors in a few short weeks, we can do in a crisis what they did. That’s the power of inspiration.

On this Araw ng Kagitingan, it’s timely to recall that our Filipino Katipuneros and revolutionary army defeated the Spaniards, then had to turn around and fight our treacherous "allies", the Americans who, it turned out, wanted to seize the Philippines for themselves. (This is not to say that Balikatan this year is bound to be a repeat of that imperial hiccup. In 1898-1901 the Filipinos and our Philippine Islands were more desirable than they are today. For starters, we didn’t have 45,000 to 50,000 lawyers at the time, and were less of a headache. On the other hand, if we had enough good lawyers, we might have prevented the Spaniards from "selling" us to the Americans, in the Treaty of Paris, at the rate of two dollars per Filipino.)

The Katipuneros delivered much more grief to the American forces than the Spaniards did, whether in Cuba or in our own archipelago. The Spaniards simply folded, and even arranged with US Admiral George Dewey to have their ships literally waiting to be sunk by his cannon in Manila Bay. The Spanish naval officers positioned their vessels close to shore, so, when they were holed and sent to the bottom by Dewey’s guns, the officers and men could conveniently wade ashore.

When I was a boy, you could still see the gutted carcasses of two of those Spanish ships sticking out of the water (at low tide) in Manila Bay.

Anyway, the American invaders had to wage a tough fight against the guerrilla forces of our revolutionary president, Emilio Aguinaldo, all over Luzon. In fact, they had, in the end, to chase him up to the wilds of the north. They might not even have managed to take him had they not hit upon the plan of sneaking a detachment of Filipino mercenaries, disguised as revolutionary soldiers, into Aguinaldo’s camp in Palanan, Isabela. In this sly fashion, Aguinaldo was finally seized on March 23, 1901, after almost three years of hide-and-seek. The American officer who had engineered the ruse, General Frederick Funston, got the glory. The Filipino traitors got the bonus.

There is, of course, offsetting this treachery, the sacrifice of the Boy General, Gregorio del Pilar, who fell, along with more than eighty of his soldiers, barely four months earlier at Tirad Pass. This contingent perished to the last man to protect the rearguard of Aguinaldo’s retreat and delay the advance of the Americans.

The battle took place on December 2, 1900, and when he died, shot down by a sniper with a Krag, Del Pilar was only 22 years old – even younger than Rico Yan.

On the dead officer’s body, when they stripped him of everything he wore "for souvenirs", the American major in charge, a guy named March, found his diary. In it, Del Pilar had written: "The General has given me the pick of all the men that can be spared and ordered me to defend the pass. I realize what a terrible task is given me. And yet I feel that this is the most glorious moment of my life. What I do is done for my beloved country. No sacrifice can be too great."

* * *

I wonder why they don’t write like that anymore, unless it’s for a script to be used in a Hollywood movie. (Not even Viva Films, Regal, and certainly not Star-Cinema use that kind of heroic dialogue.) Yet, we are poorer for having lost the fire in our bellies that produced such "corny’ sentiments.

Mabuhay, Gregorio del Pilar! It’s good that the campus of our Philippine Military Academy is named Fort del Pilar - if only to remind our cadets of their forerunner and hopefully, their source of inspiration, who truly stood for "courage, integrity, and loyalty"!

Richard Henry Little, a reporter of the Chicago Tribune, covered the battle at Tirad Pass – and he paid Del Pilar the admiring tribute of foe in his account of that encounter. He marvelled at the fact that Del Pilar kept moving about on his white horse, urging his men on, impervious of the American bullets which were whizzing all around him. When Little spotted an American sharpshooter, having found a vantage point, draw a bead on Del Pilar, the US journalist admitted that he had almost prayed for him to miss the boy general. But he hadn’t. Little later recounted how the US soldiers took everything from the body of the young Filipino officer, each desiring a memento, apparently, of him.

Etched in our hearts on this day, I submit, should be this foreign journalist’s closing lines about our hero, as he described the Yankee columns marching past Del Pilar’s almost naked corpse on their triumphant way up the mountain: "We carved not a line and we raised not a stone. But we left him alone in his glory."

Was Tirad Pass another of our famous defeats? That’s what Araw ng Kagitingan, I can only suggest, is all about.

For, in the end, a man’s ultimate victory must be over his own selfishness and his own fears - and his willingness to sacrifice everything for good of his countrymen, and his native land.

There’s a thin dividing line, quite clearly, between being a hero - and being a fool. But being one or the other is far better than being a non-entity, a play-it-safer, who does nothing.

* * *

In retrospect, we Filipinos do not lack courage. In three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, there were more than 200 revolts (most of them, it must be noted, against official or friar abuse, heavy taxation, or forced labor, or the "Basi Rebellion" which protested a Spanish tax on our local Ilocano firewater).

We fought and won the first nationalist revolution in Asia, overturning the Spanish colonial masters only to have our victory snatched away by our short-term allies, the Americans. We gave the Japanese a bloody nose, in Bataan and Corregidor and all through their three and a half year military occupation. (Our guerrilla regiments, particularly the 121st of the USAFIP Northern Luzon, defeated the Toba Division at Bessang Pass.)

Our guerrillas from Kiangan captured Japan’s General Tomoyuki Yamashita.

And yet, too often our courage is a kind of back-to-the-wall syndrome, an amok sort of bravery, a resignation to the need to start punching. In sum, we would rather have fun than fight, disarm our enemies with a fiesta rather than a battle, patiently endure rather than challenge. Somewhere in our inner soul we hope to outlive our foes or oppressors.

Even in our speech we adroitly attempt to pass the responsibility over to God for what we have to do: Bahala na comes from our word for the deity, Bathala. When you analyze this expression, we’re saying that God will do it, just as our Muslims intone, Ins’ Allah, indicating that all is in the hands of Allah.

In the Ilocos, we even dump in the Lord’s lap our debts of gratitude – or money. We use the expression, Dios ti agnina (God will repay you!). When God passes the buck right back to us, or calls in the chits on the "advances" we have asked Him to make for us, what shall we do?

In some way, we are very much like the peninsulares from Spain who, in the course of centuries, imparted many of their habits to us – good and bad. If you’ve ever attended a Spanish bullfight and been caught up in the fervor of the corrida, you’ll get the idea. The aficionados and bloodthirsty fans sit safely in the stands, in the boxes or bleachers, sol o sombra, and cheer either the torero or the bull, frenziedly, depending on which combatant they have placed their money. (Okay, I’m just kidding.)

When the matador falters in his capework, or fails to sight his sword cleanly, the stands erupt into loud condemnation. The bravos in the bleachers shout down raucous insults at the lonely figure in the ring, impugning his manhood, casting aspersions on his mother’s you-know, accusing him of being without...er, cojones. But nobody will jump into the ring (except an occasional nut) and help him kill the bull.

Are we so different? We want to win our battles without shedding our own blood, enjoy our triumphs without pain or effort, celebrate the joy of Easter without passing through the agony of Good Friday.

In the real world, outside the walls of the corrida or the air-conditioned precincts of the basketball stadium, no such easy victories exist. And that is why the Araw ng Kagitingan will have to remind us that this realization, and how they embraced the hard way over the easy way, are what made our heroes different. And made them great.