As we celebrated the 119th anniversary of our Independence Day yesterday, the best online tribute was a photo gallery of the soldiers who gave their lives in the Marawi fighting. I counted 58 photos as of writing, and unfortunately that number is bound to increase.
There was the young son of an Army sergeant, the lone survivor of a firefight trapped in his position, who called in an airstrike on himself just so he could also send his attackers to their paradise. Later posts called the story fake, but the jihadists are also pretty adept with social media, prompting the AFP to ask Facebook to close down some 70 jihadist accounts for spreading terrorist lies and propaganda.
And there was First Lieutenant Savellano, a good-looking young man who’d spent time at West Point while at the Philippine Military Academy. He’d led the troops who discovered the P79-million cash cache of the Maute gang, only to be cut down days later, putting an end to his plans for getting married and starting his own family, no different than the rest of us.
Most of these soldiers are the sons of farmers, laborers, career military and policemen, government clerks, housewives. Their code is very simple: duty, honor, country. They matter-of-factly put their lives on the line every day, they stoically bury their dead one day and then go out and do the same thing all over again the next day.
It’s to young men and women like them that we owe whatever benefits independence has brought us. It’s their memory that we honored by our celebration yesterday.
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A notable feature of the Marawi fighting was the technical support provided by US troops in the area, largely through reconnaissance overflights that must have provided invaluable intel to our troops on the ground.
Their assistance was covered by existing security agreements, and so President Duterte need not have been advised beforehand by his generals. But to his credit, given his well-known views about Americans, he thanked them afterwards for the assistance, just as presumably he would have thanked anybody else who might have come in with help, in line with his new open-door foreign policy.
Naturally, a lot of pro-American types couldn’t help making comparisons with China. After all, while American troops were out there shoulder to shoulder with us against a common terrorist threat, it’s Chinese troops who’ve been busy putting barracks and runways on newly constructed artificial islands within our UNCLOS-defined areas of responsibility, whenever they’re not taking potshots at our fishermen or threatening our President face to face about going to war over maritime territory.
One’s bile may indeed rise if you look only at what’s happening now. But from the longer view backward, our 120-year relationship with the Americans has also seen its share of troubles, as recently as the rape-murder cases involving visiting US servicemen, and as far back—if you want to go that far—as the massacres committed by the new US colonizers during the pacification campaign at the turn of the 19th century.
Looking forward—which is what really matters—substantiating the independence that we celebrated yesterday means getting away from unhealthy dependencies, making new friends while trying to keep the old, and looking out only for number one: ourselves. Permanent self-interest in the way we run our affairs is the least we owe to all those soldiers who died, and will still die, to keep us free.
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Luckily for Americans, the empathy of Filipinos for them is so strong that even diehard leftists end up seeking refuge there, or somewhere similar.
I’m sure that if the gang presently based in Utrecht had become eligible for refugee or even resident status in the US, they might have ended up there instead. Certainly none of them went knocking at the door of then-communist China or, heaven forbid, still-communist North Korea.
One leftist who ended up spending many years in the States was Bal Pinguel, the UP firebrand speaker who went underground during martial law, reportedly led the resistance in Samar, and spent five years in prison. Although it was already well into the Cory presidency in 1992, he sought refuge in the States, where he worked for many years with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker NGO based in Philadelphia.
Last week, while watching TV in his living room, Bal suddenly succumbed, most likely to a heart attack. A US-based former comrade commented that Bal always seemed sad, as if mourning the lack of success of the revolutionary movement he gave so much to. I’d like to think, though, that despite his progressive viewpoint until the very end, he’d finally come around in his final days to a real appreciation of what a working, market-based democracy can do for its people, even for fierce critics like him.
Another notable whom I’d also like to honor in memoriam is Dr. Amado Castro, the founding dean of the UP School of Economics. Dean Castro was my economic history professor at UP and one of two graduate school teachers of mine—the other at Harvard—who made me read my final exam to him because he couldn’t decipher my atrocious handwriting. If he remembered me at all just for that, I’d be immensely flattered.
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After those obits, let me close with a life-celebrating congratulatory note to the parents of Hiyas Hila, the US-based pianist and music professor who performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto 23 last Sunday with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra at the CCP.
Hiyas is a daughter of my fraternity brod Tony, who teaches at La Salle, and one of her siblings is a member of Bloomfield, the local retro Beatles band. When one encounters such musical genes in a family, hope invariably springs up—for the country, for what’s good, for life in general.
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