(Foreword: It took me years to decide to tell this story. After I decided to write it, weeks passed before I could begin the first few lines, and spent months to finish it.)
Maybe it’s the macho culture that drives many men to enter the military. Maybe it’s the glorification of war in movies and other media. Or maybe many thought of soldiery as the ultimate expression of patriotism that many boys dream of one day donning a uniform and basking in the admiration of a grateful country.
There are others though who wish to become soldiers mainly for economic reasons. For many of the unemployed they see it as an escape from poverty. A neighbor back in my childhood days said he joined the military because he wanted his mother to stop being a labandera.
In the early to mid-1970s, at the peak of the war between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front, jobless male youth in the provinces provided a vast pool of recruits for the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). They swarmed the training camps of the Army, the AFP service branch that provided most troops to the front and required minimal qualifications. Others joined the defunct Philippine Constabulary.
So lax were the requirements that many bums and toughies in our hometown jumped in on the opportunity.
Soldier stands guard in one of the villages in Mindanao. MindaNews file photo
One of those young men who were desperate to enter the military for economic reasons was Benjie, who I met in Mindanao State University in Marawi City sometime in 1981. By then, he had been taken out of combat duty to serve as security for a university official
That official rented out a room in his residence to some male students, one of whom is a friend who now resides abroad. We went there for refreshment after playing soccer one hot afternoon – and later for some beer and whiskey. (On paper, liquor and beer were prohibited inside the campus. Nonetheless, the stuff managed to slip past the guards at the gate.) Benjie joined us in a drinking binge that lasted hours.
If he wasn’t wearing a uniform, one couldn’t tell that Benjie was a soldier. He stood no more than 5’4” with a diminutive frame and an unassuming demeanor. Yet, deep inside him hid a soul tormented by an ugly past, of a crime that he would have carried to his grave if not for the effect of the spirits. In vino veritas (In wine there is truth), so a saying goes.
Benjie recalled that halfway through their training he and several other draftees were told that they need not finish the whole duration if they could do a certain “mission.” In exchange for becoming regular soldiers, they were ordered to massacre a whole Moro village. The order was to “kill all the living,” men, women and children, armed or unarmed; no one was to be spared.
Only the most hideous of men would do that. But for reasons he could not explain, Benjie said he and his fellow trainees heeded the order. Maybe it’s the yearning for a job. Maybe it’s the ingrained image of a Muslim as an “enemy.” Or maybe it’s the straightjacket soldier’s mentality to never question an order, not even those that appear to be part of a method to madness.
So, one fine day, Benjie’s unit of trainees entered a Moro village and did as ordered: kill all the living. Benjie could not remember how long their guns blazed and how many victims lay dead afterwards. There was only a discomforting silence, the lingering smell of gunpowder, and the sight of bodies on blood-drenched earth and inside the huts. “Mission” accomplished, no matter the cost.
But he remembered the anguished cries and appeals for mercy of the victims as he and his comrades fired their guns in wild abandon at everything that moved. Old men, women, children scampering in all directions as Death announced its coming. Mothers clutching and embracing infants in a final act of filial love. Dogs, cats, chickens, farm animals which, like their human caretakers could not understand the sheer insanity and cruelty of it all.
As the reality of what they had done started to sink in, Benjie said his whole body shivered and he let out a cry of shock and disbelief. Many of his comrades must have felt the same that without being told to do so, they converged at the center of the village, hugged each other, and wept in what may be considered an act of collective sorrow and contrition for the carnage.
I saw tears roll down Benjie’s face after he recounted this story while us his listeners were left stunned. Perhaps the souls of those who would die in such manner have a way of touching the conscience of their murderers, and the revelation was his way of asking forgiveness and showing remorse for the crime.
Some readers may find this story unbelievable, absurd even. Yet, similar events did happen during the 21-year rule of Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, among them the Manili massacre, Sag-od massacre in Samar, Escalante massacre in Negros Oriental.
I don’t know what had happened to Benjie since. Is he still alive? If he is and he happens to read this, surely he can still remember that shameful, horrid chapter of his life which showed the viciousness of the martial law regime. (H. Marcos C. Moreno / MindaNews)
