The ambience is
indelible in my mind. The nights were cool by Philippine
weather norms. We were in this place, in what seemed to be the middle
of
nowhere. Palm-thatched bamboo houses serenely stood among clumps of
towering bamboo and mango trees. Just outside this bucolic oasis one
could see treeless, desert-like rice paddies, square foot after square
foot of flat fields covered with dry, brown hay. A few weeks earlier
the
hay were rice stalks that bore golden grain which had, since then,
been
harvested.
Actually the place
must be just a few miles off the town proper of Tolong
but its aura of remoteness was chiefly because no roads led to it.
Its
inhabitants came to town once a week on market days on animal-drawn
carts. They used temporary trails that cut across rice fields lying
fallow for the moment till monsoon rains ushered the next season for
planting a new rice crop.
The Japanese,
we heard, bombed this place called Pearl Harbor somewhere
far across the oceans, near where many of our countrymen worked with
supposedly fabulous wages in sugar cane and pineapple plantations.
Authorities ordered
us to evacuate our homes in the town proper and we
fled to this rural oasis where humble people, without any hesitation
nor
thoughts of compensation, opened up their homes to us. At night the
women unrolled buri palm mats on any available space of our hosts'
bamboo houses on stilts where they and the children slept. The menfolk
slept under the houses where they served as sentries armed with nothing
but a "barang."
A barang
is a long utility knife, more like a wide bladed sword, used for
a wide variety of tasks from cutting meats and vegetables in the kitchen
or light chopping of firewood or clearing underbrush in the yard.
There was little
space left upstairs where the women and children slept.
So we young boys were delighted in being allowed to sleep under the
houses with the male elders and the older boys. We enjoyed the semblance
of camping outdoors because there were no walls under the houses built
on stilt-like but sturdy bamboo poles. We woke up at early dawn when
it was still dark as our mothers came down to cook breakfast in makeshift
outdoor kitchens. While breakfast was being cooked we raced out to
the
rice paddies and gathered hay for bonfires. We needed warmth because
December mornings even in the tropics are cool. About midmorning when
the tropical sun began to unleash its full energies we let our bonfires
expend themselves.
It was on one
of those early bonfire mornings when we heard dull
explosions from the direction of the town proper. The invading Japanese
from the beaches of Lingayen had arrived at our little town of Tolong
eight miles inland. Tolong was on the Japanese army's path to Manila,
the
national capital, a hundred and fifty miles south. But to our thankful
delight the invaders bypassed remote villages such as this one where
we
sought refuge.
In a few days
the explosions went further south as MacArthur's inept
Philippine army retreated into Bataan. Our elders then scouted the
town
and decided that it was already safe to return. We trekked back to
our
homes in a less harried manner compared to our earlier chaotic
evacuation. We found our homes looted. Unprocessed cane sugar in huge
earthen cone jars stored under houses were gone. Rice granaries were
forced open and emptied.
Our elders gaped
in horror at their looted homes but my father was not
one of them. At that very moment he must have been cowering in a foxhole
more than a hundred miles away. He was one of MacArthur's ridiculously
untrained Filipino draftees trapped in Bataan.
I can't remember
- perhaps I will never know now - if that day when we
returned to our homes was the day the Japanese started their siege
of
Bataan. I was to learn after the war that their siege began on the
7th of
January in 1942.
It will be three
years later, on January 9, 1945, when General Macarthur
returns to the same shores of Lingayen Gulf on his way to recapture
Manila where American and other allied civilians were interned by
the
Japanese.
