Tales Out of Gueguesangen
by Fred Natividad

I just became a teenager when General Macarthur returned to the Philippines. I was old enough to remember the ambience of liberation in my hometown in Pangasinan. I would presume that that ambience can be the same in Romblon or in any part of the country.

Anyway...

I have not seen any historical material about a U.S. Army GRS (Graves
Registration Service) unit that set up, sixty years ago, a temporary cemetery in Gueguesangen, a rural village a bit away from my neighborhood but still within my hometown of Tolong. That cemetery has long been dug up and the land has been restored as farmland. One can imagine how robust the rice or sugar cane crops must have been after the GRS pulled out! The unearthed remains were transferred presumably to the American cemetery near Manila.

Anyway, before the cemetery was dug up, it was a neat, modern aberration on the bucolic Gueguesangen countryside. More importantly, to a starving population, it was also a source of temporary employment. My father was one such temp. A prewar bus driver, who learned basic auto mechanics in Baguio and in Bataan, he applied as a temp mechanic. He was accepted merely to change flat tires! He didn't stay long not because of that affront to his skills but because he was recalled into active duty in the Philippine army, only to be mustered out shortly thereafter when President Truman hit Japan with two atomic bombs.

My father did not return to GRS because he resumed his prewar job in Baguio. The GRS vehicles, whose tires he used to help change, were mostly 6x6 trucks that hauled dead bodies from the front lines. The temporary laborers (we call them temps now, don't we?) were driven home to town every evening in those same trucks. What was interesting to watch - I was eleven years old at the time - was their fun after a hard day's work at the cemetery. Consuming glass after glass of nipa wine they told a lot of stories. Some of the stories, thanks to nipa wine, may have been dramatically embellished but in a general context they were credible enough when confirmed by other sober laborers.

These stories out of Gueguesangen are not necessarily accurate for two reasons. First, except where I had personal experience, they were anecdotal hearsay from the mouths of nipa wine imbibers. Second, hey, my memories are about stuff that occured sixty years ago when MacArthur, as he promised in his slogans, returned.

There was a dead Japanese woman, presumably a nurse or a doctor because of her white, but very filthy, medical coat and a stethoscope around her neck. Surprisingly, souvenir-hunting American soldiers did not violate the woman's modesty as they did with three male dead Japanese stragglers at Nansangaan whom they stripped naked for souvenirs. Souvenir-hunting American soldiers are nothing new. A century ago American soldiers stripped naked a Filipino general named Gregorio del Pilar at Tirad Pass - well, after they shot him dead, of course.

Oops, fast forward. The American soldier who brought the Japanese woman to GRS went to lunch, leaving the body to be transferred to the morgue by laborers. Before the corpse could be transferred, however, some neighborhood boys scrambled up the 6x6 truck. They lifted the skirt of the woman, pulled her panties off and made fun of the poor woman poking her with a stick. A horrified American saw them and angrily chased them away. He was unable to catch any of the boys because they nimbly scattered in all directions.

One story teller justified the boys' despicable prank by reminding us that what was more despicable was the bestiality Japanese soldiers who raped Filipino women! He, the drunk, could not understand why the American was so prudish. Didn't American movies suggest that Americans openly display sexuality with women freely getting kissed on screen? In those days, in backward Tolong and all over the Philippines, openness in sexuality was still taboo.

I remember Juan. He was an all around utility man but mainly he was an
"aguador" (water carrier) like Ito, Kardo, and Mariano. He fetched water in two five-gallon tin cans (originally kerosene cans) hanging on opposite ends of a nimble, specially crafted bamboo lumber balanced on his shoulders. From the public artesian well at the plaza aguadors brought water to neighborhood homes. They were paid the princely sum of five centavos per haul! In those days five Philippine centavos were equal to half an American nickel.

Anyway, at the height of peak employment at Gueguesangen Juan put aside his water cans and dug graves for GRS. There he became a champion glutton for left over food from the American army kitchen. It seems that GRS cooks purposely provided left overs for their temps. The story tellers all agreed that Juan could wolf down a gallon of food! He would eat anything - from corned beef to spinach or whatever the GRS cooks gave away.

There was an American camp near my own neighborhood, too, and the cooks there also gave away left overs. After soldiers have eaten we children took our turn, lining up with all kinds of containers, mostly large coffee tin cans. The cooks would plop all kinds stuff in our tin cans. This kind of scenario is now seen again live from Iraq, thanks to modern TV.

Back to Gueguesangen... There was one pay day when grave diggers lined up to get paid. Everybody stank - hey, they handled dead bodies, donchaknow... But one fellow was unusually stinky. He even complained that perhaps he was sick because he felt cold itchiness from the soles of his feet that slowly crept up to his knees. After he got paid he went to some secluded place to check on his itchy legs. To his horror his legs were covered with maggots. It appeared that to avoid detection by the Americans he wore the combat boots he stole from a dead soldier. What he didn't know - or perhaps ignored - was that the shoes were full of maggots that he thought were sticky mud.

Another scavenging story was about one temp who sneaked into the morgue at twilight when everybody was supposed to have gone home. He rifled the pockets of a body for anything of value. To his surprise the body, wet with blood, was still warm. To his horror the body groaned! He forgot that he was in an off limits building and exposed his presence by screaming hysterically that there is a ghost in the morgue. Americans nearby were first startled and then they realized that the frightened thief discovered that a supposed corpse was still alive. First aiders rushed in. They were too late. The man finally expired from the gaping bullet holes all over his body. Had he been discovered earlier he might still be attending veterans' reunions today in some part of the USA.

The GRS command in 1946 Gueguesangen was apparently as community
relations conscious as the US military is today in 2003 Iraq. The Graves
Registration Service had another camp in town. GRS vehicles commuted
between that camp and the cemetery and camp in Gueguesangen. In the
evenings GRS soldiers allowed us to hitch rides on their 6x6 trucks so we
can watch outdoor movies in Gueguesangen. Any truck, we knew, had been used to haul dead bodies but apparently after every use it was cleaned by temps. We scrambled up the 6x6 unmindful of the lingering smell. Sometimes, after the movies, we were told that no truck is coming back to town. We didn't mind. We sang our way home walking in the dark of night.

Sometimes the movies were set up in town at the town plaza and we didn't
have to scramble up the trucks to Gueguesangen. I can't remember now any of the movies we watched. Half the time I didn't understand what the movies were all about because of the the strange accents I was not yet familiar with.

At one time there was some kind of a Christmas program where a certain
Floyd Flanner, a GRS first lieutenant, was supposed to speak. I don't
remember if it was to be at the central school in town or at Gueguesangen. Anyway, we heard that Lt. Flanner suddenly got sick and could not make it. The grapevine was that he got very drunk that Christmas evening. He must have been too homesick of pristine snow. For all I know maybe he just curled up with a "pampam" as he listened to a Bing Crosby rendition of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas."

I think the word "pampam" was a GI invention when they nicknamed prostitutes after American "pom-pom girls." Was this a hint that high school girls in America were promiscuous?

One thing that strikes me now, almost sixty years later, is that if the GRS command was headed by a young lieutenant the unit must have been merely of company size that was supposed to maintain a cemetery that grew day by day as the war raged on. His men were lucky that there were plenty of temps they can hire to do their unpleasant jobs of gathering dead bodies, digging up hastily buried soldiers, loading them in trucks, digging graves at Gueguesangen, planting row after row of white crosses and landscaping Gueguesangen farmland.

In the immediate era of postwar Philippines there were countless stories of very naive girls easily flattered and left pregnant by US servicemen. These girls became the focus of a Filipino-produced movie entitled "Hanggang Pier Lamang" because the girls were left at the piers holding their big bellies as US navy ships took their American lovers back to America. I have not seen that movie so I still wonder if its creators had the skill of realistically portraying a sad commentary on one effect of war in the Philippines. But the movie led to a street language term for half breeds: "Anak ng hanggang pier" (a child of a hanggang pier).

Of course, not all the girls who submitted to GIs at the sight of a chewing gum were "hanggang piers". I heard one success story of a young Gueguesangen girl. Details may not be accurate because I just heard of - but never met nor saw - this girl. She was a teenaged laundry girl of a GRS enlisted man - a corporal, I think. When GRS dug up the graves and moved to Manila the corporal married the girl and took her with him. I heard accounts of how the once unsophisticated laundry girl became an American style middle class housewife in big city Manila who visited rural Gueguesangen in a family car. A car in those days, especially in rural Gueguesangen, was the epitome of affluence.

I once told my memories of Gueguesangen to a WWII veteran with whom I
worked here in the States. When I wondered if the US government ever
compensated the owners of the land that GRS used he looked at me with
disbelief. Why would the US pay? Didn't America liberate you guys from
the Nips?

I wanted to slug him. But I can't slug people bigger than me so I merely
argued that the Philippines just happened to be liberated as the US
regained the upper hand in its conflict against Japan. World War II was
an American war and the Philippines was then, against its will, US
territory. The Philippines was merely the bloody, devastated battleground
that safely insulated peaceful American communities, inspite of which,
Filipinos, by their own choice, are arguably the most pro-American people
in all of Asia especially during World War II.

So which nation is grateful to whom? I say each is grateful to the other.
My native land, in its role as a battleground, passively shielded the
American mainland from devastation. On the other hand this general
scenario has, in particular, impacted me - and thousands of other
expatriates. Today I drive an American clunker in my adopted American
hometown. And I love the hot water, especially when the snows come
falling down, even if Virginia does not have as much snow as Chicago
where I lived for three and a half decades.

© 2003 Fred Natividad

 

About the Author:
Fred Natividad, of Lonton, Virginia is a native of Pangasinan.
Email address: frednati@earthlink.net