Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (21 page)

I wanted to nurse a hangover, but Kathleen wanted to see the
war in the countryside. We hired a jeepney, and set off for the hills.
A military outpost had been overrun three days before in Mandug,
about thirty kilometers northwest of Davao. The leftist nun had told
Kathleen that a pregnant woman was shot in retaliation while
innocently washing her clothes in a stream.

Mandug was a pretty farm village with a range of hills behind
it. We found the outpost on the first of the hills. It was a sloppy
cluster of thatch huts and low stone walls with an open-air mess
hall occupying the crest of the knoll. The whole affair looked to
have been built by hippies or large ground-nesting birds. Government forces were back in control, the troops in usual Philippine
battle dress-shower flip-flops, Michael Jackson T-shirts, brightly
dyed bandanas around their heads and snips of red cloth tied to
their rifles to protect them from bullets. And there was a spitshined full-bird colonel there ready with a colorful yarn about the
battle.

As befits a romantic nation, the Philippines are great romancers. Tales start out at Jack's bean-stalk height and get taller with
every telling. Giannini, the Black Star photographer, swears he
once saw a Manila newspaper story that began, "Miss Carmelita
Torres was struck by an automobile on Rizal Boulevard and three of
her legs were broken."

The NPA attackers, riding in a stolen jeepney and a commandeered truck and disguised as banana-plantation workers, came
down the dirt road that runs beside the outpost.

"How many were there?" I asked the colonel.

"Oh, so many," he said, "a hundred."

"A hundred? In one jeepney and one truck?"

"Well, there were many more out there," said the colonel,
waving his hand at the countryside.

The NPA apparently tried to encircle the position by stopping
their jeepney at the outpost and sending their truck down the steep
road to the base of the hill. "But," said the colonel, "our unit on
patrol in the village spotted this truck already and fired upon the
driver of it causing him to-crash- dangerously into a house."

The village was half a kilometer away, so this would have
taken some good eyesight and better Armalite shooting. Moreover,
the battle hadn't started, and there was no reason to shoot at a
truck. However, a trail of mashed palm trees did lead straight off
the road and intoa small house with a large hole in the middle.

"Then what happened?" I said.

"The defenders of our outpost were attacked by surprise from
the jeepney and returned fire, surrounded by superior numbers as
the NPA shouted, `You're looking for us? We are here already!'
These NPA then, they were pinned down in the sleeping huts there
for a fire fight of forty minutes after which our soldiers were forced
to have decided, tactically, to retire with one killed and five
wounded. But the NPA, they suffered, oh,-twenty- killed."

I solemnly wrote this all in my notebook. "How many NPA
bodies have you, um, actually found?"

"Two."

I wandered around the outpost counting bullet holes and
expended cartridges. There were no bullet holes at all in the
sleeping huts where the NPA was supposedly under fire for forty
minutes and only a few chips out of the stone wall around the mess
tables.

This is what I'm pretty sure actually happened: Fifteen or
twenty-five NPA came down the road, and the hayseed rebel
driving the truck lost control on the hill and went off the road.
Meanwhile, the remaining dozen NPA-the most a jeepney could hold-rushed the outpost all pumped up and firing their guns in
every direction and probably inflicting their own two casualties on
themselves. The completely surprised government troops, who
were-five will get you ten-having a nap, hightailed it into the
shrubbery. Then the NPA grabbed some guns. This is what most
NPA actions are about. It's called an agaw-armas, a "gun-grab."

"So how many guns did the NPA get?" I asked the colonel.

"Two M-60 heavy machine guns, one M-30 light machine gun
and four Armalites." He didn't mind that I hadn't believed a word
he said. He could tell I liked a good war story, that was the
important thing. Had he heard anything about a pregnant woman
being shot? He said it might be true. The day before yesterday
Scout Rangers-the Philippine equivalent of Green Berets-had
come upon a group of NPA, and he'd heard a civilian had been
killed. There was a lot of fighting, he said, around Fatima, the next
village up the road.

Indeed, dozens of refugees were coming from Fatima, their
possessions dragging on wooden travois behind the family caribous. But the colonel said he couldn't let us go there, the road
might be mined by the NPA.

I'd have thought that twenty or thirty two-thousand-pound
water buffalos would have cleared up the land-mine question.
Kathleen and I stood in the tanning-salon sun with the colonel,
considering. Filipinos don't argue. They "consider." And after, as
it were, a considerable length of time, a truck arrived from the city,
carrying rice and canned goods to Fatima. This allowed the colonel
to change his mind without losing face. Now it would be okay to go.
The food truck would set off any land mines, and we could follow
behind it. But first, the soldiers must inspect the truck.

"It's a food blockade," whispered Kathleen. This seemed to
be true. The soldiers said they had to take seven sacks of rice and
two dozen cans of peas off the truck so there wouldn't be extra food
for the NPA in Fatima. They stacked these by the side of the road,
and the truck rumbled away. We started after it in our jeepney.

"Wait, wait," said the soldiers. "Are you going to Fatima? This
food was supposed to go there." And they loaded the rice and peas
into our laps.

In Fatima some families were evacuating, some families were not evacuating and some families weren't sure if they were evacuating or not. They said one army officer had come and told them to
stay put, and another army officer had come and told them to move.
"What are you fleeing?" we asked. They weren't certain. "Where
are you fleeing to?" They weren't positive. "Who's in charge here?"
Hard to say. "Had there been any fighting?" Oh, yes, there had
been a lot of fighting-in Callawa, the next village up the road.

Events move around a lot in the Philippine countryside.
Whatever's happening is always happening one village away from
where you are. "No fighting in this district then?" we said. Well,
no. They thought it over. One eager fellow volunteered that the
army had looted his house.

"They stole my pants, my scissors, my radio and my saw," he
said. He was holding a large cross-cut saw in his hand. I stared at
the tool. "Well, they gave the saw back," he said.

We asked if anyone had heard about a pregnant woman being
shot. Yes, yes. It was an awful thing, terrible, very bad. They were
all sad about it. "Did you know her?" No, they'd heard it on the
radio.

We drove on toward Callawa. We were in communist-held
territory now. We knew that because a large banner across the road
said so. The hills were rising into mountains here and covered with
balsam trees. When the road crossed the head of a deep ravine, we
could see the amber Davao River twisting through rice fields below
us like a gold-link bracelet dropped on a putting green.

Five kilometers from Fatima we came up on a grizzled old man
carrying a wooden hoe and leading a caribou. Man and beast could
have belonged in any of the past dozen centuries except the man
was wearing flare-leg double-knit slacks and an earth-smeared
Ban-Lon shirt as though dressed for some game of peasant golf.
When we asked him about the pregnant girl, the old man was
matter-of-fact. Yes, sixteen rebels had stayed at his house, more in
two other houses nearby. About nine o'clock Sunday morning,
while the rebels were having breakfast, the Scout Rangers fired on
the houses. One woman with the NPA was killed, hit in the
forehead and leg. Yes, she was pregnant. The rebels fired back
briefly "but had short arms only." Then they fled.

"Put a sock in it, buddy," I wanted to say. For all he knew, Kathleen and I were Fawn Hall and Ollie North, Far East division.
But omerta is not a Philippine concept.

The old man wasn't, however, eager to lead us back to his
home. He said someone would show us the way in Callawa, if we
wanted.

Callawa looked like everyplace else in the Philippines, sort of
cute, sort of ratty, with Latin stucco false fronts on southeast Asian
thatch-and-bamboo buildings. The food blockade didn't seem to be
working very well here either. Our driver immediately began loading his jeepney with cheap local produce.

The town's largest landowner invited us to lunch. Yep, he
said, Callawa was a red area. The army never came here because
people would tell the NPA on them. He laid out an enormous
spread-rice, sardines, pork chops, mangos, jackfruit, coconut
milk, caramel pudding and three kinds of bananas.

"Great bananas," I said, "not like what we get back in the
States."

"Yep, we feed those to the caribou," said our host.

I asked him if he'd been bothered by the NPA, and he said of
course he had; they considered him a rich man. He said he paid
the NPA a tax, "part out of fear, part out of pity. I bargained with
them."

"How much did they want?" I asked.

"Ten thousand pesos a month."

"What do you give them?"

"Three hundred." This is probably one reason the NPA is
communist-because they're such lousy businessmen. If I couldn't
negotiate a better deal than that while holding somebody at gunpoint, I'd be a goddamned communist too.

While we were having lunch, an ambulance and a car from a
Davao funeral parlor arrived in town. The pregnant woman's family
had come to get her body. A guide was found, and a procession of a
dozen people started into the countryside, carrying a stretcher,
shovels and plastic sheets. The parents were about sixty, the father
stoic, the mother in steady, quiet tears.

We walked for an hour, across a banana plantation and up onto
grassy slopes. A cousin, a young man in his twenties, told me the
dead woman had been married only a year. She was twenty-six and six months pregnant. Her husband was in the NPA, and she was a
member of the Urban Poor Coalition in Davao, a pro-NPA group
harassed by Alsa Masa. She and some thirty other coalition members had fled to Callawa, where she met with her husband. She
hadn't seen him in several months. The cousin told me all this as
though politics were something like a flu epidemic or a car wreck.

Kathleen and I found the three crude plank houses where the
NPA had stayed. There were chickens and a puppy in one door
yard and bullet holes in all the buildings but no humans. Most of
the bullets had struck the houses too high to hit anyone. They'd
gone through the flimsy constructions, in one side and out the
other. But in one house there was a sleeping pallet in a corner and
several bullet holes just where you'd prop a pillow against the wall.

Everything in the scene spoke of idiocy. The NPA had two or
three dozen people cooped up and hadn't secured a perimeter. The
houses were sited so that four or even three Scout Rangers could
have surrounded them and forced everyone to surrender-or killed
them all. But, instead, the Scout Rangers had obviously stood away
and just let blast, not even bothering to aim. They'd killed one
pregnant girl, and all the rest had escaped in broad daylight. We
could see where the NPA group had run across a plowed field;
they'd dropped a cheap pistol holster, some propaganda leaflets
and an empty cartridge box.

The grave was a hundred yards away, marked with a cross of
lashed sticks. It was by the side of a path on a high, broad meadow
in a nimbus of hills. The undertaker's men began to dig. The
mother yelled, "Where are the masses when we need them? How
could they leave her like this?"

The undertaker's men dug carefully, holding their shovel
blades almost parallel to the ground and tossing aside little scoops
of soil. They wore bandanas across their faces. Everyone else
breathed through handkerchiefs. The smell was already as strong
as a vision. There is no odor like the odor of a dead human. It's a
saccharine putrescence-rotting meat and prom corsages, a sweet,
gagging stink. It penetrates clothes and skin. No matter how many
times you shower, no matter how many times you tell the poor
laundry girl at the hotel to take your clothes back and wash them
again, the scent returns like a worry or an evil thought. It's not even such a bad smell, no worse than whiskey vomit, but the reek of our
own death goes like a shock to some early, unevolved ganglion just
at the head of the spine, to the home of all wordless, thoughtless
fear.

The first part of the body to come unearthed was a knee,
swollen black and round as the crown of a hat. When the mother
saw this, she screamed and fell, not in a faint but attacking the
ground with her fists and forehead and screaming something,
screaming everything, I guess, there is to scream. It took three of
her family to pull her away. They led her into the shade, where she
sat splay-legged and cried, open-faced and open-lunged, making a
sound I'd never heard from an adult, a rhythmic sobbing louder
than a yell, the sound infants make, meant to wake the world.

The undertaker's men kept at their work, clearing the dirt
from two bloated sausage arms and from the mound of pregnant
belly and then from the face. The features had swollen and begun
to liquify into a wide, smooth, sickening bruise-with the face of a
young girl disappearing into slime, beauty haunting horror. They
pulled at her hips, and the body came free, stiff, distended, overripe inside its ghastly skin, hair trailing clots of sod. What ideology
has that oozing face for a price? What abstraction is worth that
smell?

I convinced Kathleen to fly to Negros the next day, to visit a
sugar-planter friend of Tina's family. Maybe there'd be a vast, tileroofed hacienda with servants to bring lots of drinks to banish the
memory of that dead girl and gardens out to the horizon to look at to
make her face go away and a swimming pool, a huge swimming
pool, to splash chlorine up our noses.