My great-grandfathers were ‘Ghost Soldiers’

Frankly speaking, I have no penchant for reading war novels or anything that has guns in it. Not until one book made me and had me literally retracing three generations of my family. I cried after realizing that it was my family history, as it was the history of many other Filipino families whose loved ones died in the Second World War.

Admittedly, it was my fascination, nay, addiction to HBO’s award-winning mini-series Band of Brothers, based on Stephen Ambrose’s book with the same title, which forced me to tease a friend to buy me the paperback on one of her trips to the US as pasalubong. And when it arrived, I ravaged the book the way I read my favorite ones – cover-to-cover – reading about and reliving Easy Company’s campaign from France to Germany, imagining every bullet, the blood and bravery that pushed this group of soldiers to their limits and surviving each day alongside their comrades, their "brothers." How they managed to survive Capt. Sobel’s torture-training in Mt. Curahee to the real jump as paratroopers on D-Day together and fighting for freedom during World War II. It was a wonderful story whether it was about the plain GI’s or the frontline force in the snow-covered foxholes in Normandy under the mercy of German artillery, bombarded and maimed while starving without sufficient winter clothing, to the capture of the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s Mansion in Germany. Stephen Ambrose’s masterpiece was the eye-opener for me to fully grasp the full impact of wars. Especially that I ended up conversing with my lola about the Japanese Occupation in the Philippines and found out how my great-grandfathers died.

As my lola narrated their stories, I could only imagine the heroism of my three great-grandfathers (maternal side) when they became a pilot, an army messenger at the age of 16 and a machine-gunner in Corregidor who later joined the Death March in Bataan. How they became soldiers is a different story but the death of the pilot (the eldest), which they heard about from his own brother, was hard to accept for the family. Double that when they learned that Corregidor, Bataan was finally captured by the Japanese. The second sibling, who was a machine-gunner, was stationed there! This is where Hampton Side’s Ghost Soldiers played a role in deepening my family relations, even though I didn’t give a zilch about the Death March until I was 18.

Ghost Soldiers, although focused on the lives of American soldiers who surrendered in Bataan in April 1942 and forced to go on the Death March, is also the story of Filipino soldiers and civilians. Many of them survived, but most of them died in that gruesome procession, including my great-grandfather. The ghoulish scene of soldiers marching, slowly but steadily, starving and sick, like living skeletons shows the strength of the human spirit and the will to survive in times of despair. For the men of Bataan, their morale was zero when dozens of their comrades began to "fall like flies" along the road to Camps O’Donell in Cabanatuan, where thousands more died in prison camps, succumbing to diseases and the Japanese bushido and samurai.

A particular page I would never forget involves an Imperial Army and a pregnant Filipina who throws rice cakes to the passing patriots. He grabs her and brings her behind a tree. Her screams are a reminder of how evil man can become as the Japanese soldier "took his bayonet and gauged out her fetus right in front of her." Those who fall, either by starvation or exhaustion, are run over by tanks or shot in the head. Some Japanese who pride their swordsmanship would usually rip a soldier’s ribs with their bayonet. The marchers are left with two choices: either move on or die trying to move on, My great-grandfather chose the latter.

Ghost Soldiers is also an intelligent and masterful storytelling of the daring yet triumphant rescue mission led by Lt. Colonel Henry A. Macci. To rescue the POWs in the prison camps of Cabanatuan took more than just courage. It took dedication and the Filipino guerrillas.

How Mucci trained his men with disciplinarian philosophy may be compared to how my great-grandfathers’ father molded his children. As my lola relates to me, he was tougher than he looked and he aided the famished guerrillas by hanging kamote and other crops on a tree for them to collect.

While Lt. Mucci planned the rescue mission, the surviving men of the march spent their days inside the prison camps for three years, working in the fields, planting and occasionally enjoying a fly swatting contest when not suffering from various infections such as tuberculosis, beriberi, malnutrition and severe deficiency of vitamins. Soon, the camp became a community of ghost soldiers who thought that they had been totally forgotten. But their will to survive kept them going, and although the hardest part for them was seeing their friends and family die in the camps, they wept and move on. My great-grandfathers’ family did the same. They wept and moved on, not knowing why their brothers had to die.

Ghost Soldiers teaches one about suffering, dying – living. The last was the ultimate goal of Lt. Mucci, the Filipino guerrillas and the good men of Bataan.

I did not know my great-grandfathers but I have to thank Ghost Soldiers for making me realize the value of knowing one’s family history.

I like how Hampton Side began the prologue of his novel with a quote from Dante’s Inferno: "Let us not speak of them; but look, and pass on," followed by the names of more than a hundred American soldiers who perished in the historic march. Somehow it gives me solace as I stand in front of a stone slab in my great-grandfather’s birthplace. It reads: Heroes of Guimaras.

I look, read their names and pass on…with pride.