Forgiven, perhaps, but not forgotten

The movie The Great Raid, based on the true story of the rescue of 513 American prisoners by a small party of 120 US Rangers and 280 Filipino guerillas from a Japanese prison camp in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija on January 30, 1945, was well-received in this country.

It was a rare war movie which didn’t focus on the epic deeds of Audie Murphy-type American soldiers, but gave due credit to the heroic roles played by Filipinos, both resistance fighters and common folk.

A force of 200 guerillas under Captain Juan Pajota, played in the movie by a quite credible Cesar Montano, valiantly held off a supporting force of a thousand Japanese troops at the Cabu River bridge while the Americans conducted the lightning raid.

Later, the mostly sick and disabled prisoners were carried by carabao carts, an idea of Captain Pajota, to rendezvous with advancing US Army units in the town of Talavera. The carabaos and carts were provided by ordinary farmers in the area, at great risk to themselves.

The intelligence provided by Filipino guerillas was critical to the raid’s success. As accurately noted in the film, Captain Pajota insisted on a postponement of the raid for 24 hours. His network had learned that the road in front of the prison camp would be jammed with Japanese military vehicles and personnel rushing northward under cover of night. At that precise time, the US Rangers would be approaching the prison gates on their bellies after crawling across an open rice field.

It was Captain Pajota who suggested that a US military aircraft make several passes over the prison camp to distract guards manning watchtowers while the Rangers tried to cross the open field undetected.

Thus, while The Great Raid isn’t destined to be a classic war film, it was satisfying on at least one level. It was also most disturbing because of the portrayal of the harrowing experience of the prisoners at the hands of their brutal Japanese captors.

I don’t know if the release date of the film was purely coincidental or whether it was timed to be at the theaters at about the time the world was commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent surrender of Japan to the Allied Forces. These events took place in August, 1945. The anniversary, once again, was marked by public protests in China and Korea.

Nations victimized by Japan’s aggressive militarism in the Second World War have long resented what they regard as callous Japanese insistence on officially honoring their war dead, including convicted war criminals. Annual visits of high Japanese government officials to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine trigger angry reactions in Asian countries that were invaded by Japan during the war.

This year, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi didn’t make the traditional visit but sent two cabinet ministers to pay respects at the shrine, a gesture which failed to mollify China and Korea. The premier also issued a statement which read in part: "Our country, through colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations . . . We humbly accept these historical facts and express again our deep remorse and our feeling of sincere apology."

But for many victimized nations, these words are cheap and come too late. It will clearly take much more than rhetoric to make people forgive, much less forget. Even time does not seem to have provided closure. This may seem difficult to understand for this generation, far removed from the agonies and the devastation that we only read about and see pictures of in history books or grainy black and white war documentaries.

But having re-read the book of Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers, on which The Great Raid was partly based, and recalling many other accounts of the Bataan Death March and the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, as well as stories told and re-told by my parents and other relatives, I can understand both this abiding resentment and the difficulty a previous generation of Filipinos has in dealing with these emotions. Some, certainly not all, have forgiven. None has forgotten.

Over the weekend, I read an unusual obituary on the 61st anniversary of the death of Dever Garcia Alejandro who died at the age of 22, beheaded together with 27 comrades by the Kempetai after enduring several months of "indescribable torture and pain" at Fort Santiago. Dever, an ROTC volunteer from UP, fought in Bataan, survived the Death March and the infamous Camp O’Donnell concentration camp in Capas, then joined the underground in Manila. He was captured in January, 1944.

It is singularly impressive to me that a family remembers after all this time, even after several generations of Alejandros have been born. I can only imagine what stories of bravery, of love of country and extreme personal sacrifice have become the legacy of that family and a source of real strength and inspiration for all its members.

I have mixed feelings, of course: of consuming hatred for people that can perpetrate such systematic cruelty, and of empathy with those whose sufferings were direct, personal and, unlike the movies, true to life and not make-believe.

I thought of citing here several examples of Japanese atrocities during the Death March, and later inflicted on inmates at Cabanatuan, as described by Sides. His truly horrific stories would, I am sure, have enraged and might have even been cathartic.

But I decided not to.

A few weeks ago this August, we also commemorated the dawning of the nuclear age, when two atomic bombs killed, maimed or condemned to a slow death hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, including innocent women and young children. Then, I remembered that my own uncle, my mom’s beloved violin-playing brother, was killed in the carpet-bombing of Malate during the so-called "liberation" of Manila.

I guess hatred and resentment, while in a way comforting, are not the answer. I don’t have the answers. I doubt any one has. And so, we grieve, we remember, we resolve never to let this happen again. But forgiveness is much harder for some than it is for others, because it seems so huge a betrayal of the memory of those who suffered.