Fireplace chat

He shakes his head slightly in answer to the first question put to him, and says the "win" situation from the rape trial in Subic now awaiting its verdict is that the justice system works. "Whatever the outcome, we’ll have to accept it," says Col. David Maxwell, the new chief of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, dapper in a dark suit with a pin of twin Philippine and American flags on his lapel. It was the eve of his formal assumption of command, he had just paid a courtesy call on AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr. and held a dialogue with Maria Ressa and the ABS-CBN news staff, and the officer just arrived from a posting in Korea was cautiously relaxed over dinner at The Fireplace, the Hyatt Casino & Resort’s showcase grill restaurant, where the staff’s convivial encouragement will easily make you over-indulge (the chocolate soup gets my vote, no matter how stuffed you may be at the end of the meal).

"There is still the matter of a possible court martial," he points out, his public affairs officer explaining that their military investigation into the alleged rape in Subic was still ongoing. With the prescribed one year period for the case to be concluded– as stipulated in the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA)–just a few weeks away, it’s hard to say what exactly will happen. But the rape trial and the four accused servicemen are not actually within Col. Maxwell’s realm of responsibility; he oversees the couple of hundred–the number fluctuates–American troops stationed in AFP camps throughout the country, mostly in Mindanao, from his base in Zamboanga.

Col. Maxwell has been in the country before, in 2002 for the Balikatan exercises, and spent time in Basilan (which he pronounces bah-si-lan, accent on the first syllable) which he recalls with some fondness and is eager to revisit. He stresses cooperative effort–"like yin and yang", he demonstrates with an interlacing of his fingers–the militaries of two countries "working together, listening and talking to each other to come up with ideas".

Their concern is security and the fight against terrorism, so a large part of his responsibility has to do with military training, strategy, equipment and the like, but he stresses that the thrust is to get at the root causes of terrorism, the factors that breed terrorists–chief among them poverty, the lack of education and basic services. Thus a good part of their work here is developmental: building schools, providing books and pencils, helping communities with water and sanitation facilities. Toward this end, the American forces jointly with the AFP and the local government last April set up in Jolo a Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center or HACC which matches project requests from the communities with the appropriate donor resources.

Among the problems Col. Maxwell is inheriting from his predecessor is a cellphone that, with one button wrongly pressed, shows all commands in Chinese characters. He has to find someone to fix it "or I’ll have to learn Chinese"; if that doesn’t happen, he’s heading for the cellphone mecca in the Greenhills tiangge (his six-year-old daughter back in the States will perhaps then be the happy beneficiary of a stop at the pearl section of the tiangge). But the good colonel is all too familiar with the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times", and, with the sharpness and resilience that training and experience in the Army Special Forces has afforded him, he seems ready to take on whatever "interesting" developments his one-year posting in Mindanao may come his way.