Friendly Fire & Liberation

Thanks for all the fruit. They really served to pick up my appetite because for the past week I did not feel like eating. I had a very bad strep throat and had some bad mouth sores. I do not know what caused them. Add to that all the depressing news on TV. So it was a six-day slump–stayed in bed getting up only to play mahjong two afternoons.

Staying in bed sick and watching CNN made me remember all kinds of harrowing things about the war we had to go through. When pictures of young army wives clutching their babies appeared on the TV screen, I could see myself, 26 years old, standing at the old garden gate on N. Domingo watching your father walking away. He had just received a message from his guerilla outfit to "get out of town fast!" because one of the members of their outfit had been picked up by the Japanese and taken to Fort Santiago and there was fear that the man would be tortured into revealing the names of the other members of the outfit.

I stood there, a two-year-old toddler (you) clutching at my skirt and a four-month-old infant (your brother) in my arms, sick with worry, watching my husband go, afraid of what could happen when he tried to get through the many Japanese check points before he could finally reach the sheltering mountains. I never felt so alone in my life.

Talk of "friendly fire" and "liberation" over TV made me remember when we evacuated from the old family house in San Juan just in time, before a "friendly" salvo from the entering American "liberators" had been aimed at a Japanese gun emplacement on our N. Domingo wall. The old house, together with everything in it, all the mementos of a lifetime, was razed to the ground. A day later, we got the news that "friendly fire" from a liberating plane had hit the air raid shelter where the other Licuanans had sought shelter on the other side of the Pasig. Your paternal grandmother was fatally wounded and died immediately, decapitated by a big fragment of shrapnel–two of her young grandchildren died with her–the youngest, the baby, was wounded but died an agonizing death days later from gangrene. Your Tita Gells was shell shocked and so traumatized so that for many years later she would wake up screaming, trembling with fear from nightmares in which she re-lived that terrible moment of "friendly fire". A cousin, the widow of an army captain who had died in Bataan, was also hit and left two small children completely orphaned.

Those nightmarish things actually happened in our family– and yet we were among the lucky ones, we survived to see our world become good again.

Now, lying in my comfortable old bed, eating a dish of your delicious strawberries, I watch TV and hear again the sound of wailing sirens and fearful explosions. I see smoke and fire, men in uniform grimly walking towards what could be their death, women and children cowering in fear.

I know how they all feel, I have been through all that myself–my heart goes out to all of them who are going through it now and I hope that, like us, they will have a chance to see their own private worlds turn good again.

Let us count our blessings.