WAR is a filthy tragedy — but it has always been like that. The violent age that was the Renaissance, then the Roman Empire, while the golden age was in Greece. When reporters describe people dying in war, are you helping abolish war?
What is the magic attraction to war, and the risk and defiance of death? No one is insensitive to heroism, whose natural habitat is war. Nowhere does heroism burst out as in those in war, when it has the unique price of death.
It was time once more to honor the men and women and what they died for, in a moment of celebration, despite the bloody cost.
It was always a proud day for Filipinos celebrating Araw ng Kagitingan (Day of Valor). The people’s applause were special. There was no cue, as they simply put their hands together in long sustained ovations for the bemedalled veterans of a world war, who came perhaps for the last time to pay tribute to the few left among them, and their untucked memories.
It wasn’t just the colors or the uniform, never mind if its just a few moments to show off their medals and remember, but it was bittersweet. As they pass, people stood in quiet respect and eulogy from whispers of the past.
Many of those who left for war were fresh, muscular 20-21 years young back then, strong and resolute, bonded in that kind of relationships war forges with fire and steel. They now sat on wheelchairs or walked aided by a cane. Some can no longer walk, some were unable to speak to us about the death defying and war time sacrifices they survived in what seems oh so long ago.
Veterans in their uniforms and garrison caps bedecked with medals of valor; stomachs in, shoulders back, their lined faces adamant in their manliness, beautiful in their frailty. These sprinkling remnants of World War II continue to evoke a powerful sense of something definitive in our past — of that most found tragedy that can ever be remembered.
Time has shrunk them. Snapped bones, unfatigueable microbes, exhausted hearts that continue to deplete. It has creased their skin and hobbled organs. Every day is lived on a razor’s edge of will.
World War II veterans are withdrawn into a mere abstractions as we go on with a generalizing, romanticizing and trivializing their war and those who endured it. These gentle and noble survivors, who will always think of themselves as former soldiers. The eyes of the entire nation, as well as the entire world, were fixed on them as the young men ready to live at close quotes with death, in the name of freedom.
It was always a day of retracing the steps of years ago, revving the bloody sacrifices as they honor fallen comrades. As honor guards paced slowly through the crowd, followed by the men in uniform, some now fitting tightly across the stomach, the Fil-Am community began to clap and stomp their feet, while some began to cry.
What is disturbing today are the WW II fighters still waging a battle. Almost certainly the last major struggle in a sprinkling number of what is left of them, in their more than half century quiet to be recognized as American veterans, is still a struggle.
These men and women, Filipino soldiers and guerillas, whose own service of the United States, should have entitled them to the same benefits as millions of other GI’s from Normandy to Iwo Jima, lost out to the Supplemental Surplus Recession Act of 1946, when they’ve fought side by side in the Bataan Peninsula, at Leyte Gulf and in the mountains of Luzon.
It makes you think even deeper, nowhere else in Asia did they subject people support and defend the colonial master. Didn’t the Indochine turn on the French? The Indonesian on the Dutch and Malaysian and Burma against British? Only the Filipinos remained loyal.
In a day of tribute about war time sacrifices nobody stands taller in remembrance than a World War II veteran. Feeling proud but forgotten, battled scarred and fighting old, old age and infirmity, he embodies poignant messages of duty, honor and undying love, heroism and sacrifice..
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