WAR IS NOT KIND, ARCHIBALD

We heard the chug-chug-chug of the big bird up in the air.  As it circled the military camp for a landing at a grassy clearing near the tennis court,  young girls and young boys and some male grown-ups materialized from the nearby houses and raced forward looking up. In this capital town, a helicopter arriving from its base somewhere in the regional capital signifies an encounter between soldiers and insurgents (the military tags them as communist terrorists) and that there are casualties on the government side. As it landed, dust, fanned by the machine's blades, whirled like a baby tornado slowly settled down as the young pilots in blue uniform emerged from the helicopter.  After a few minutes, it took off again with eight soldiers in full battle gear and some provisions. The scene recreated for us the sorrows and pain of the Vietnam War almost half a century ago. But instead of Americans pursuing and hunting and killing little Oriental men with slit eyes, it is Filipinos stalking their own kind with the same relentlessness and barbarism of men of war. And the protagonists are young people, the other side pursuing an ideology they may not understand or comprehend. Thousands have died in the struggle that knows no end. Such war has stymied development in the countryside, especially. What a waste in resources and manpower, not to say time. Suddenly, as soon as the chopper disappeared in the sky, the heavens darkened and the rains came and fell in torrents. But it soon stopped. The downpour drenched the ground and filled the potholes in the clearing where the chopper had landed. In less than an hour, the chopper was back with its human cargo--the dead and the wounded of an 8-men patrol team that had been ambushed by the adversary in the far mountains to the north. The soldiers in full battle gear were left behind to track down the enemy.Soldiers and civilians alike milled around the big black chopper as the dead and wounded were unloaded in silence. The critically wounded were transferred to waiting funeral cars and whisked away to the local hospital. They would be flown the next day to a military hospital in Manila. The dead touched us as much as the survivors who would not know what await them when doctors try to remove the bullets imbedded in their bodies. For them who did not see the sun the following day, their problems had ended but for their respective families, their ordeal has just begun. The two fatalities were comparatively young. One was a new recruit. He had just completed his military training in Nueva Ecija and was deployed to the province a couple of days earlier when death came like a thief in the night. The other soldier, an Igorot, the lead scout of the ill-fated patrol group was equally young but probably a little bit older and more experienced in combat than his comrade. One of his eyes was covered with gauze and we learned later that the enemy had gouged it out. Life was still in him then but he had other wounds and the coup de grace could have been less painful. When he was carried away on a stretcher, we saw the watery blood on the buri mat on which his body has been wrapped. So this is the face of war: two young men sleeping peacefully forever, their bodies punctured by armalite bullets; two beautiful and robust specimens of manhood meeting their bloody end in a strange terrain far from their home. Their loved ones will shed tears when they receive the bad news and their agony shall be deep and terrible. War is not kind, Archibald MacLeish.