MY uncle was a young ensign in the Philippine Marines and I was but a kid when the Kalayaan islands once became the topic of our elders’ discussion. What I could make out from the talks then was that my uncle’s unit had a tour of duty in those islands, which were largely uninhabited but were claimed not only by the Philippines but also by other countries, prominent of which was Vietnam.
It was only years later that I found out that Kalayaan was the name of the portion of the Spratlys in the West Philippine Sea that China now claims as its own. At that time, however, I imagined the place to be god-forsaken based on the story I heard from my uncle and from how he looked after his unit’s deployment there. My uncle was fair-skinned and went home months after tanned dark brown.
What stuck in my mind was a photo he showed to us of themselves on one of the islands they were guarding. There they were in their fatigues and their firearms in a place devoid of vegetation but whose grounds were filled with a thousand birds that looked like black and white grasses under the heat of the sun. Some of the men in his unit were sitting on big sea turtles.
Imagine being there at a time when the invention of cell hones and the Internet was still decades away. Days were so boring and the heat so punishing, my uncle said, that one or two of his men lost their minds. The desperation peaked when the arrival of the unit that would replace them got delayed. When a Vietnamese ship going to the islets they claimed passed by, he ordered his men to fire at it.
It was a ploy. The Vietnamese ship, he said, momentarily stopped. They then radioed headquarters that they were being attacked. The Vietnamese ship sailed on even as the reinforcements did arrive hours after. That was the time they were brought back to the mainland.
I recall this story every time I hear President Duterte and Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano act like wimps in the face of China’s territorial grab in the West Philippine Sea in the form of building islands where they have installed missiles and where their bombers are landing. Decades before these officials came to power, our soldiers had sacrificed even their sanity protecting that territory.
Amidst their inability to defend our territory are the insults they keep hurling at us ordinary Filipinos who are goading them to assert our sovereignty in the Spratlys. The president is even using the defense of our sovereignty as a joke, telling critics of his wimpish foreign policy to bring them to battle with China in the front lines where he would then supposedly leave them to their own designs.
We are no wimps. In fact, when the Spaniards colonized the archipelago, the first thing they did was to tame the warrior tendencies of the islanders. The Moro and the Lumads in Mindanao fiercely fought Spanish colonization and Europeans feared the Moro pirates that roamed the Sulu Sea and its environs. Finally, we revolted against Spain and fiercely fought the American colonizers and later the Japanese invaders.
We are not wimps. Never were and never will be.