TWELVE years ago, a policeman was killed in an ambush in my hometown in Masbate. He was on his way home after driving his wife Inday, a public school teacher, to school when he was waylaid by six men. His killers were believed to be New People’s Army members. At that time, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had declared an all-out war against communist insurgents.
Fred Nallos had a son who was staying with us. He was 16 years old and a medical technology freshman at the Velez College. I was asked by his mother to break the news of his father’s death to him.
I wrote about my experience in my column. “It is not easy being the bearer of bad news,” the column’s first paragraph read. “I thought of ways to gently break the sad news to Niño but when I saw the innocent face as he strode into the living room when he arrived from school, the lines that I thought I had memorized, vanished. I groped for words.”
In the end, I decided to deliver it straight. Your father is dead, I told him. He was on his motorcycle when he was attacked. He never made it to the hospital.
“He was shocked. My heart sank as I watched the boy’s face turn pale, and biting his lips as he gamely tried to fight back tears. Then the dam burst and he wept inconsolably.
“What can you tell someone who is at the threshold of deepest grief? What can you do to assuage his pain? I wanted to tell him that it was part of God’s plan but what if he asked why God should plan for his father to die that way and so soon?”
I remembered Niño and the deep unmistakable pain written on his face that afternoon that I talked to him after I read about the killing of Senior Insp. Porferio Gabuya Jr. in Guihulngan, Negros Oriental the other day. Did he leave any children? Are they as young as Niño was a dozen years ago?
As in the case of Nallos, Gabuya never stood a chance against his attackers, who pumped bullets unto his body until they were certain that he would not survive. “Napurohan gyud, Noy,” Nallos’ wife told me over the phone then.
“It is easy and tempting to condemn the NPA for turning orphans of Niño and his 14-year-old sister especially since they did not give Nallos a chance to defend himself.
“But Fred was a policeman and, as his widow noted, the government had just declared an all-out war against communist rebels. Policemen and soldiers had their marching orders from President Arroyo; the NPA had theirs from the communist hierarchy.
“Even as I grieve for Niño, I grieve and fear for my town. How sad that the grounds where we romped during our youth should now be stripped of innocence.”
How many sons will have to be consoled, how many more people will have to lose their loved ones before we can see the end to this tragic episode in our national life?