MacArthur's Ghost Read online

  “Now one of the dirty little secrets of those years is that, though they fought when they had to, a lot of the guerrilla outfits, especially the USAFFE units, often weren’t up to much. That was the “lie-low policy” that came up from MacArthur. It meant surviving, recruiting, building up a network, doing intelligence work. But it was a policy that avoided confrontation. Maybe that’s why I kept going back to Mount Arayat. I felt like I was proving something. That I kept my promises. That I came to fight.

  “If I traveled with anyone during those years, it was usually with Connie, the young Filipino who’d hooked up with us on Bataan. He knew the languages I didn’t know. He handled the rice lands, the provincial capitals, the barrios, the way I managed the mountains. I was the one who foraged roots and fruits and wild things; he could promote a hot meal and a change of clothing, a warm and often not-so-lonely bed. We were a pair. Together, there was no place we couldn’t go.

  “Connie was a school principal’s son, from the town of Tarlac in the province of the same name. He had the good looks and charm, the romantic streak and the life-long boyishness that lots of Filipinos have, but there was something else too: the sort of hustle you notice, or used to notice, in immigrants to the United States. Maybe he thought that’s what he was, an American in the making. Once, near Malolos, we practically walked into a Japanese patrol. We never had a closer call, we were two men hiding behind a bush that couldn’t have concealed a cat, and our lives depended on the fact that of three Japanese, not one looked left instead of right. After it was over, and the Japanese were dead, I asked him what on earth he was doing walking around with me and he answered, straight-faced, ‘Improving my English.’ He meant it. And what a flypaper mind he had! Once Camper and I were talking about autumn in America and Camper mentioned that the foliage season moves south at twenty miles a day. No reason for Connie to care about elms and maples, but he never forgot that. Twenty miles became a figure of speech, a unit of measure, ‘moving with the leaves.’

  “Olmos and the Huks made him nervous, though. Connie’s ambitions were conventional, but here was an army of peasants, dirt poor, aiming to turn the world upside down. He admired them and he worried about them, worried about the guns, the lectures, the drills, the theories, and most of all, he worried about the anger he saw in Olmos’s eyes. One other thing. Though there were women among the Huks, Mount Arayat was about the only place in the Philippines where he couldn’t get laid.

  “The first time we came back, we walked into a celebration. The Huks, who were always busy, had just finished a three-day scrap. The Japanese and the Filipino cops—the “puppet constabulary,” they were called—had gone into the rice lands at harvest time, down around a place called San Leandro. They wanted the crops and they even brought some landlords out from Manila to enforce their claims, so what followed wasn’t just about Japan; it was about landlords, cops, and crops. It was Juan Olmos’s kind of fight, a nasty, running battle, burning fields, blocking roads, ambushing trucks, and when the Huks were done, there was roast pig on the mountain.

  “ ‘You came back,’ Juan Olmos said to me matter-of-factly. But that one sentence was worth the trip, to me.

  “ ‘I promised I’d be back,’ I said.

  “ ‘MacArthur’s Ghost. You said that someday we would all fight together, Americans and Filipinos.’ Then Juan Olmos said something else, said it while he was chewing on a rib, finishing the sentence and his bone at the same time, wiping the grease off his face with his sleeve, walking away laughing.

  “ ‘We can’t wait that long.’

  “After that, Felipe Olmos sat with us a while. It can be as disconcerting as it is flattering, when someone just sees you and decides that you’re going to be friends. But that’s what he’d decided.

  “So we were sitting chatting, when there was a commotion on the edge of the camp. Juan Olmos and some of the others came out of the woods leading a prisoner, but the prisoner was one of their own men. I remembered him from my first visit, a teenager whom Felipe called ‘El Bandito de Para de Nirio,’ the baby-faced bandit. He was one of the friendly ones, a mimic and a clown. He was proud of the fact he could recite the names of all the U.S. presidents. It was something he must have learned in school or around a civil servant’s household, something he did for tips and favors from his . . . I was going to say masters. It was a song-and-dance bit: Washing-tone, Adam, Jeffer-sone, Madisone, Mon-row, Adam. The second Adam made him stop, as if he’d lost his way, and then he picked up with Jackson, repeated the same hesitation with Grover Cleveland and the Roosevelts. Tonight he was in real trouble, though. They’d gone out and caught him sleeping on his watch. It wasn’t the first time, I gathered, and Felipe Olmos looked worried. They took him inside the meeting room, and everyone filed inside. It looked grim. But not as grim as it got. They heard him out: another exercise in self-criticism. His last. They marched him outside, into the woods. As he passed by, the baby-faced bandit was walking briskly, as if this whole execution thing was his idea, and as he passed, he looked back and waved, waved to me, and then I heard him reciting the names of the presidents, like a rosary, and the farther away he marched, the louder he got, and faster, so fast that names started overlapping: Buchan-Lincoln-John-Grant. They killed him at McKinley. McKinley was the president who sent U.S. troops to the Philippines at the time of the Spanish-American War, and I wondered if that wasn’t Juan Olmos’s idea, ending his life right then. I also wondered if Juan Olmos hadn’t stalked that kid the way he went after Japs, and whether the whole thing would have happened if I hadn’t been there. Some of the execution detail came back crying. Not Juan Olmos. His mind was where it always was: on the next thing.

  “ ‘I liked him,’ I said, supposedly to Connie, but loud enough for everyone in the firing squad to hear. ‘I liked that boy. I’m sorry he’s dead. And I’ll remember him.’

  “Juan Olmos turned around as though I’d shouted ‘about face’ and marched right for me. That was when I discovered his English was as good as he wanted it to be.

  “ ‘And I liked him, too,’ he said. ‘And I am sorry he is dead. And I will remember him.’

  “He said it loud, like an announcement for the whole camp to hear.

  “ ‘You come here to make friends,’ he said. ‘I come here to make army. Two hundred revolts in Philippine history so far. Two hundred! And not one winner. We fall. We fail. We divide. We sleep. Not this time. You remember my word, MacArthur Ghost. Not this time.’

  “Then he was gone and the camp fell silent and all I could hear was Connie whispering. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘These people scare me.’

  “In May 1943, during the rainy season, a submarine landed some weapons on the Lingayen coast. Pretty much on my own, I decided that a few of those M-1’s should go to the Huks. They were sure to use them. After the war, the Huks claimed to have killed twenty thousand Japanese soldiers, puppet cops, collaborationists. (They didn’t separate the three categories, you notice. Juan Olmos knew his enemies when he saw them and that was that.)

  “Divert. I by God diverted two dozen M-1’s into a farmhouse just off the coast and sent word to Olmos that he could come and get them. He sent some men whom I accompanied back to Mount Arayat, mainly to see whether I could get Juan Olmos to say thank you. He left that for the others. A lot of the men had gotten used to me and that M-1 delivery really raised my stock. That night, Felipe Olmos made a speech in my honor. We were sitting in darkness because there were Japanese in the area, and a fire might betray us.

  “He spoke, stopping to translate his own words, which were about friendship, democracy, cooperation. Then he called on me to speak. I forget the exact words. But I’ll never forget the scene: me standing in the middle of that clearing and, around me on the ground, more than a hundred Huk guerrillas, squatting in moonlight, listening, hardly moving. They were like a herd in the field at night, a cough here, the flare of a match there. For a moment, I choked up. What was I doing here? What was I promising? Who did I think I was? Wel
l, they answered for me when I was done: ‘MacArthur’s Ghost. MacArthur’s Ghost!’ And there was Juan Olmos, raising the rifle I’d stolen for him, shouting, ‘MacArthur’s Ghost! MacArthur’s Ghost.’“

  “Griffin, I’m sorry. It’s way late and I have to stop soon. I want to be out of here by first light. You know how I feel about the morning. Already I’ve covered a lot of ground. The ending comes closer all the time. I know the ending and you don’t and I wonder which of us to envy.

  “October 1944. We had picked up the survivors of a U.S. plane that got downed in Bulacan, a pilot named Barber, badly wounded, and a wisecracking photo-reconnaissance cameraman named Eddie Richter, Jr. Richter said that the Americans were coming back, though they were hitting Leyte before Luzon. The end was coming and I wanted to share it with Juan Olmos. Connie and I arrived to find there was a meeting on Mount Arayat, leaders of dozens of Huk squadrons meeting all night to decide what next, now that the Americans were coming back.

  “Years later, people asked me, what did I know about the politics of the group? They asked, the same way they ask, didn’t you know he drinks? Couldn’t you see they were sleeping together? Didn’t you know they were Reds? As if they’d been there all along and known better than me since the beginning: `Well, of course they’re Communists.’ And they would leave me feeling—well, never mind how they left me feeling. They saw what they wanted to see. I saw what I saw. I saw Felipe Olmos. You could call him a socialist, a populist, a Communist, a labor leader, an agrarian reformer, depending on the time of day. He was political, but he was also beyond politics. So was Juan Olmos, but in a different way. What he was about was anger. Anger was his fuel, his fire, his guiding light. Other than these two, I saw dozens of peasants who wanted lower interest on loans, and a larger share of the harvest, and a little more of the land, plus maybe a fair count on election day. They were the ones who did the killing and the dying, who cheered MacArthur’s Ghost.

  “Juan Olmos was the first out of the meeting hall, like a pent-up kid bursting into a schoolyard at recess. He stretched, stamped his feet, saw me, and walked right over.

  “ ‘You want to fight?’ he asked.

  “ ‘Fight?’ I couldn’t tell whether it was an offer or a challenge.

  “ ‘You say, someday maybe we fight together.’

  “ ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘Today. You come . . .’

  “That was how I got to San Leandro the first time. Juan Olmos had a score to settle there, lots of scores, and time running out to settle them. The first thing I learned was that the Japanese had concentrated there and were stockpiling everything they could lay their hands on. But there was more. Some time before, a Huk messenger had been caught there—betrayed probably. The local police chief, a man named Sylvester Olivares, had turned the man over to the Japanese, who beheaded him. There was still more. In and out of uniform, on and off duty, this same Olivares had served for years as the local landlords’ enforcer. More than one labor organizer had disappeared while in Olivares’s custody. That was what they told me as we headed down the mountain. I’m sure there was more. There always is.

  “We came in from the west at dusk, moving out of the rice fields and onto the banks of a river, which, if we followed it, would lead us straight into San Leandro. We could see the town ahead of us, at just that time of day when the last sunlight came in from the west, so rich and golden it makes the poorest village on earth look like El Dorado. We sat on the riverbank and rested. I remember how we looked, that time, how that sun made us golden. The farmers at the water’s edge, washing up. Felipe Olmos sitting alone on a field of grass. His brother pointing this way and that, dividing us into groups. Eddie Richter, who ‘wouldn’t miss this for the world,’ loading his camera, and Connie, improving his English on a Huk woman who looked like she was saving her last bullet for him. And we were golden. All of us. And a golden city across the fields, birds flying around the church tower. And a golden army in the fields. Then the sun was gone, darkness came on, and we went in.

  “I wonder, how did the Japanese feel when the phones went out? When the lights all died? When the bell started ringing in the cathedral? When the Chinese merchant slammed down the shutters of his little dry goods store? Or when they saw men with guns and bolos on the outskirts of town? Did they know they were dead? I think they did, the way they rushed out of their barracks and were shot. The ones who didn’t die in the town square died on the bridge leading out of town. Others hopped into a jeep and raced south, Manila-bound, right into a firing squad that was waiting for them; they died in a ditch. A handful got out into the fields and were hunted down like rabbits, and they squealed like rabbits when they died. But the puppet constabulary who holed up in the municipal building were another matter. They wanted to live. They returned our fire, shot for shot. We lost men and all they lost was windows and plaster. It looked like a standoff to me. Juan Olmos didn’t have the artillery to reduce the building and he didn’t have the time for a siege: the next Japanese convoy to come up the road would put an end to that. The night drew on and nothing changed. Sometimes there’d be half an hour of silence. Then one side or the other would start in and it would build up to a racket, then subside, with nothing changed.

  “I could see Olmos was boiling. And I could see why. The lights had come back on—on his orders, I suppose—and the whole population stood behind us in the streets that led off the square. They’d already done well, these people, rice and cooking oil and seed and canned goods distributed among them, and they had the Huks to thank for that. But this was about more than rice. It was about whether Juan Olmos could finish off one crappy, unimportant, three-story municipal building in a medium-to-small provincial town called San Leandro. One ugly building decked out with banners and slogans I couldn’t make out and with a ring of what looked like Christmas lights running around the top, don’t ask me why, and a gun or two in every window.

  “ ‘What now?’ Eddie Richter, Jr., asked me. ‘What gives?’

  “Eddie was like a race-track character hanging around stables, pumping jockeys and trainers for some inside information. He had a camera out of his shot-down plane; now, he said, he was aiming for Life.

  “ ‘I think we ought to leave,’ I said.

  “ ‘Sure,’ Eddie said. ‘But I don’t think we’re leaving.’

  “He eyed the lit-up square, open and empty, like an arena ready for action, killing, fucking, any kind of a show. Then he gestured toward the guerrillas forming up for attack.

  “ ‘I think some people are going to die,’ he said. ‘Lots of people.’

  “ ‘That’s stupid,’ I said.

  “I walked over to where Juan Olmos was huddling with his lieutenants. One man I called the Birdwatcher, because he wore taped-together glasses with lenses thick as beer bottles. Another, always in black, was the Hangman. And, Birdwatcher, Pirate, Hangman, I could see they were uncomfortable with what was coming: it wasn’t their kind of fight.

  “ ‘This is stupid,’ I said. It was the wrong thing to say, of course, and the wrong time to say it. Juan Olmos spun around and glared. Felipe put an arm on my shoulder, as if to lead me away.

  “ ‘I said it was stupid,’ I repeated. ‘You got the Japanese . . .’

  “ ‘This isn’t about the Japanese,’ Felipe said.

  “ ‘It’s about suicide,’ I shouted. ‘You go against that building, you’ll lose half your men. What is it? Do you believe in heaven? Are you counting on a place in the history books? A statue in the square here? A shrine? Do you believe in that?’

  “ ‘Mr. Harding, you don’t understand,’ Felipe said.

  “ ‘All right! You want the building?’ I brushed Felipe off and kneeled down right in front of Juan. ‘Is that what matters? Do you want the building? Yes or no?’

  “I snapped at him. I was talking the way you talked to a servant. We both knew it.

  “ ‘Yes,’ he answered.

  “ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Come with me.’

 
“The bell tower smelled of bird shit and from it Juan Olmos and I and another man—the Pirate—could see all of San Leandro. On the north was the river and the bridge across it, and the road toward the mountains. To the south, the same road, straight as an arrow, toward Manila. Down below was the square, part cobblestone, part tar, part dirt. It wasn’t much of a town.

  “The Pirate stayed in the bell tower while Juan and I climbed out, slid over the tiled roof, down to the eaves. From there it was a five-foot jump and a dozen-foot drop to the roof of the municipal building. As soon as we were ready to jump, the Pirate started ringing the bells and that told the men below to open fire on the building. We jumped onto the roof and scrambled to the back of the building, away from the square. Then came the moment I dreaded, when I lowered myself over the edge, down toward a third-floor window. This was the moment I couldn’t control. Either there was someone at the window or there wasn’t. If there was, the only question was whether he’d shoot me when he saw my legs, my stomach, chest, or face: Washington, Lincoln, or McKinley.

  But there was no one in the window; they’d all gone to the front, facing the square. In a minute we were inside, working our way from floor to floor, room to room, sneaking down hallways, slipping into rooms where one or two men were at the windows. They never saw us coming, never knew what hit them. Not until the first floor. Maybe they heard us upstairs. Or maybe it was the silence that told them the building had gone dead above their heads. They were ready: but not ready enough. They died turning to face us, raising rifles toward us, or raising hands to surrender, it didn’t matter. A last few defenders ran out of the building, out into the square and the poor bastards mistook the cheer that went up at their appearance as a welcome. I can see them looking at each other, kind of puzzled, until they realized that the people rushing toward them were going to kill them and then they folded down onto their knees and died.