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by J.G.P. MacAdam
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“The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives.”
—————–— Mark Twain, “Comments on the Moro Massacre” 1906
The Spanish are defeated (and paid). The multiyear Filipino insurrection, collectively known as the Philippine-American War, is squelched. The leader of the insurrection, Emilio Aguinaldo, is captured and swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States. The terms water torture, concentration camp, gook and boondock, from the Tagalog bundok, enter the American lexicon. The northern Philippine Islands are firmly in the grip of US military authority and commercial interests. America’s turned a corner. Wars no longer occur in America, what with the ending of the frontier. No, wars are now something that happens over there. It’s 1902, but it feels a lot like Mission Accomplished in 2003. America notches another overseas victory, sure. But in reality, the war’s only just getting started.
Thousands of American combat troops, no longer needed in the northern Philippines, move south to a blip on the map known as Jolo Island. What the Yankees call Moroland. Their mission: pacify a tribal, predominately Muslim people. The Moros. Their name deriving from the Spanish for moor. The subsequent Moro Rebellion would last for over a decade.
The Moros fought against Spanish colonial rule for centuries. They fought against American regiments for years. They continue to fight today against the Philippine government though they are now split among various factions from the Moro National Liberation Front to Abu Sayyaf. However, this endless little war did finally end for the United States. With an American withdrawal in 1913. To some extent successfully replacing Kansas, Georgia, and California boys with American-equipped, predominately Catholic Filipino boys to carry on the fight. That is, until 2003, when a contingent of US Special Forces would arrive at Jolo’s main port. The War on Terror had begun, and American boots were back on the ground. Their mission this time: help the Filipino military to quell the Islamic insurgents still putting up a fight.
As American troopers stepped off the boat, a banner greeted them. “We Will Not Let History Repeat Itself! Yankee Back Off.”
***
“Here, try a strawberry.”
“No.”
“Just one bite.”
“No.”
I give up trying to feed my toddler and go back to googling the “Moro Crater Massacre.”
If I were, say, looking up massacres in Vietnam, my search results would be deluged with endless articles to read. Photographs to examine. Books to buy. Perhaps even an ad or two asking me to donate to a charity for Laotian and Vietnamese children still being maimed to this day by unexploded “bombies” dropped in their millions decades ago by American aircraft.
But I’m not.
I’m looking for the Moro Crater Massacre. Though information on the Moros—or on any of America’s campaigns in the Philippines—is scarce. It takes effort simply to find that information. And it’s not because it all happened over a century ago. Look at how much information overload there is about the U.S. Civil War! No, there’s something else afoot in this blank spot of our collective memory…
Why are some wars remembered so vividly and thoroughly and powerfully that you might say they’re over-remembered? And why are others, despite all good intentions, resigned to gather dust on esoteric bookshelves? Like a pebble dropped in a stream. You barely even register its splash, or any massacre, or war, or torture, as having occurred at all.
A half-eaten strawberry pelts me in the face.
“No. Throwing. Your food.”
An impish grin.
“Fine,” I say and put my phone away. “You win.”
This is what happens when you try to split your attention between a smartphone and a toddler. One or the other is bound to lose.
***
“Hey, who wants to see a dead body?”
Vole jumps to his feet. He’s never seen a dead body before. This being his first deployment.
“Where is it?” I ask.
“Over in one of the huts. SF shot him.”
We’re on one of these battlefield hand-off missions. Special Forces conduct a raid on some tiny out-the-way village somewhere (though still within my battalion’s area of operation in Wardak Province), they end up killing somebody, then we—10th Mountain—chopper in so they can “hand off” the battlefield back to us. One Green Beret puts the point of our missions pretty succinctly—“The hell’re you guys doing here?” He could’ve been asking that of practically any regular army unit deployed anywhere in the War on Terror.
“Can I go see it, sergeant?” Vole asks me.
“Sure,” I say, as I scooch my body-armored back a little closer to the rock wall behind me. Closing my eyes. Yawning. The morning sun on my face.
“You’re not going, sergeant?”
“Nah, you go ahead.” This is my second deployment. “I’ve already seen more than enough to last me.”
***
Debate rages in the halls of Congress. Yes, testifies William Howard Taft in 1901, governor of America’s latest territorial acquisition, cruelties have been inflicted… there have been in individual instances of water cure. “His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown,” states Lieutenant Grover Flint. Waterboarding leaves behind no bruises. In 1947, Ramon Navarro, a Filipino lawyer, describes what it was like being waterboarded by the Japanese: “[O]ne becomes unconscious—like drowning in the water.” The water cure becomes a popular torture technique under the Marcos regime in the Philippines until 1986. A blanket, a cloth, a board, a jug of water—these items, by themselves, don’t immediately make you think torture device. “The Enhanced Interrogation Program saved lives, prevented attacks, & produced intel that led to Osama bin Laden,” tweeted Liz Cheney in 2018.
***
One photograph keeps popping up in my search results. It’s one of the rare photographs documenting the civilian toll of America’s war in the Philippines. Taken at the end of the battle (or what the U.S. calls a battle), inside the crater of the extinct volcano Bud Dajo on Jolo Island. Taken in 1906. A trench winds through the center of the picture. A trench overflowing with the bodies of Moro men, women, even children. US soldiers and their Filipino counterparts stand atop the lip of the trench, looking on. Zoom in and you can make out their expressions. One Filipino kneels and stares intently down. An American with a gun cocked on his hip poses for the camera. A dead Moro woman. Head flung back. Something dark (blood?) smeared under her chin. She is the very heart of the picture. Where the viewer’s eye naturally comes to rest. She makes me ashamed. This photograph wasn’t taken for her to see; there is no seeing for her. Even photography, the noble pursuit of documenting atrocity, itself, can become a form of domination. Of theft. Of colonization of not only lands but bodies as well. Of bullets and ships and cameras proving their might over spears and huts and tribal superstitions.
***
Scrolling…
drone strikes against ISIS, forest fires, Syrian refugees—how many drowned? a mass shooting in a church in Charleston
is like a continuous swallowing,
cops kicking in people’s doors, ever bigger forest fires, another shooting in Las Vegas, wait—who’s President now?
like a relentless dripping in your face,
d’you see what Hurricane Maria did to Puerto Rico? four spec ops guys killed in Niger—we have troops in Nigeria? a Hellfire dissipates a banana farmer in Somalia
like a snake eating itself,
assassination-via-drone of an Iranian general, #ww3 trending, another shooting, mobile morgues—is the covid in our state yet? damn, look at those protests!
like a leaky faucet in the middle of the night, dripping,
Taliban revenge killings, thirteen fallen angels in the evacuation of Kabul, the pandemic over? Russia committing war crimes in Mariupol, #ww3 trending
dripping nonstop for so many years you can’t sleep a wink without hearing it anymore.
***
I’m rocking my kid to sleep, nodding off myself a little bit, what with having spent the last several hours inhaling every historical account, snapshot, and scholarly text I can tap my fingers across concerning the Moro Crater Massacre. It’s not much to go off of. Few, if any, eyewitness accounts survive. A sprinkling of returning soldiers’ nightmares and regrets. An American general’s justifications for the violence. Nothing from the Moro perspective. Silence. And that’s when I hear it. Out of my mind and into the semi-darkness of my child’s bedroom, piercing through the white noise, a voice—her voice.
***
Am I dead enough for you? I lay, here, under your knee and watch you pose for a man behind a box.
“Good one!” says the man, covering the black circle on the front of his box. “One more, gentlemen, if you please.” He flips the cover off.
My one eye sees you, cowboy. The sweat on your brow, a scruff of dirt across your cheeks. Quite a battle, wasn’t it? I want to spit in your infidel face. Though my mouth hangs open and I don’t think I could spit if I wanted to. I can’t move.
To you, cowboy, I have no name. None of us do. The only people who knew my name are lying in this ditch. Also shot through with shrapnel from your cannons on your big metal ships. You know my two children lie not far from me? My father? My cousins? We are all here. You make our names smoke.
I don’t think you see me, cowboy, but I see you. My one eye watches you, the other watches the inside of my skull and with that eye I see the lies washing around the inside of your head, your heart, your soul. You sit with us in our cottas and chew betel nut and listen to our datus talk about our problems like you care, so you can tell yourself you are being humane, that you are endeavoring in a great compassionate deed, spreading the gospel of freedom. Yet in the back of your mind, you’re sizing up our lands for coffee, rubber, coconut plantations. We will not be your slaves. We have our own. Your words are empty, but your guns are loaded. What is my kris to your gun, hm? Your general will lie and call what you’ve done here to me and my people a complete victory. He will say the women dressed like men and the children were used as shields. You make us outlaws in our own land. We came to Bud Dajo to escape paying the pittance taxes you say must be paid by us though you are the ones building the roads and waging the war. You cheated the Sultan, Jamalul Kiram II. You promised autonomy, but that was a lie, too.
Don’t wrinkle your nose at me. You’re the one put a hole through my belly. You don’t like the smell of my guts? Well, I don’t like it either.
You call us juremantados, like el Español before you. Battle-crazed berserkers. Needing shotguns and Colt .45’s to stop us. But this, too, is a lie. A lie to thicken your own myth. You told lies about your Indians, too, didn’t you, cowboy?
Why do you smile for the box?
Across the inside of my skull, I see the future. In another crater, in Bud Bagsak, seven years from now, I see Datu Amil fall with hundreds of other Moros, and I see Moro scouts aiding you in yet another lopsided victory. I see Filipino soldiers massing in ranks and columns, led by dozens of you, cowboys, calling yourselves 8th Cavalry, then.
But you are 4th Cavalry, now, yes? How does our Bud Dajo look on your unit insignia a hundred years from now? Impressive?
I see a whole base of Filipino soldiers, and only Filipino soldiers, down in Jolo City. Invaders—all of you. We will fight all of you! You, cowboy, and your people, fear an endless little war? A generational war? That is the only war we know.
A final ragged breath rattles up out of my throat. What little air remained within me.
You flinch and glare. Your cheeks go pale. Your knuckles whiten, gripping the stock of your rifle. Do I frighten you, cowboy? Look at me. Am I a dead berserk gook? A victim? A heart, a mind, to win? An apparition in your photograph? A voice in your dreams?
I don’t think you see me, cowboy. No, not at all.
***
The baby’s finally asleep. I settle him in his crib and tiptoe out the door, careful to click the knob shut behind me.
Her voice still echoing in my mind.
Though the voice I hear is not her voice. It is my own. A disgorgement of my imagination. A pantomiming of a corpse. Her true voice is lost, missing, absent from the historical record, drowned in the waters of time. In all likelihood never to be recovered because no one bothered to record it, as far as I can tell. Even by the time the photograph was published in 1907, for an American audience to behold, it was already too late. So, why persist in the fiction? Why attempt to empathize with an “enemy” of the United States? Why rip their remains out of the ground only to badger them (ourselves?) with questions—Tell me, please, who were you? And because I went to war against you, who does that make me?
***
Back east, Civil War reenactments are practically a religion. People dress up and live in tents for weeks on end. Obsessed with the tiniest details of what soldiers ate for their last meals or the time it took to reload. Spectators line up to watch the mock battles. Formations marching on one another. Volleys of fire. Puffs of smoke. Cannon blasts. Folks in uniform spasm and fall to the ground, one here, one there. Hit. They lie there, in the tall grass and weeds, sometimes hours, motionless. Sun bearing down. Bumblebees buzzing past. I remember leaning up against a splintery fence and watching them. I was very young. I remember wondering when they were going to move. But they never did, or at least I don’t remember when they did. Now when I think of them, I shake my head. What’s more absurd than lying for hours in the middle of a field pretending to be dead?
***
One of the more absurd things I’ve ever done while in the US Army was pretend to be Iraqi police. In Fort Polk, Louisiana, they’ve got a training center fitted out with mock villagers, actors roleplaying Iraqis, a whole brigade dedicated to OPFOR (opposing force). For weeks sweating in our tan costumes, months after our own deployment to Afghanistan, my buddies and I jibber-jabber nonsense to the soldiers trying their best to train. “No English! No English!” We holler like banshees from rooftops. We have mass casualty incidents. Green-on-blue attacks. Go “out on patrol” with our American counterparts then willy-nilly start walking the other way. Range cadre come along and give us a card. “You’re dead,” they say. The training soldiers grumble when they’re forced to come clean up our corpses.
***
I’m kneeling next to my Mom-mom and my Uncle Don. We’re in the back row of the Presbyterian Church on Salt Road just outside Enola, Pennsylvania. I go with them to church sometimes. While growing up. Sing hymns. Sit in the salmon pink pews. My Mom-mom gives me a dollar to drop in the collection plate. Christ, bleeding, dangles by spikes through his hands and feet behind the pulpit. If I were in, say, a Catholic cathedral, with anyone on my father’s side of the family, I’d see the same thing. The Son of God suffering for our sins. Up front and center. Where your eye naturally comes to rest. When the person behind the pulpit speaks, they often tell a story. Like the body houses the soul so a story can house a convenient meaning, a message, a lesson. Reenactors drag wooden crosses down their respective Main Streets for the same purpose. To carry on that story of redemption, of suffering overcome, of forgiveness even for those who inflict suffering upon us. And when you bear witness unto those who have had violence done unto them, whether in effigy, or in a movie, or merely in a photograph, grainy as it may be, are they not in a way resurrected? And are we, bearers, not forgiven?
***
Outside the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., protesters reenact the procedure for waterboarding. One volunteer lies on his back, he’s tied down, a cloth draped over his face, the board is tilted, then the water is poured. He gags. Empties his stomach onto the sidewalk. Pictures are taken. Video. The protesters want everyone to see exactly what it’s like.
***
Our toddler likes taking a bath. Bubbles. Letters that stick to the wall. He likes it when I pour water from a cup, and he can feel it run through his fingers. His giggles are all that is right with the world. But he does not like it when I pour water on his head to rinse the baby shampoo out of his hair.
“C’mon, look up.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
I pour the water. It runs over his face. He sputters and gasps. He does not like it one bit. “Sorry, little dude. But we gotta get the bubbles out of your hair.” I pour again. He cries, though I’m pretty sure in years to come he’ll forgive me. If he even remembers at all.
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J.G.P. MacAdam is a disabled combat vet and the first in his family to earn a college degree. His work can be found in The Point Magazine, Passengers Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. You can find him hunting for wildflowers with his wife and son, or otherwise at jgpmacadam.com
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