September 26, 2005 – Love in the Time of Madness

September 26, 2005 – Love in the Time of Madness

When I visited my mom and dad at the end of April this year, I sat my dad down and asked if he would tell me how he met my mother. I had brought my tape recorder and we were sitting at the dinner table in the kitchen of my folks’ place in El Paso. We had just finished dinner and it was after 7:00 in the evening. I flipped the tape recorder to record and I started asking questions. I began by asking him how he got to the Philippines.

“I will never forget that day: the ninth day of January of 1945,” he began, “Looking out toward the ocean, all you could see was ships. I landed on White Beach, the first landing on Luzon. Leyte was the first island the Americans took and we went from there beginning the big push out of Leyte, then Mindanao, then Nigros, the last one was Luzon and my outfit went in on the tail end of the Luzon landing. They had it set up so that so many were going to each island. They knew who was going where. Luzon was the big island. We went to Luzon. Me and my motor sergeant, Hassel—we had one piece of equipment left—were the ones left behind until that last piece came off the ship.

“We landed at the break of dawn and the sun was setting when at last everything was finally taken off the ship. Once we landed, we couldn’t find our outfit and there was this one major there who said, ‘don’t worry about your outfit. Find you a place where you can dig in and secure yourself for the night and tomorrow morning we’ll get organized.’ So we dug in—he said ‘get away from that beach. The artillery will be coming down out of the mountains.

“We got set up. Hassel and I move inland a ways from the beach and dug ourselves an “L”-shaped foxhole and slept with our feet together. The Japanese like to fight at night. They had these big guns in the mountains overlooking White Beach. The night we landed, they brought those big guns out and threw all this stuff down on us and you heard the shells exploding everywhere. I was supposed to sleep for a while, wake up and relieve Hassel and let him sleep. In the days before I had been up for many nights on the ship. They would sound ‘general quarters!, general quarters!’ and we’d go up and nothing would happen and so I hadn’t had any sleep. When his time on watch came to an end, he started kicking me thinking I was dead—I was that tired.

“Next morning we started trying to find our unit. This guy with the signal corps come up to us and asks us what our shipping number was. I tell him 4916C. He says ‘jump in the jeep and I’ll take you to your unit.’ I left my truck and trailer with Ellis another guy in our outfit and I jumped into this guy’s jeep. We located our unit and they said ‘Where the hell you guys at?’ I told him and then went to get the truck and trailer and my guys.

“We set up a perimeter right on the edge of a rice paddy. I had to move my motor pool away from the company and I had to use my people to stand watch four hours apiece. I had all the gasoline and some ammunition. They didn’t want any of that where the troops were in case it blew up. Right beside my motor pool there was a little trail that had been used by everyone. Your mother got off the bus one day just after we arrive and she was thirsty and asked for a drink of water which I gave her from my canteen and we started a conversation,” he said. “That was the beginning of it—that drink of water. If she hadn’t stopped for that drink of water you would not have been here today.”

“What happened next?” I asked.

My mother jumped in. “The following day I had no money so I went to sell him my watch. I asked for a hundred pesos for the watch so we could have something to spend.”

“Your mother came back the next day after I had given her the hundred pesos,” my dad continued. “I was standing there talking to her. We had a Filipino doctor who saw us. When she left, he came over and told me ‘That’s a nice girl, why don’t you get her a hotel down in San Fabian?’ Your mother’s family was in a house across from the evacuation center. I got your mother a room in the hotel nearby and I took off to Manila. I was gone for about a week. The Japanese were in retreat and we encountered no resistance. We held up at a park outside Manila.

“While in the park, my ammunition officer—he was a demolition expert—approached me and said ‘Mac, get me about eight two-and-a-half ton trucks and a wrecker.’ We got the eight trucks and he sent us off to Bagio where the Japanese were hold up. We picked up sixteen 55-gallon drums of pure alcohol and sixteen drums of aviation gas along the way. Bagio was a city with only one way in and one way out. We got to a staging area and started charging these drums” mixing alcohol and aviation gas producing Napalm. We pulled into position above Bagio at about 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning. We got the drums unloaded and set up in different places at one end of the city. We ignited and rolled the first set of drums right down the main street of Baguio.

“As soon as these drums were detonated we set off drums rolling down two other paths on either side. With fires raging around them the Japanese occupying forces were forced out the only exit road into an ambush of 50 caliber machine guns. That was the end of the Japanese occupation of Baguio. When we got that taking care of around 10:00 AM the next day, we were sent back to our dug-in position at White beach. I got there at about 3:00 to 4:00 PM that afternoon. I got a bath and clean clothes, fatigues and I thought I went down and see your mother. I had my old boy Ellis drop me off in a jeep and come back in a couple of hours to pick me up. That was when your mother and I started our thing.”

My father’s repaired all the equipment destroyed during the fighting. “My job was direct support for the front line units,” he says proudly. “In other words you’d have a truck that got hit with a Japanese mortar and tore up the engine. And you had another that got hit in the rear end. We put the two of them together to get one good truck back in working order.” This was how he spent the remaining time in the Philippines before his unit was loaded on ships for the invasion of Japan. After returning from Bagio, his unit was moved to Damortis, the location of the army’s petroleum and gasoline dump, safely away from the remaining combat going on in and around Manila.

It was near Damortis that my father purchased a house for my mother. “I gave a guy 500 pesos for a house he owned,” my dad said. I was dumbfounded as to how he had come by all the money he was spending on my mother. “When I left New Guinea (where he was before the landing in the Philippines), I hadn’t been paid for six months or more,” he explained. “When we landed in the Philippines, we were told we were going to be exchanging our American money for Pesos. That’s how I got all that money.”

My mother and father moved into the house and lived there until near the end of summer when my father’s unit was shipped out to Japan for the occupation after the surrender. “I felt bad about leaving you and your mother alone back there,” he explains. “I gave your mother the papers for that place I had bought in Damortis, told her I would come back for the two of you. She sold the place and moved back to Manila. I knew she wasn’t going to hang around there. It was a shack but it was one of the most beautiful places. Rain wouldn’t come into it and there was a breeze that would come into the place that was out of this world. A shack down by the sea.”

My father did return, but that’s another story.