About that time I wandered into a riot and a revolution

Covering the Philippine People Power revolution and aftermath

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 14

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out
Don't you know it's gonna be all right?

The Sunday Reader, July 28, 2024

We were sitting talked out on the hood of a Philippine Army Jeep in the soft predawn dark smoking cigarettes. Or the colonel was smoking a cigarette and I was pretending, smoking the cigarette like a cigar, pulling the smoke into my mouth and puffing it out without ever ever inhaling. I’d learned early on that inhaling anything swiftly ended badly for me, and so the smoking flirtation every teenager went through in those days for me lasted less than one cigarette.

Cigarette, joint, hand-roll – they all followed the same sorry path: 1-inhale; 2-cough up a lung; 3-hyperventilate.

But the colonel had offered one of his own cigarettes from a case, and it seemed churlish to refuse, and also I wanted to sit and chat and understand exactly what was going on that night. We were parked in front of Olongapo City Hall, where the mayor’s mother and sisters had barricaded themselves so no one could loot his office.

The People Power revolution had just toppled Ferdinand Marcos. The dictatorship that had arbitrarily and capriciously ruled for decades was no more.

Yay!

Now what?

Marcos had run roughshod over the old laws and constitution, “nationalized” companies and then appointed cronies to run everything. So when the helicopters carried Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their family left the Philippines, no one was quite sure how to unravel the mess that was left behind.

The new president, Corazon Aquino, said everything was on hold while they figured things out, including positions elected under Marcos. The Mayor of Olongapo – the city that bordered the giant US Navel Base at Subic Bay – announced he was headed 90 minutes up the highway to Manila and Malacañang Presidential Palace for “consultations.”

Two weeks later he still hadn’t arrived, and his mother and sisters were still barricaded in his office.

So, I said casually, carefully not inhaling my cigarette, what’s the plan?

The colonel shrugged and lit a new cigarette off the dying butt of the old one, which he then flicked into the street. Nothing. They’ll get hungry or tired or bored and come out eventually. We’re not attacking anybody’s mother and sisters.

This remarkably civilized attitude marked the entire People Power revolution. The Marcos government had tanks and helicopters and fighter planes and armored personnel carriers.

Corazon Aquino had…well, the people. After a disputed presidential election Marcos had declared himself the winner, but key supporters defected, charging massive fraud, and joined Aquino. The rebels were being surrounded by the Philippine military when people began assembling a human wall of protection. It felt like the onset of a massacre – human walls are not much of an obstacle to tanks.

Then the nuns came, knelt in the streets in front of the tanks, and began praying. Commanders tried to order their units forward; Philippine soldiers from all over the archipelago imagined themselves explaining to their mothers that they’d run over nuns and…they left and went home.

And just like that the Marcos government fell.

So its no surprise that the colonel and his soldiers were utterly uninterested in doing anything beyond keeping the peace.

I was good with that. I’d had all fighting I could stomach by then.

I was working out of the Pacific Stars & Stripes Subic Bay Bureau that spring, down from Tokyo filling in for a few months for a Navy photojournalist who had gone on leave Stateside. Settling into a new beat is always equal parts exciting and unsettling. Exciting because it’s all new and interesting. Unsettling because you don’t know the players or the game and it’s all too easy to get taken in and make mistakes. So when I saw a bulletin board flyer promoting a rally for the union representing the Filipino workers on Subic Bay Navel Base, I thought it was a great opportunity to meet movers and shakers and learn more about the issues.

That first rally turned into a series of stories as everyone struggled to untangle the mess left by the fall of the Marcos government. The union said they were working under a contract negotiated by Marcos cronies. Which was true. The US bases – the Subic Bay Navel Base, and the Air Force’s Clark Air Base – said they had valid contracts in place with the unions. Also true.

The base officials stood firm. The unions said they would strike, and when the base officials ignored them, went on strike. The picket lines not only went up they blockaded all the entrances to the US bases. No Americans were allowed in or out.

Except one. Me.

When the picket lines went up I went to interview the strike leaders, who turned out to be the same union leaders I’d been covering for weeks. They said I had treated them fairly, and taken them seriously when no one else would, and so they passed me in and out of the picket lines so I could cover all aspects of what had turned into an international story.  Indeed, they were quite put out with the Associated Press, UPI, the New York Times and the rest of the international press in Manila who had ignored their repeated entreaties for coverage. Now those same reporters were clamoring for interviews, but the union leaders had lost interest.

This lead to a rather ridiculous situation. In those wire service days beats were measured in hours, or even minutes. My stories were beating the wires by days. I wish I could claim it was some cunning plan, but it mostly boiled down to the wire reporters were in Manila, and I was the only one in Subic. Because the Army had sent orders with “SUBIC” stamped on them. When the Army says go, you go. It’s not a discussion.

So the union leaders gave me interviews, and passed me in and out of the picket lines whenever they thought there was an interesting story. That’s how I ended up on the hood of the Jeep that night in front of Olongapo City Hall fake-smoking with the kind colonel.

That’s also how I ended up in the riot.

Phones were hard to come by in the Philippines in those days, and missing a call meant missing a story. So I slept under my desk next to the bureau phone, and lived on pickles and crackers and ramen noodles from the convenience store next door.

The phone woke me one morning; when I answered there was nothing but howling. That wasn’t completely unexpected; the ancient copper infrastructure often seemed haunted.

But gradually the howling resolved into the voice of my editor, Dewey Brackett, who was spewing expletives at me in three languages. I kept saying the same thing, over and over: Dewey-it cannot be that bad.

He finally exhausted himself. Do you have today’s Stripes?

I did.

Are you looking at the front page?

I am. It’s my picture. What’s wrong? Did I misspell someone’s name?

What’s wrong? WHAT’S WRONG? !@@#@!!! YOU DON’T INTERVIEW PEOPLE IN A RIOT! YOU’RE GOING TO GET KILLED!!

After he hung up the phone I shook for an hour. It had never occurred to me. I shot my photos and asked my questions and took my notes and it never occurred to me that the knives and clubs that left 17 hospitalized  neither knew nor cared that I was a journalist. A truckload of Marines had been out in Olongapo on leave when the picket lines went up. When they returned the strikers refused entry.

Now you can tell a Marine what to do if you are a gunnery sergeant. If you aren’t…well, there’s going to be trouble. And trouble there was; the fighting started with fists and then escalated to picket signs, knives…it wasn’t good.

So by the time I was fake smoking with the colonel I was a few days older and a little bit wiser and a heck of a lot more cautious. The strike came to a negotiated settlement not long after that, Richard Gordan ended up being reinstated as mayor. I slept for three days in an actual bed and ate human food; my editors were so pleased with my coverage that they gave me a week to relax and write a feature story.

I was worried all through the strike that writing about an international entanglement would end up with me in trouble, but everyone was happy. Then I wrote the feature story and got banned from the Pacific Rim. But that’s another story.

But all’s well that ends well, no? After all the strife and conflict the Philippines today is a democracy far removed from the Marcos dictatorship now run by…checks the interwebs…President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr., son of Ferdinand and Imelda.

There really is no point in writing fiction, is there?