“Unsurrendered 100 Voices” is the title of the documentary made by Lucky Guillermo and Peter Parsons. The two and their outfit were the same group behind another documentary “Manila, 1945: The Forgotten Atrocities.” The two documentaries share one thing in common: the remembering of events that have been forgotten.
The “unsurrendered” refer to Philippine and American guerillas who fought during the Second World War and never surrendered even if the official stand of the American forces was to surrender. The release of the documentary is significant because former guerillas are once more coming out of retirement to claim what has always been due them. The US$9,000 for those living in the Philippines and the US$15,000 for those growing old in the U.S. of A. According to the regulations, only those living can claim the lump sum. Those who died because they have been waiting so long will never get anything, not even their heirs.
We do not remember these guerillas. We do not even remember the war that was fought by our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers. The history books do not carry them. Like any historical approach that underlines the lives of the prominent and the official, the feats of the ordinary people are never written, never talked about.
The two documentarians put the crisis in these words: “We are sorry that we have only a hundred voices to tell this story. But the ones we have are a wonderful sampling of the whole. Our apologies to the remainder who should also be included here.”
Our memory of them shall be our only apologies. But this memory should remain honest if only to honor those who fought for some principles that we may never understand now. As we can never understand the fact that our men and women fought side by side with the Americans in a war that was really the war of the Americans.
I told Parsons and Guillermo this that the value of their documentary is that it never glosses over the histories of the guerillas. My grandmother used to tell me that up in the hills of Ticao, where they evacuated, they were always scared of the guerillas. There were many factions of them. In the Ticao area, whenever one group passes by, the people in the farm had to make sure that they had chicken and rootcrops to share with them. They also have be careful to keep in storage a bulk of food or, at least, hide some chicken for the next batch of guerillas, especially if they belong to a different faction.
The account of Parsons and Guillermo validates one cruel truth about the war against the Japanese. It was also a war among Filipinos.
In the Mindanao region, for example, the guerillas were headed by Americans who were power unto themselves. But, if there was the underside to the guerillas, there was the grandly heroic in them. Young students, some in high school, did not need to be conscripted; they fought to be enlisted. Young men climbed mountains and started a fight that event the persistent Japanese forces could not terminate.
These young men are old now. The young women in the documentary who were kept by the Japanese forces as helpers and sexual slaves have told their stories. They tell stories without tears. They have become rocks and have grown old in order to escape the youth that was wasted by a vicious war.
In Naga, I see them sipping coffee. They keep the same company. Unless there is a young student out to make a paper about them, they do not talk anymore about the war. It is difficult to join them in their small group unless you can make your presence felt as a historian or an academic. They have seen something that we have never seen, and perhaps will never see.
These months, many of them will be seen in Manila. They will be claiming a fund that is bandied around as hitting almost half a million. The money is good for them. For their medicine, for their hospitalizations, for their food and the food of those who take care of them. Or those hover around them. But this so-called “lump sum” is really a paltry amount, a sentimos for the things they have given and those things they have lost many years ago.