Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This?

by P. J. O'Rourke

  I don't know why the ASPCA gets its boxer shorts in a wad every time our Hispanic cousins have a cockfight in the Bronx. This is a lot less violent than the Super Bowl and who wants an extra-crispy quarterback anyway? Each cock gets one razor-steel spur about half the length of a ball-point pen. This is tied on the back of his claw just below the drumstick. The fights are one or two sneezes long and, as a visual spectacle, resemble watching someone kick a down vest with a pointy-toed boot. Feathers fly, spectators holler and-voila-dead clucker. The fun parts are betting and screaming and, especially, arguing the merits of this or that combat fricassee. I was good at this. Nobody spoke English, but that isn't a handicap if you can do a pantomime of Big Bird.

  After the main event, one of the owners let me hold his champion-another source of amusement to all. Apparently there is a cool way and a nerd way of holding a fighting cock, and I was the worst chicken grasper anyone had ever seen.

  Franco was hungry again, though we'd eaten enough for six at his uncle's house. I wasn't hungry, but the girl running the roadside food stand was so pretty I was willing to stand there and eat things for days if that would keep the gleam in her enormous brown eyes.

  Franco bought a disgusting batok which is a fertilized duck egg in which the duckling has been allowed to grow until it's almost ready to hatch, then it's hard-boiled. The result looks like an antiabortion movie produced by the Duckburg branch of the Right-ToLife organization. You eat its little feathers, beak and bones and all. It's bar food in the Philippines. I had a bite and, believe me, batok is not going to replace buffalo wings as the USA's favorite happy-hour snack anytime soon.

  Then Franco began poking around in a big stew pot. He asked the girl something in Tagalog, and she said, "Aso."

  "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh, you should have some of this already," said Franco, jabbing me in the ribs and barely able to contain himself.

  However, aso happens to be one of the few words I understand in Tagalog. "You have some," I said.

  "Oh, no, no, no," said Franco, taking another bite of duck down. "I'm from Manila. I am a city man, you know. Ha, ha, ha. You have some."

  I gathered dog was a strictly rural delicacy. The pretty girl was looking expectant, however. And I'd already underwritten a political assassination that day, indulged in the vice of gambling and committed adultery in my heart.

  It's dark meat, in case you were wondering, and on the fatty side. Considering what a hot, wet dog smells like, dog stew has a surprisingly savory odor. To tell the truth, it tastes pretty good, like oxtail. To be perfectly honest, it's delicious. (Anything about this to my golden retriever, and I'll punch your lights out.)

  "It's supposed to be very warming," said Franco. "Good for love. Ha, ha, ha."

  Maybe. But I wasn't going to be allowed to gold-brick in Manila and find out. A whole pile of angry telexes from Rolling Stone were stuffed under my hotel-room door. It seemed I'd been in the Philippines for two weeks and hardly anybody was dead. There hadn't even been a coup attempt-practically the only two weeks in the Cory regime without one.

  Tina suggested I do a story about vigilantes. A lot of people with guns were running around unsupervised in the Philippines. And not all of them were opposed to the government. Armed anticommunist citizen posses were the latest fad. It seemed the NPA was not as welcome everywhere as it was in Marlita.

  The largest of these vigilante groups was called Alsa Masa, which translates as "Masses Arise" or "Giddyup Masses," depending on your translator's sense of humor. Alsa Masa was based in Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao. So I bestirred myself again and flew down there the next day with Kathleen Barnes, an ABC radio reporter.

  Mindanao is an historical skunk nest of Moslem, communist and other insurrections. The colonial Spaniards failed to subdue Mindanao, so did the Americans and ditto the Japanese and Ferdinand Marcos.

  Vast, impoverished Davao City was the NPA's first urban target. Until a few months ago they held the place hostage, the only Philippine city they'd ever penetrated in force. But, after the Cory election, the Davao slum-dwellers went fickle on the communists. Now there are about a thousand Alsa Masa gunmen running the city, all of them claiming to be former members in good standing of the NPA.

  Kathleen wanted to interview Colonel Calida, "The Cowboy Colonel," commanding officer of the Philippine Constabulary in Davao. The Philippine Constabulary is a national military police force with the same equipment and training, or lack thereof, as the regular armed forces. Colonel Calida, Kathleen said, had been acting as the ninog, or godfather, to the Alsa Masa vigilantes, letting them keep some of their NPA arms and giving them a semiofficial status patrolling the city's toughest districts.

  Camp Leonor, Calida's HQ, occupied about ten square blocks in downtown Davao. It was all peeling paint and sprung screen doors, like the YMCA camps I used to be shipped to in the Fifties. Security was everywhere, much of it asleep. Soldiers on duty wandered around in their undershirts, and groups of civilians loitered on the parade ground. A sign in the hall outside Calida's office read FIREARMS IS NOT THE ANSWER SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE IS.

  The colonel was powerful-looking in a short, compressed way, like an attack hamster. He told us that three thousand NPA members had surrendered to him personally, so far.

  Calida's office floor was littered with NPA weapons, the worstlooking arms cache I'd ever seen. There were battered Korean War-era Garand rifles, dozens of ancient gangster-style Thompson submachine guns, Philippine-built "short arms" with single-shot rifle barrels mounted on zip-gun-type pistol grips, a World War II paratrooper's grease gun, a British hand grenade, a USAF smoke bomb and a rust-crummied model 1894 Winchester lever action 30/30 left over from American occupation in President McKinley's time. It was death's flea market. Without a Cuba or any other Soviet butt boy to funnel in commie largess, the NPA are worse armed than an Oklahoma volunteer fire brigade.

  "Isn't Alsa Masa just going to oppress the masses even worse than the NPA did?" said Kathleen, who didn't hit it off with the colonel.

  "Neat guns," I said. The colonel and I got along fine.

  I asked him what had made Alsa Masa such a pop sensation, besides, that is, his small but august self. Calida told me the NPA had grown paranoid and had begun to purge its own ranks. It was "a tactical error," as the colonel put it. Comrades began turning uncommunist quick. The former guerrillas had led Calida to the bodies of seventeen purge victims. He hoped there might be one hundred.

  The colonel took us outside to see burlap bags full of dead people. An enlisted man dumped them on the parade ground. Dirty bones, with that particular smell of human morbidity, clunked dully on the ill-kempt lawn. A skull rolled across the grass and came to rest with its idiot eye holes pointed at the sky. "Later I will get coffins," said the colonel. "I will give them decent burial. This is propaganda."

  Kathleen said, "I have reports that the Alsa Masa has been extorting money to support itself, intimidating certain groups, especially Chinese businessmen."

  "No!" said the colonel. "That is black propaganda. We have intelligence officers, and we would know. But some Alsa Masa might ask some concerned groups to help. I do not call that extortion."

  "What concerned groups?" asked Kathleen.

  "Oh," said the colonel, "Chinese businessmen."

  Calida leaned over and spoke confidentially to me. "We will disarm the Alsa Masa. But I have not told them yet. The government will have to give them livelihoods."

  Which was, after all, what Commander Melody had said. The poor Cory government is going to have to get itself a tall stack of livelihoods from the World Bank or wherever they keep those things.

  I told Calida about my visit with the NPA, Kathleen gasping at my indiscretion. "A scruffy bunch," I said. "But they seemed like pretty good guys. I gave them money." Which didn't bother Colonel Calida. He nodded in agreement. That was the decent thing to do.

  "Three things that are their motives," he said. "First, the importance. Then the power of the
gun. And only a tiny bit of politics. Just the leaders have the politics." He told me how he had the NPA leaders radio frequencies. Sometimes he talks to them in the hills. "I told them, `Why don't you come down?"' Calida said. "`There are some beautiful girls in the city.' But it is against their principles."

  The colonel ordered a police officer to take me to see Alsa Masa at work. The cop, Nick, was the largest Filipino I'd ever seen-a sort of kitchenette-size Refrigerator Perry. He and I and a very fat driver got in a battered Japanese micro taxi and drove off, with chassis scraping the mud streets. Nick was thirty-four. He'd been a policeman since he was sixteen. In a year and a half he'd be eligible for his pension. His dream was to go to L.A. and be a security guard.

  All cities have slums but Davao is slums-filthy, jumbled hovels spread like an architectural carcinoma along the mud flats of the Davao River. The place grew up during Mindanao's ten-minute logging and copra boom. The poor were drawn from all the dinky, ungroceried hill towns. Then the jobs and money went away, but the poor remained.

  Nick took me to a squatter patch called Agdau. It used to be known as "Nicaragdau," partly because the NPA ran it and partly because Filipinos love any bad pun. Agdau was built right in the water with splintered packing-crate catwalks from one stilt shanty to the next. The Davao River-sewer, sink and the garbage collection service combined-flowed by underneath. On one bit of dry land was Agdau's only solid structure, a tin roof covering a basketball half court. I was promptly beaten in a game of H-O-R-S-E. The tall kids in these precincts of malnutrition are four feet eleven inches but do lay-ups like Air Jordan. If the NBA ever raises hoops to twenty feet, the Chicago Bulls are going to have to take up field hockey.

  Nick summoned Pepe, who had been a member of an NPA "Sparrow Squad" assassination team and was now an Alsa Masa leader. Pepe was twenty-three but looked sixteen. Two of his boys stood by with Thompsons. They looked twelve.

  Nick hovered over Pepe like a large, blowzy, slightly dim guardian angel. Pepe was smiling, cool and self-possessed. Nick told me Pepe had joined the NPA at seventeen and worked his way up from gofer to hatchet man to community organizer, the NPA equivalent of Eagle Scout.

  I asked Pepe why he'd turned against the NPA, and Nick translated a pat little rap about Cory, democracy, reconciliation and the rights of the people being violated.

  "Tell him to get real," I said to Nick. Nick gave Pepe a smirk and a nudge.

  "No drinking. No going to movies. No girlfriend," said Pepe. "No church," he added as an afterthought.

  "I've lived here. I was a target of the Sparrows," Nick proudly interjected. "I survived by being security conscious and not committing crimes' (a rare thing for a Filipino policeman).

  "Ask Pepe," I said, "if he ever tried to kill you when he was a Sparrow."

  Pepe and the guys with the guns laughed and began talking, all three at once. Nick, a little abashed, translated: "We didn't try to kill him. We liked him. When he had money, he would buy drinks."

  "Pepe," I said, "did the NPA really purge people, kill them because they thought they were spies?"

  "Yes. Six in the sitio. One woman, five men." (A sitio is about equivalent to a city block.)

  "Why?" I asked.

  "A little intrigue only."

  By now about fifty adults and every kid in running distance had gathered around us. I addressed the crowd, not hard to do since being a normal-sized American is like standing on a soapbox. "Alsa Masa okay?"

  "Yes! Yes!" Lots of enthusiastic nods.

  "The masses having fear of Alsa Masa?" I said in pidgin with charades.

  Much laughter. "No! No! No, no, no." The little kids pressed in to touch the submachine guns.

  I asked Pepe what the NPA leadership was like. He said, "Politics, lawyers, people who get orders from higher up." They seemed a vague bunch to him. Had he ever met any? "No." Was there ever any contact with NPA groups from other areas? "Only by higher up."

  "When Pepe was a Sparrow," bragged Nick, "he killed twenty, maybe more-eight military and twelve others, civilian robbers."

  "Jeeze," I said to Pepe. "Doesn't your conscience bother you?

  "The conscience bothered him before," said Nick, "but not since Alsa Masa."

  "Pepe," I said, "have you gone to church?" He nodded. "Have you gone to confession?" He nodded. "Well, what in the hell kind of penance do you get for killing twenty people?!"

  "The priest said I must be very sorry and say many Hail Marys."

  Back in the only hotel in Davao with running water, Kathleen was taping an interview with a homely, skinny left-wing nun. The nun posssessed that bottomless indignation endemic to ideologues and had worked herself into a real bother about Alsa Masa. "Small kids are given already Armalites, and the grenades are like apples." She was writing a letter to Cory that would expose these things. I decided to hit the bar. Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

  Holding forth in the hotel's dank but flashy cocktail lounge was Nonoy Garcia, once the top Marcos henchman in Davao and still the very picture of a corrupt pol. He was a barrel-chested, barrel-stomached guy with big gestures but the ability to order drinks all around with one tiny motion of a finger. "Come," said Nonoy, spotting me for some kind of journalist. "Sit down. Join us." He and his cronies were discussing bodyguards. In Davao it's fashionable to have former Sparrows for personal protection. These kids, none of them twenty-one, sat in the background, tiny and shy.

  "My boy's only nineteen, and he killed ten people," said one of the cronies.

  "Mine's eighteen," said another, "and killed a dozen." (That is, the man was saying, a dozen of his own friends and political allies.) The more people your Sparrow killed, the cooler it is.

  When I told Nonoy my father had been a CB, he insisted I have dinner with him. The CBs are revered in the Philippines. In more than four hundred years of foreign and domestic mismanagement, the CBs seem to have been the only people who ever made anything work. Nonoy took me to a surprisingly clean Japanese restaurant, a sort of miniature Benihana's, as out of place in Davao as a kosher deli in Aman. Four very beautiful young women were waiting for us at the table. We talked about Cory a bit. Nonoy wasn't bitter. But from his own professional point of view she wasn't much good as a dictator. He thought she should have started some big, symbolic public-works projects and made other grand flourishes to get things hopping. "She has lost the momentum," he said.

  Unfortunately, Nonoy probably had a point. What Cory had done so far in the Phillipines was magic, but a very mild kind of magic, like pulling a rabbit out of a rabbit hutch. However, a man must be made of sterner stuff than I am to meditate upon the fate of nations with so many pleasures of the flesh at hand. We ate about ten courses, drank enormously and went to Davao's only discotheque and danced with the young ladies until an hour that would make the IMF shudder about productivity in the Pacific Rim nations.

  I wanted to nurse a hangover, but Kathleen wanted to see the war in the countryside. We hired a jeepney, and set off for the hills. A military outpost had been overrun three days before in Mandug, about thirty kilometers northwest of Davao. The leftist nun had told Kathleen that a pregnant woman was shot in retaliation while innocently washing her clothes in a stream.

  Mandug was a pretty farm village with a range of hills behind it. We found the outpost on the first of the hills. It was a sloppy cluster of thatch huts and low stone walls with an open-air mess hall occupying the crest of the knoll. The whole affair looked to have been built by hippies or large ground-nesting birds. Government forces were back in control, the troops in usual Philippine battle dress-shower flip-flops, Michael Jackson T-shirts, brightly dyed bandanas around their heads and snips of red cloth tied to their rifles to protect them from bullets. And there was a spitshined full-bird colonel there ready with a colorful yarn about the battle.

  As befits a romantic nation, the Philippines are great romancers. Tales start out at Jack's bean-
stalk height and get taller with every telling. Giannini, the Black Star photographer, swears he once saw a Manila newspaper story that began, "Miss Carmelita Torres was struck by an automobile on Rizal Boulevard and three of her legs were broken."

  The NPA attackers, riding in a stolen jeepney and a commandeered truck and disguised as banana-plantation workers, came down the dirt road that runs beside the outpost.

  "How many were there?" I asked the colonel.

  "Oh, so many," he said, "a hundred."

  "A hundred? In one jeepney and one truck?"

  "Well, there were many more out there," said the colonel, waving his hand at the countryside.

  The NPA apparently tried to encircle the position by stopping their jeepney at the outpost and sending their truck down the steep road to the base of the hill. "But," said the colonel, "our unit on patrol in the village spotted this truck already and fired upon the driver of it causing him to-crash- dangerously into a house."

  The village was half a kilometer away, so this would have taken some good eyesight and better Armalite shooting. Moreover, the battle hadn't started, and there was no reason to shoot at a truck. However, a trail of mashed palm trees did lead straight off the road and intoa small house with a large hole in the middle.

  "Then what happened?" I said.

  "The defenders of our outpost were attacked by surprise from the jeepney and returned fire, surrounded by superior numbers as the NPA shouted, `You're looking for us? We are here already!' These NPA then, they were pinned down in the sleeping huts there for a fire fight of forty minutes after which our soldiers were forced to have decided, tactically, to retire with one killed and five wounded. But the NPA, they suffered, oh,-twenty- killed."

  I solemnly wrote this all in my notebook. "How many NPA bodies have you, um, actually found?"