by Tom Anthony
For the rest of the day and into the night the Abu Sayaf slowly but steadily continued their way due north between the Banga and the Alah Rivers, toward the prearranged meeting point with Kumander Ali. The Alah drains Lake Sebu in South Cotobato province and flows through a broad plain parallel with its brother river, the Banga. Parallel mountain ranges channel the two sibling rivers north until they join to become the Mindanao River, which continues to the seaport of Cotobato City. When he reached the river junction near the border of the province of Sultan Kudarat, Lateef ordered his men to take up defensive positions within the triangle formed by the rivers, leaving only their southern flank exposed to pursuers. Mahir and one cargo boy were well guarded in the center of the new camp, holding the vital stash of U.S. dollars that would seed the revolution.
23
Task Force Davao
Colonel Reginald J. Liu had been professionally humiliated on the field at Koronadal in a sloppy battle that caught him unprepared, and he was angry. He was perspiring not only from the heat and the humidity but also from frustration, sweat trickling down his face, a face more rounded now than when he was younger, eyes peeking from behind pudgy and slanted eyelids reflecting the half of his ancestry that was Chinese and narrowed by years of squinting down a rifle sight. Liu may have put on a few pounds, but his legs were muscled and powerful from training and leading soldiers in combat. Now he was being tested again. One minor American State Department official had been killed and two of the STAGCOM irregulars wounded, one seriously. Liu had also lost five soldiers. He commanded a field force far superior to the enemy paramilitary group that had attacked him, but their smaller force had beaten him in the first encounter of what would become known as the Mindanao Civil War. Even with high-tech, secret American intelligence and electronics surveillance technologies providing exact knowledge of the enemy’s position, the Abu Sayaf had gotten the jump on him. Maybe it was pure dumb luck, but it counted. And he had absolutely no excuse why his security elements had been unable to detect the Abu Sayaf.
Twenty-six dusty, recently re-painted 1982 vintage deuce-and-a-half trucks of Task Force Davao, Philippine Army, were positioned along the road behind him, containing a large infantry force that he had not been able to deploy at Koronadal. Too late to avoid the defeat today, he ordered the rest of his troops to dismount—the soldiers who had not been stuck on the floor of their trucks. Liu moved them into defensive positions on the main highway south of Koronadal and put his trucks into a motor pool, well guarded. He ordered the mess unit to set up cooking fires and the entire battalion-sized force to get settled in for the night, with a perimeter guard well motivated to stay awake after the deaths and wounding of their comrades earlier in the day. Liu had already seen to one of the most difficult responsibilities of a commander that he had to accept. He had shipped the bodies of the dead and the living wounded back to Davao City along with letters hand-written on bond paper for their families.
Hayes wrote his official report to be flown back tonight to the embassy in Manila. The hard copy documents would keep company with John Robert Mundy’s cold, mutilated body in the helicopter on its return trip.
Liu established his command post by sandbagging an abandoned soft drink stand he had commandeered at the south side of Koronadal. Moments later, his two captains and the two Americans, Hayes and Thornton, joined him. The wrinkles on Liu’s brow tightened, and so did his grip on his coffee cup as be began describing the situation. “This is just disastrous. Our first engagement in a real conflict since the breakdown of the P.S.I. treaty agreement, our first combat against the Abu Sayaf away from their home base of operations, and we get spanked. I am going to ask for special authority to initiate punitive actions against this enemy, not just defensive posturing.”
“From where we see it, and the way Manila and Washington will see it,” Major Hayes responded, “is that we no longer have a few foreign terrorists loose in the countryside; we now have a real threat to stability.
Hell, mat’s wrong, we no longer have stability. You have a civil war on your hands.”
Thornton gave his perspective. “You’re both overstating what we have here. We’ve been following one Turk and a few confused farmers who think they’re revolutionary warriors on jihad. Without the money the Syrians sent here with that Turk, they couldn’t find food to live on except for handouts from missionaries, unless they stopped their terrorist activities and stayed in one place for a while, planted something, and waited for it to grow. Even with the Turk and all that money, the Abu Sayaf are just a few recently barefoot tribesmen. They couldn’t gather a quorum in an outhouse.”
“They have shoes now, Mister Thornton,” Liu responded, objecting to Thornton’s condescending comments, whether he was a long-time colleague or not. “They might not wear white socks under heavy and hot combat boots, like you consultants, but they have weapons and money and they are near to achieving a kind of cooperation among themselves, the MNLF, the NPA and the others.”
Captain Agustin got the attention of his commander and reported to Colonel Liu, “Sir, we have in the Southern Command alone at least 6,000 troops available in Mindanao and the Visayas. If you ask for them to be put into the field, we could be ready for serious combat within four days.”
“The Abu Sayaf are in their realm now, Captain.” Liu reverted to his military instruction voice, “in their milieu, they are experts of evasion. We have not had much success over the years, frankly.”
“Yes sir,” Agustin responded. “I see their resurgence. I don’t like their renewed efforts. That’s why I’m ready for action as soon as you order it.”
“Well, we have the Abu Sayaf patrol located,” said Major Hayes. “STAGCOM tracked them, and we know where they are. We can bring in a long-distance air strike and take them all out twenty-four hours from right now, if you get your government’s permission to ask for our support.”
“That is preposterous.” Liu did not take a second to respond. “This is not just about that small Abu Sayaf patrol, and you know it. We have to use them to find Kumander Ali.”
Lui continued, “There are many different kinds of rebels scattered over many provinces. Most of their members have not been to school, do not have documents that attest to their births or marriages, can’t read or write, and wouldn’t know Karl Marx from King Kong. New Peoples Army sounds cool to them and they might pick up some loose change from kidnapping for ransom under that flag, but they do not identify with the labels you invent for them. But we still can’t blow up a few individuals together with a whole town. You’d create a dozen martyrs and a million enemies. This is not Vietnam, and it is not Iraq. Ali wants to band together small groups of families, the kind that would fight us at night while they harvest pineapples at the Dole plantation during the day. You can’t tell who is a rebel just by looking at him. They don’t have universal enemy codes implanted on microchips inside them that you can read from space.”
Major Hayes offered his perspective to Liu. “The NPA rebels are communists, scattered over three or four provinces. If all their scattered groups combined, they still wouldn’t unite with the Muslims. Islam and Communism don’t mix.”
Colonel Liu continued as though he was teaching at the Philippine Military Academy again. “The Abu Sayaf will not have any more luck organizing the communists than we’ve had educating them. The scattered NPA will never join together, and so we have to defeat them piecemeal in the field, one renegade band at a time,” Liu concluded.
“They might not unify this month or even this year, maybe not until their kids get on the Internet, then they can all get together asynchronously,” said Thornton, thinking about how the future would look. “They won’t need to see each other in person or know their real names. The next generation of insurgents will use web cams and create cute nicknames for themselves. They’ll find a way to connect.”
Liu stared hard at Thornton a long five seconds, then responded. “By accident or by genius, the general area they have chos
en for continuing this confrontation itself is a uniting factor for them. They are located at a strategic confluence of three territories, South Cotobato, Maguindinao, and Sultan Kudarat. Together that makes up most of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, the ARMM. If you add Basilan Island and the islands that trail off toward Indonesia, islands that surely would go along with anything decided here, as Basilan is the home base of the Abu Sayaf, you have a nation. Combine all that geography with Agusan and Lanao del Sur, the rest of Mindanao, and you have a country three times as big as Kentucky in size and four times larger in population.”
“That makes your next action strategic, and you will need to make it decisive.” Thornton summarized what they all were thinking. “And remember that the larger war could turn on one little firefight, one small incident. Like today’s.”
“As much of history is decided,” Hayes said.
Thornton moved on. “Colonel Liu, it’s you who decides the objective for TFD. Your objective decides whether I can be involved, and how.”
“I know that. Here is how I see it. To move my task force quickly long distances, I am constrained to stay on the roads until the decisive moment, but we have significant firepower and the advantage of superior forces.”
“Yes, so to achieve your objective, you don’t really need STAGCOM,” Thornton said.
“STAGCOM is of little value to me in major combat involving massed units charging each other. There may be a time you can help me with small unit missions. But the major threat to us is not the NPA’s combat power. The threat to my nation comes if they organize the people, all the people of Mindanao, to follow a rebel leader politically.”
“So STAGCOM represents an opportunity for you.” Thornton wanted to set the Colonel up for what might happen later. “Consider, Reggie, at the opportune time, you step aside. I am your opportunity. You win the war, STAGCOM slips in and the bounty money disappears, and you then can win the peace. The cash is a divisive element because it might permit the NPA to consolidate.”
“Thornton, you have your own ideas. You want to pursue them first for your own selfish reasons.” Liu was talking frankly.
“Tomas, let the professionals do their job.” Elaiza just had to say something to him. “It’s not worth dying for.”
“I don’t intend to the for it, but before Liu blows them up with his artillery and spreads the cash all over the jungle floor, I would be happy to clean up the mess for him.”
Thornton turned to the colonel. “Reggie, listen to me; we can both get what we want out of this.”
“No promises, Thornton, other than that I will do my duty. If there is no conflict with that, maybe we can help each other. We’ll see.” Liu was closing the discussion.
After his briefing, Elaiza asked Colonel Liu to help her with the seriously wounded Eduardo. He had not been evacuated with the other wounded soldiers because officially he did not belong to any of their units. The medic had looked him over, and the news was not good. His upper arm was shattered, and would have to be amputated just below the shoulder, or he would not survive. Liu called for a medivac helicopter and told Elaiza, “OK, I’ll get this fellow taken care of. We’ll send him to Davao Doctors Hospital, it’s close by air, and he’ll have his best chance there.” Elaiza stayed with her heavily medicated uncle until the chopper picked him up.
At the command post the TFD leaders wrote out the details of an operations plan. They defined their mutual tactical objective: to tie down and then destroy the Abu Sayaf along with any elements that had joined the movement in Mindanao. They would track them into Sultan Kudarat, where they were now heading, trap them between the Banga and the Alah Rivers, and wipe them out.
The next morning, Task Force Davao, commanded by Colonel Liu and now reinforced, started out of Koronadal on the main road north, this time with armed riflemen, fingers on triggers and rounds chambered, on top of each vehicle. A helicopter overhead kept watch on their flanks to give warning of the possibility of an ambush. Liu rode in the front seat of his jeep, the middle vehicle in the convoy as an armored Humvee led them up out of the swamplands and into the foothills. The colonel’s driver said to his leader, “With that cover above us, there’s no way we could be surprised, but neither could the enemy we’re following.”
Liu knew his driver was right, said nothing, but thought, “One helicopter. Of the forty helicopters owned by the Philippine Air Force, only seventeen were serviceable, wrecks from the Americans’ old wars.” According to a recent report he had seen, the Air Force somehow needed a work force of several thousand men and women to maintain the aircraft. Typical mismanagement, he thought. If only the Philippine Air Force had the funds to buy new helicopters, the flying relics could be consigned to the scrap heap. He sighed in resignation and returned his attention to the road ahead.
Careening downhill from the opposite direction at over thirty miles per hour, a two-wheeled motorcycle with outriggers followed the hyperbolic arc of the highway’s outward curve, balancing five human passengers seated on each outrigger. It narrowly missed hitting Liu’s jeep. Liu began to see more of them transporting passengers between villages and intermediate destinations along the highway between Koronadal and Lake Buluwan.
“Are there no buses or jeepneys here?” asked Colonel Liu.
“Very few, sir,” replied his driver. “That is the primary means of transportation around here. For a fare of four pesos, passengers are carried wherever they want to go, as long as it is along that highway—and not only passengers, but also cargo.”
Following Liu, Starke drove the Pajero with Elaiza dozing in the front seat between him and Thornton, the Otazas spread out in the back two rows of seats. Looking out of his window at passing scenes, Thornton saw the sleepy eyes of a long, fat hog tied to the outrigger of a bicycle, looking back at him, questioningly. He surmised that the pig, a full-grown hog, roasted, with rice, would feed an enemy platoon for a week in combat.
Liu had decided not to close the road with checkpoints, as that would also shut down the economy of the region. That would not be good politics, so the road stayed open. Travelers could just as easily be defecting from the NPA as going to join another subversive cell, and the last thing the AFP wanted was to create more enemies and more hatred.
The advancing task force left the two-lane paved highway and took a dirt road westward toward the projected position of the Abu Sayaf. The column was now moving at a walking pace. Liu ordered most of the troops to dismount and sent out patrols on his flanks to move parallel with the main force. The road, which had started out as generally passable, became incrementally worse every mile the men moved—from hard-top to hard-top with potholes to a hard-packed, ungraded and unmaintained dirt road to a condition in which the road was barely distinguishable from the rest of the terrain.
In the Pajero, Thornton shared his growing concern with Elaiza. “I don’t like traveling along this so-called road. The mountain villagers have had months to place land mines. We know they do that.”
“But any mines would get Liu’s vehicle first, before we roll over them,” she answered, alert to the dangers.
“Not necessarily. The mines could be in the middle of the road, allowing the vehicle wheels to pass on either side, but if we just happen to slip, it’s curtains.” Thornton had seen it happen.
He was thinking out loud, formulating, and when Liu’s men dismounted from their vehicles, so did STAGCOM, except for the slightly wounded Juanito, who was now driving the Pajero.
“Elaiza, time to turn on the TIAM,” Thornton reminded her.
“It’s on, you have us on your map?”
“Yeah, I got it. Liu will want to engage any rebels wherever he finds them. And he will want to win. That could be a big encounter. I want to get our target before he does.”
“And he’s OK with that?”
“I don’t know.” Thornton turned his head toward Elaiza. “I’m not sure what; but something must have happened in Manila to affect his attitude.”
“He wants the Turk too, but only incidentally.” It sounded hollow to Thornton himself when he said it that way. He knew Liu wanted more, but was not sure what.
“We have a better chance alone to find the Turk than Liu and TFD do, what with their making all that noise and show. We know where Mahir is headed. We can make a beeline toward their destination and cross paths with them eventually.” And turning to the Sergeant, he said, “Starke, you and the four Otazas who are still OK, come with me.”
With that, STAGCOM became a hunter-killer patrol. “If Liu pauses or procrastinates, we attack Hakki.”
“Elaiza, take the Pajero and drive to Bual with Juanito. That’s close enough to rejoin quickly and far enough away to avoid action. I’ll shadow Liu until he fixes the Turk in place. Pay a family there to stay with them, cover the Pajero with banana leaves or something like that and take care of Juanito and yourself.” Thornton then walked away from her after issuing his orders.
It hurt her. Every time he walked away now she wondered if she would ever see him again, surprised by the depth of her feelings. It seemed to her that he always walked away from the people who cared about him. There would have to be a last time, and she wondered if this would be it. “When?” she asked.
Thornton knew he would see her again. Or would he? Uncertainty was a part of their relationship. He looked back; she was looking straight ahead over the steering wheel and did not smile. He strode off with apparent confidence but felt a knot in his belly. Then he turned around and walked back to the Pajero and held her close, pressing her face into his chest.
“You win. From now on, we’ll always be together.” He surprised himself by what he had said. “Come on. Juanito, you heard what I said, take the vehicle to Bual.”
