“After the Japanese invaded us, we were angry and scared, but we wanted to fight back,” Nick’s father said. “Some of us had guns and talked about forming an army. I had come back from Manila, where I had gone as Nick did for my education, when the invasion by the Japanese interrupted it. I had been away for over a year, and by the time I got back here, there were small-armed groups already forming, mostly tenants, farmers, and peasants. So I joined a small one in the mountains nearby. I didn’t know then that it would be a lifelong commitment.”
“How did the resistance movement come about?” I asked.
“At first people acted on their own,” he said. “But we couldn’t achieve much that way and soon realized that we needed to organize and did. We only had homemade guns and the few rifles we had stolen from the homes of hacenderos. I joined…I had to learn to shoot…and elsewhere in Pampanga other groups had begun to emerge. We joined them. That was in March of 1942. We stayed mostly in the barrios where we mobilized other guerrillas. It was a very difficult time for us. There were thirteen units, and this was the first squadron, the beginning of an army; and as we increased in numbers, they gave our squadron a number, Squadron 6 of the Hukbalahap. All along, I had felt the need for a “citizens army,” but it wasn’t until the Japanese entered our barrio that we broke open a small ammunition depot and gave the weapons and ammunition to our neighbors. Before that we had made no plans. It had all happened spontaneously. I was sixteen at the time. I had to grow up in a hurry. I would soon get married. It helped me seem mature, but I must tell you I wasn’t ready for what occurred because I hadn’t anticipated it. That March, in a barrio at the foot of Mount Arayat near the Pampanga border, several squadrons joined together, men from Candaba, San Luis, Minalin, Magalang, Cabiao, and as far away as Bulacan. All together there were over two hundred of us.
I asked him how that worked.
“It helped that we had a common enemy,” he said. “Also, we had the leadership of Luis Taruc. Taruc had been baptized a leader before he came; he was good at speaking and inspired us. I never wanted to be a leader, but it turned out that I was destined to become one. I looked up to Taruc…it gave me much the same confidence that Taruc had. Like me, he was the son of a tenant farmer. Like me, and unlike most peasants, he completed high school and went to college for a year in Manila, before returning to his roots. He was a farmer, a tenant; he had been a ditch digger, who became a tailor. He left that trade and his wife and children to become our leader. He would listen to us. He was like a brother. Once, when we were together, he asked me if I would give up my wife and son too. Like I said, he had set the example. I told him I would, but thank God I didn’t have to.” Whereupon, he looked at Nick’s mother and smiled, and said, “She followed me and wouldn’t stay home like she should’ve. What did it matter that she was a woman?” He laughed. “She became my jungle bride,” he said. ”I liked her spirit. Only a woman like her would carry a rifle at the same time she carried a baby. They called her Lady Sinn, after the 6th century woman warrior. Lady Sinn had been a leader of the Nan Yue, and Lady Sinn’s military exploits were legendary. Nick’s father used to refer to Nick’s mother as “his Lady Sinn.” They felt invulnerable then and fought all the time.
“What did you fight about?”
“We often clashed over roles. She refused to be left behind, and I got very upset about it. S he challenged my masculinity. Taruc, who seemed to be looking after me, approved, and said he was sending us home unless we could reconcile this. Ever since, I’ve been thankful for that. When we finally got back to our own camp, I watched her do everything a man could do and later, much later, felt responsible for her delicate condition, because I was and because of the fact that we were Catholic. The question was not just what we wanted to do, but what God required. I finally said to her, ‘All right…you win.’ I wanted to be with her. I wanted her to have my baby. She did. How fortunate we were. And here we are. We were with each other all the time and she went on raids, and then Nick came along, and we had to think of him.” He then turned to his wife and said, “You were so foolish. Don’t you understand that you could’ve been killed.”
I asked her about the experience.
“Sex, love and revolution: what more could I have asked for? I often slept next to my husband on the ground. We got married when I was fifteen and he was sixteen. We would hold each other to keep warm. When we slept outside, we always slept with clothes on and our rifles ready. So I don’t know how I got pregnant. Just kidding.”
“You only had the one child?”
She hesitated, and finally said, “I had trouble getting pregnant. But, we rarely got the chance. Remember we slept on the ground and with other people always around.”
“But what did you family think?”
“I think they were proud of me. I also think they were disappointed.”
“How did you feel?”
“About not getting pregnant? Disappointed.”
“Didn’t your husband want a family?”
“I think he did, and that would explain his mixed feelings about my decision to become a Huk female insurgent. There was a lot of hubbub about jungle brides, but in our case, as you see, it worked out, and we had Nick, we weren’t killed, and Nick has come home with his American friend. My participation in the revolution may seem unconventional, but I wasn’t the only woman out there.”
“What do you say now about Nick’s politics?”
“What can I say? We have always been supporters of the revolution, and all we ask is that he takes care of himself. He teaches and has published, and he keeps himself very busy. God gave us Nick when I thought I could never have a child. He was our Christmas one year.”
Randy Ford
