Bombs over Baghdad

Ed's note: here are a few pages from one chapter on our Iraq coverage during the Gulf War for my book Correspondent. Please feel free to comment. Thanks!

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Fast forward. Baghdad, 2003.

Ever heard an air raid siren go off? It's a sound you never forget.
I was on the phone with my wife, assuring her we were safe and fine and well protected and that we knew exactly what we were doing when the frigging air raid sirens went off and I remember hoping to God she couldn’t hear the wailing sound over the scratchy phone line because I would never hear the end of it.

I've never heard sirens like these before; they wailed like banshees down Baghdad’s empty streets, sending echoes through the canyons of high-rise buildings and apartments that characterized the western bank of the Tigris where we were. There were three or four sirens throughout the city, wailing up and down an asynchronous otherworldy scale that made your hair stand on end. The distances between the sirens made it all the more eerie; one would hit a high note while a more distant siren was hitting a low. It’s how you’d imagine air raid sirens to be like in the movies, or in those old movietone newsreel clips of the Blitz over London. But the wailing and the message they brought were unmistakable.

War had started. And we were still in Baghdad.

I cupped my hand over the phone’s receiver, trying to block out the noise. Esther was still talking when I finally decided to interrupt.

"Uhm bubba, I have to go. Now. Something's happening," I remember telling her as calmly as I could.

The rest comes more clearly, since I had remembered to switch on the videocamera hanging by a strap from my neck. The video is dark and grainy, and jittery, like a badly directed movie. I nervously banged the phone down so hard that the ringer sounded off, and then I ran for the balcony, where Val had already set up his camera.

"Pare yan na," Val said from under his steel helmet.
He had his camera out on the ledge, shooting the twinkling lights of Baghdad on the first minute of the second gulf war. I was rolling with my own camera too, the jerky video capturing the nervous run from the room to the balcony. The autofocus struggled with the low light, and the video had the surreal image of the blurred lights of the Baghdad skyline slowly coming into sharper focus while sirens wailed in the background. It was like waking up to a nightmare.

Val turned to me and said, "Pare patay mo ang ilaw."

The lights inside the hotel room were still on, which meant we were silhouetted against the bright room while we stood filming out in the dark balcony. It may seem insignificant, but it was an important detail. Five stories up, we could be clearly seen from the street.

It was dangerous because we weren’t even supposed to be shooting any video without the presence of our minder to tell us where we may or may not poke our nosey lenses. Not that we planned to obey to the letter, but you don’t violate their rules and rub it in their face at the same time. More importantly, we simply did not want to call attention to ourselves from the streets. The Iraqi government was already pretty paranoid, even before the bombing. From the streets, in the dark, with our helmets, flak jackets and equipment, we could be mistaken by soldiers or policemen for spies or saboteurs. These are details that help keep you alive.

I ran inside and turned off all the lights. The only light left in the room came from a small stubby candle Val had lit beside a bible given him by the nuns of Lipa.
With the lights off, I switched on my camera's night vision sensor and headed back to the balcony.

The sirens continued wailing while Val and I jockeyed for position in the balcony. Baghdad was still brightly lit, and every streetlight looked like an inviting bullseye. We had half expected city officials to plunge Baghdad into a blackout at the first sign of an air raid. But no, Baghdad was on fire, and no bombs had been dropped yet.

The first sign came from fireflies to the south. Lights flickered in the sky over southern Baghdad, followed seconds later by the sound of airbursts. The anti aircraft defenses have opened up. The shells burst with sharp pops, much like a string of baby rockets let loose on New Year's. Somewhere up there in the inky blackness, coalition planes were prowling the skies of southern Baghdad, and Baghdad’s air defenses were reaching out for them. In a few minutes, more anti aircraft fire lit up the skies of Baghdad, punctuated by the glowing tailpipe of an occasional surface to air missile.

Then the bombs came.

From our perspective, they didn’t come as massive explosions that would shake our foundations. Not yet. Instead, we saw weak flashes of light in the horizon, like distant lightning during a brewing thunderstorm. Then, the low rumble that you heard vaguely, but felt more with the soles of your feet. The bombs were falling to the south of the city, perhaps in the Al-Doura district, where the main power plant and the oil refineries were located. I remembered Farida, a Filipina married to an Iraqi who lived in the Al Doura district. We had dinner a few nights ago at their home, while her teenage son played Filipino songs on their karaoke.

Val and I were caught in a trance; the blinking lights were hypnotic, like a million fireflies from childhood, zipping harmlessly past to disappear in the inky blackness. The low rumble of bombs could be felt in the gut, like the humming of a poorly tuned car. But at this point, it all seemed so distant, so far away. We were easily nothing more than spectators watching a distant play unfolding. At this point it was still easy to forget those bombs and missiles were falling on the heads of other people. I hoped Farida was safe.

Then it occurred to us - the battle for Baghdad had been raging for several minutes, yet the office had not bothered to call us for a live phone report. We had no satellite phone to make the call, part of the cost cutting measures I had to institute just to get Manila to agree to our trip. Any communication between Manila and my team was done through the unreliable and severely compromised Baghdad telephone exchange.

And, as part of our cost cutting measures, we avoided making outgoing calls to Manila. Especially for phoned-in live reports. It was simply too expensive, and I had to stretch my budget. Besides, the studio would keep you stewing on the line for ages while you wait for your turn to deliver your report. It was simply financially unfeasible. Sometimes, they would keep you on hold for half an hour or more while a producer in his nice airconditioned studio figures out what to do with you.

It was already morning in Manila. The network had earlier started a special countdown to war program throughout the last nights of the ulitmatum. As the night deepened and the bombing continued without a ring from Manila, we wondered if Manila had fallen asleep on the job.

I was severely tempted to call Manila. After a while of waiting, I asked Val if I should just get it over with, damn the budget, and call Manila. The first night of the war was going to pass us by, and we may as well have stayed asleep. Eventually, Val concurred. I picked up the hotel phone and dialed the operator to ask him to connect me to Manila. To my horror, the operator refused to pick up. I called several times just in case the guy was just taking a leak, but there really was no answer. Now I was really worried.

Standing up, I told Val I was going down to the front desk to find out what was wrong. Still heavily clad in a flak jacket and helmet, I violated a cardinal rule and strode into the elevator for the six-floor ride down to the lobby. In hindsight, I should have just taken the stairs; they say you never take the elevator when the building is on fire, so it presumably follows that you also don’t take the elevator when the city is being bombed.

The lobby was deserted except for a few of the staff running around. I cornered one and asked him why no one was answering the phone. The guy looked at me in disbelief. The phone? Of course no one is answering the phone. Everybody is in the hotel bomb shelter, where sane men go whenever there are bombs falling. And that includes the telephone operator.

Of course that made sense. But whoever said this job had to be sensible all the time? In the bomb shelter? I slapped my forehead. We were finally witnessing the bombing of Baghdad, yet we couldn't report it because no one was answering the phone. For a moment I considered manning the operator's booth, then I remembered I didn’t speak Arabic.

I need the operator at his post, I pleaded with the man, Manila was calling. Okay okay I will call him, he said. To be sure he wasn't pulling my leg, I watched him rush off to the bomb shelter.
That settled, I went up to the room again. Via the elevator, of course.

Up in the room, I told Val the problem. Fuck, he said. Paano yan? I crossed my fingers and hoped the telephone operator would pull his head out of the bomb shelter. Miraculously, after a few minutes, the telephone finally rang - it was Manila on the other line!

I no longer remember much of what I reported, since they called us so many times over the course of that early morning that it all merges into a blur. I spoke of fireflies from childhood, of popping firecrackers, the distant thunder underfoot, and of the burning lights of Baghdad. Most of all, I talked of history, ancient and recent. I realized that at this point, everyone was talking about the bombs falling down and the anti aircraft fire going up, but most viewers didn't have the foggiest idea of Mesopotamia, Uruk, the Garden of Eden, the Hammurabi code, and a couple of thousand years of Iraqi history going up in smoke. People wanted to hear about the bombs, but they didn't hear enough of the people whose heads the bombs were falling on. And I remember speaking of tyrants, pro and anti American, and how the world can be so selective in the way it defines who stands on the other side of the line between good and evil.

The night passed as a blur of successive programs and inquisitive anchors who passed me on from one hour to the next. Over and over, again and again, I told them what I was witnessing, which at this point was not really much. I called it a virtual lightshow, and a weak one at that, with sparks twinkling over the city to the counterpoint of detonating anti aircraft artillery. I told them of the virtually empty streets, not unusual given the fact that it was past four in the morning here. And I told them too of the occasional taxi and bus crossing the bridges over the river Tigris, as if nothing was happening tonight in Baghdad. If this was shock and awe, it certainly wasn’t shocking or awesome – yet.

Later we would learn that the first strikes in the new Gulf war were directed at Saddam himself. It was supposed to be a decapitation strike, an assassination attempt if you will, directed at the Iraqi leadership in hopes that a quick kill of Saddam would end the war on the first night.

Acting on a tip from a supposedly reliable Iraqi spy, President Bush authorized the airstrike several hours earlier than his own deadline. The spy told the Americans that Saddam was, at that very moment, in one of his smaller Presidential Palaces on the south western bank of the Tigris. Bush thought it best to risk an early strike that could mean an early end to the war. With that, F-117 stealth fighters loaded with smart bombs took off from a Middle East airbase and released their payload in the inky blackness several thousand feet over Baghdad. The Americans would later realize that they missed their target, and it would be nine months before they would finally get Saddam.



Over and over again, the anchors at home would ask why, with the whole of western civilization seemingly bearing down on their country, the Iraqis didn't simply overthrow Saddam since he's such a bad guy. Since he's caused so much misery in his own country, and made billions for himself, why don't they just boot him out. And over and over again I told them that in this region, Saddam didn't belong to the lonely-hearts club of tyrants and dictators; there were plenty of them to go around in this region. He did belong to a subcategory that includes Muammar Khaddafy where the members were tyrants like most other leaders around here, except that they were also anti-US. But if you're looking for ruthless dictators intolerant of other beliefs, the anti-US club doesn't hold the monopoly there. If Saddam would throw you in jail for carrying anti Saddam publications and for criticizing him, Saudi Arabia would do the same thing if it catches you so much as carrying a bible or praying to a Christian god. In fact they would also give you a couple of lashes of the cane as a bonus.

Of course the US wouldn't dare invade Saudi Arabia, so instead they give them billions in military training and aid, sell them the most sophisticated weapons and aircraft that oil money could buy, pat them on their back, and call them buddies in the war against terror. This, even though most of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis, Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi before he was booted out, and most of Al Qaeda's core group were Saudi; there were no Iraqis involved. Most anchors would just give intelligent-sounding grunts to that reply, and move on carefully to other topics. I understand that it is difficult for studio monkeys to comprehend something that goes against the accepted tone of the western news agencies, but there you go. Of course it was a roundabout way of answering their question, but I was avoiding making simplistic comments on such a complex region. Simply said, Saddam was a dictator, but he was not the only dictator in a region where the west props up plenty of other dictators. He simply was a dictator that, after the debacle of the first gulf war, Americans would simply love to hate. He deserved to be bombed in the same way that all other dictators, both of the pro or anti US varieties, deserve to be bombed.

Every once in a while, the anchors would pop a gem. Where was Saddam right now? Have we seen him? Another priceless question: the Americans have crossed the border of Iraq and Kuwait some 600 kilometers down south - do we have a situationer? Manila had been hearing of reports of Iraqi soldiers surrendering by the thousands in the south. Do we have anything on that? Sometimes you get the impression that some people never even bothered to glance at a map. Or perhaps it was a misperception of scale. Perhaps since Iraq is just one large landmass and not seven thousand islands, people sometimes think of the map of Iraq in the same scale as the map of Metro Manila. So, I would try not to sound too stunned and croak out a safely vague answer about distances and censorship and the basic natural law that says you can't be in two places at once – even at the best of times.

A lot of the questions also revolved around Val and myself. How did we feel? Were we scared shitless? Do we have insurance? Some were really expressions of concern; others just seemed to be designed to drum up the fact that we were the only Filipino newsteam left in Iraq, and that we were in extreme danger, "in the service of the Filipino," as the station blurb went. It was embarrassing at times, but the air war over Baghdad was off to a slow start, and there was little else I could tell anchors at home except for the thunder of antiaircraft fire, the twinkling lights in the sky, and the slow rumble of distant bombs. You can only repeat that so often. In the end, the studio anchor would drift back to the question “how are you holding up?”

It helped that I had done quite a good deal of research before leaving Manila. Like what I did during my first on-camera live from Baghdad, I took this chance to talk a lot about the Iraq that few people knew about, or cared to know. Every chance I got, I backtracked thousands of years to talk about the history and culture of this land, and how it tied in with the present. Then, there was also a lot of contemporary history to talk about, from the rise of Saddam to the unwavering US support of his regime during the Iran-Iraq war, to his fall from grace with the invasion of Kuwait. Post-Gulf War, there were 12 years of UN sanctions that crippled this proud country. There were so many other issues to talk about, and the lightshow over Baghdad now was just a colorful sidebar that you could unfortunately not ignore.

The air raids came in several waves. After a few hours, dawn broke over the city, to the continuous popping of anti aircraft artillery. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds, rays treaming out through the morning condensation, making the sunrise look positively, well, religious, like God was cluck clucking down from his perch while the red and the black ants went to war again.

Thus ended the first night of the bombing; nothing spectacular or visually sensational like CNN's "fireworks" video from the first Gulf War. But it didn't matter to Val and I; despite all the odds, we had made it to Baghdad, stayed in Iraq way past the dates our permits and our money would allow, and we had made it through the first night of the second gulf war.

Ed's note: this is the continuation of the previous post; excerpt from a book I'm writing titled Correspondent. Please feel free to comment. thanks!

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Things got kinda slower and darker, figuratively, when the sun went down. After the early evening newscasts, the police reporters would disappear into their hideaways, be it the local sauna bath or strip joint for a night of drinking and carousing. That left those few banished to the night beat to fight over the torn sofas and heavily gouged benches in the press office. I would find a corner chair to sit on, crack open a book, and kill the time doing the rounds of homicide, general assignments section, or theft and robbery. I bought a small transistor radio, and wired a headset so I could monitor the AM radio stations constantly with the radio clipped to my belt. I remember the smells of the homicide section most of all. I would lean over the homicide desk, greet the cop and duty, and with the requisite drawl of someone whose balls are too heavy, politely but firmly ask to see the thick police blotter where the recent homicides and murders were first listed. I must have looked at that police blotter a hundred times every night. The section also had a small jail cell that was always crowded, and you would run smack into a wall of humidity and stench the minute you got closer than three feet. The homicide section was our favorite, because stories here had the best chances of seeing print. General Assignments Section, or GAS, came a close second, since this is where complaints of rape and assorted nasties are lodged. Theft and Robbery ran third, because theft was not unusual anymore, and robbery in this country is all relative. The night duty cops would sleep on benches or plastic chairs lined together. The small offices of the section chiefs would almost always be covered with peeling mirror tint.

The practice at the time was for the night shift reporters to cover the whole of Metro Manila. So when the sun went down, my beat expanded from Manila to the whole metropolis. This meant I was responsible for an area that covers more than a dozen cities and municipalities. How my office expected me to cover all of this alone was way beyond my comprehension.

Print coverage that time was worlds away from TV coverage. We print reporters had no vehicles, or living allowances, so we didn't do the rounds of all ten police precincts in Manila. We simply couldn’t afford it. The TV guys, naturally, went around with their service vans and porta-lights, thrilling cops and criminals with the idea of instant fame and celebrity. Lowlife like print reporters had to hope that cops appreciate the written word enough to buy a publication, even a tabloid. Many times I would find that a policeman had no idea what a Chronicle was, or that it was a newspaper, or that it was a publication that was adjudged Number One in Readership Quality. Still, every thirty minutes or every hour, I would lift the ancient phone in the press office and call each of Manila’s ten police stations, and every police district headquarters, introduce myself and my newspaper, and ask if there was anything interesting developing. On the other hand, the TV reporters, with their cameramen, drivers, and news vehicles, could afford to bounce around the city while looking as fresh as a daisy. Simply put, it was a pretty lonely job. The only connection you had to your office was a small press card and an occasional paycheck. That’s why most print guys generally stayed at the press office of the western police district headquarters in UN Avenue. It was tedious and boring work, looking for a story that could force a remat in a political-business paper.

It sounds so much like “press office” coverage, where reporters stay at the press office and occasionally make calls to contacts to ask for news. Today, I would tell reporters to avoid that practice and go out and search for enterprise stories. But today, we are all wired to each other and to contacts with cellular phones. Two decades ago, the cellphone did not exist, the beeper was still years away, and the working public telephone was an occasional blessing. Really, finding a working payphone then was already reason for celebration. If you have to cover the whole Metropolis alone at night with no telephone or vehicles at a time of bombings, assassinations, and coup attempts, you are always afraid of stepping away from the pack, even for a while, and missing the biggest story of the year. I remember, at the end of each night’s coverage, feeling very exposed and uncertain because I had been out of the loop for even just an hour or two. I would only feel relieved once I am back in the press office and able to check on all the police districts in Metro Manila.

One time, in the middle of the night, a bunch of reporters announced they were off to the massage parlor for a free massage, among "other" things. Not that they had any freebies really coming to them. There are reporters who simply assume that they can walk into a beerhouse or massage parlor and get everything on the house because of their connections with the local station commander or the vice squad. It was a pretty sleazy arrangement for many police reporters, but bear in mind that this happens in a much larger and grander scale among, for example, clean-looking and famous and famously hard-hitting newscast anchors and program hosts, or big network bosses, the only difference being that they probably go to places where the toilets smelled a lot cleaner and actually had toilet seats.

They even invited me along, which probably meant I had been in the night shift too long. I declined, saying it was dangerous, since the Manila police had been busy lately raiding sauna baths that were fronts for prostitution. For that, I got laughed at. There are some perks that come with living in Manila’s dark underbelly.
Seeing my hesitance, one reporter bragged that he once made a reluctant masseuse strip and attend to his earthly needs simply by mentioning to her that he was tight with the vice cops.

I remember the Christmas party of the press corps. It was held someplace in San Marcelino Malate, with WPD chief Alfredo Lim as the special guest of honor. Naturally, the organizers of the press corps party also arranged for a bunch of girls to strip for the press corps as part of wishing everyone a very merry Christmas. But this was the time when the Manila police was cracking down on girlie joints, and raids were being conducted by General Lim's men left and right. The party was supposed to start in the early evening, but the time passed and people, including the good general, were getting restless - the girls had not yet arrived. Finally, someone broke the news: the girls were frightened by the presence of the Manila police chief, and had refused to come. Duly apprised of the situation, General Lim rose to the occasion and ordered his men to make sure the reporters were properly entertained. After an hour, the police van arrived, and onto the stage marched... the Discovery girls! Hauled from a popular girlie bar along Magsaysay Boulevard, the girls promptly gyrated and stripped to the hearty hooting and clapping of the reporters and their guests, including the chief of the Manila police. Such are the ironies of life.

On occassion, a "big" story would come up, and we would all rush to the latest tragedy of some poor father, wife, or son. Since I had no vehicle, and no money to get a cab, and since many of these crimes took place in the nooks and crannies of Manila, I would just jump into the vehicle of any friendly reporter. Getting to the crime scene was no problem. Getting back sometimes was.
One time, we rode with another reporter to a crime scene in some remote part of Paranaque. Unfortunately, I lost track of time, and got left behind by the rest of the reporters. It was past midnight, and I remember worrying where in the world I was in Paranaque, and how I could get back to Manila.

It was also interesting watching how police reporters work. In a way, we were part of the metro’s underworld, living off the stagnation and decay that the comfortable would rather ignore. After all, no one wants to have anything to do with a policeman unless a crime is committed and you are the victim. Policemen, in their dirty, grimy, humid precincts, are for those people who live in dirty, grimy, humid shanties. The rich and powerful are isolated in their gated and fenced communities, with their own blue guards with gasoline for their mobile patrols and radios that really worked. It was a rare treat when we see one of the rich and well-off in the precincts, their clean and moisturized skin glistening and uncomfortable and irritated by the stale air that we breathed into our lungs every night. There were times when I felt like telling these visitors, perhaps rather unfairly, “Welcome to our world. Did you even know we exist?”

Police reporting has its own subculture. It was a “masculine” world, although there were a good number of female police reporters. I don’t use the word masculine in a sexist sense. It was simply a world skewed heavily against the female gender. Female police reporters were sexually harassed with such regularity that the older ones had refined the put-down to an art form. Sometimes, police officers and lowly bureaucrats hit on them with the subtlety of a bull in heat. I know of one female reporter whose feminine charms so overwhelmed one local official that he chased her around his office table. Naturally, no complaint was ever filed. You can hardly complain about your sources, when a big part of your job actually demands that you court them, woo them, and make them think of you every time they have a story to tell, and even when they don’t.

So it was part of the risks of the craft that a good number of female police reporters became romantically involved with this police officer, or that local official. Perhaps romantic is too generous a word; often, it was more like two people realizing they both had something the other needed.

Again, the TV people had a clear advantage here over their print brethren. The TV girls, naturally, looked like goddesses to the bottom feeders in print. It was a rare day when a female TV reporter would waft into the press office; on days like those, time would slow to a crawl and the birds would start chirping outside the press office window and the window blinds seemed to open up a little more to let the sunlight in. At least, until the TV reporter opens her mouth. But while the TV girls were obviously more attractive magnets for the maniacs in uniform, their TV persona also offered them some sort of invisible protection. It’s like the beauty queen syndrome; everyone drools after them, but few would actually try to court one. There’s that unsaid and unmentionable feeling that only the big bosses get these types of girls. On the other hand, everyone tries to hit on the girl next door.

TV people also have that “power” that print people don’t have. People know them by their first name, smile at them in the mall, recognize their faces in the crowd. People actually want to be interviewed by them, no matter how silly their questions can sometimes be. What this means is that many sources really want to be meet these journalists. On the other hand, the print guys have to scrape and beg for a short interview. You can see it even now. Shine a bright light, point a camera, and poke a microphone at a minor official, and he starts jabbering giddily, spouting all sorts of quotables to the most inane questions, often in tortured english. Sometimes, you don’t even have to ask a question. Many times, it’s even hard to get them to stop talking. But replace the lights and camera with a reporter with a notepad or a tape recorder, and, unless the source is politically savvy, you’d be lucky if the source even bothers to acknowledge him. What this means is that the female police print reporter sometimes has to put herself at a clear disadvantage, because she has to go the extra mile to be extra nice and friendly and charming. It’s something that is easily misconstrued.

Also, the TV girls naturally move around with an entire TV crew, complete with camera, lights, microphone, and makeup kit. Given this fact of life, the source is seldom alone with the TV reporter. Even if he was, the thought that the camera crew is just waiting outside the door is enough to dampen the libido of many wannabee lotharios. A TV team and its equipment are intimidating to a lot of sources. In contrast, a demure female print reporter will be all alone when she finally bags an appointment with this or that official. She is armed only with a notepad and a pen; no threatening cameras and crew. In all likelihood, she is also a rookie.

Having said all that, there are some female reporters who have managed to walk that thin line and come out on top. These are the reporters who have learned to parry the advances without offending the advancer, who have learned to be just a little flirtatious and charming without appearing inviting. It really is a thin line, and the sharp edge can cut both ways.

There’s that stereotype of the police reporter that we all tried to resist, but eventually fell into as the months went by. The most obvious was that drawl that many of us affected when we spoke on the phone, especially to policemen or other reporters. It was a drawl that sounds halfway between drunk and bored, a tambay’s drawl perhaps, as if to show that I’m cool and unconcerned even if the world ends tonight, but lemme check what’s happening on your side of the world anyway. We’d draw out the word “Sir” into “Seeerrrr….” The tone was set on a deadpan monotone. And of course, there was the cussing and the bragging and the loud voices, and the gambling and the whoring and the petty corruption all around you that you have to treat with a blasé attitude. I stepped on someone’s brains yesterday. Oh really? Was it warm? Or, I was whoring the whole night last night. Today’s another day.

But it was the least obvious that was the more alarming. The experience ate away a little bit of our humanity, each one of us, in different degrees, and few of us would ever admit to it. Anyone who immerses himself deeply into this side of the city absorbs a part of it, and leaves a part of himself as well. The irony is that in losing a bit of our humanity, some of us, I hope, came away a little more human, a little more conscious of our frailties and faults. It was a frightening gamble, because after a while it became clear that many of us simply lost our humanity without gaining anything in return. Remember the idealism of college, where we were taught to wield the mighty power of the pen with great circumspection, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afficted? We who lived in the dark who were supposed to give it light, have begun throwing our own darker shadows.

I remember one night in particular. A man was inconsiderate enough to get stabbed to death. Or, at least he was considerate enough to get stabbed during my watch. I rushed to the Philippine General Hospital with a photographer from another newspaper. I don’t recall why I was even there, since the story would never have made the Chronicle’s pages. Perhaps I had hitched a ride in the photog’s service vehicle.

Anyway, we rushed to the morgue, where the poor fellow lay on a gurney, cold and stiffening. Unfortunately for the photog I was with, the doctors or the first responders had already removed the knife from the dead man's chest. Naturally. What doctor leaves the knife in the chest while attempting treatment?

The photog cussed and swore, and complained of inconsiderate doctors who made life more difficult for working stiffs like him to get good pictures of dead stiffs like that. What good was a photo of a stabbing victim if there was no knife to show? So the photog did the next best thing – he asked the mortician to produce the knife, and the mortician willingly obliged.

In hindsight, I now wonder why the murder weapon was with the mortician in the first place. This was long before the police force created the Scene of the Crime Operatives, or SOCO, and long long before hollywood cooked up CSI.

Okay, the photog told the mortician. Stick it back in. To the mortician’s credit, he hesitated. Then, to my amusement, he stuck the blade back into the knife wound. Thwack. Just like that. No complaints from the victim, of course. And at least the mortician had the decency not to make a new stab wound. There was no one in the room except for me, the photog, the mortician, and the dead guy. The photog snapped happily away, and we left with the knife still sticking out of the man’s body. The guys from that CSI show would have gone into epileptic fits. The fact that I was amused and not shocked spoke volumes of my frame of mind at the time.

There’s also a popular story that went the rounds of the WPD. It’s a fact that many reporters and photogs like to beat up crime suspects who are in police custody. Why do they do it? Perhaps it's considered a rite of passage, perhaps it's a show of mindless machismo; perhaps it's a vent for all the frustrations that have built up from seeing all the mindless blood and gore of Manila at night. Or perhaps it's simply mindless. Whatever the case, it is not unusual for reporters to beat a suspect black and blue, in front of the arresting policemen. Naturally, the suspects cower in fear and don't fight back. I would really hate to be a suspect.

One night, the popular story goes, a reporter rushed to the press office. Hey there’s a crime suspect at the theft and robbery section, he tells the rest. So the reporters and photogs rush to the theft and robbery section, where they come across a man standing there alone. There was no policeman, so naturally, everyone started beating the poor fellow up. And on cue, the policeman comes back from the john, and finds everyone ganging up on the man. Stop, the cop says, that's not the suspect. That’s the victim.

The story always draws a lot of laughs, but it brings home a sticky point. Some reporters like to say that the criminals deserve to be beaten up, especially if it involves crimes against children. I have seen, personally, both reporters and cameramen from print, television, and radio, beating up suspects while police officers watch with delight. Some of them were even my own cameramen. And to be honest, I have, on occasion, been tempted to throw in a few kicks and punches myself. After twenty or so years, I still have not given in to that temptation, but it is always there, lurking, maybe waiting for a moment of weakness. How do I explain that feeling? I don’t consider myself a particularly violent person, although I have seen quite a lot of it delivered to people both deserving and undeserving. But what makes a man want to lash out and beat another man to a pulp? How much motivation does it need? Or is it motivation we really need? Could it be that in our deepest, baser recesses, what we really look for is not motivation, but an excuse. Oh yeah, he’s accused of raping a kid. Then a hand lashes out and connects with a nose or a brow, then another, and a few moments later, a man is barely able to see because of his swelling eyelids. Oh he snatched a purse. And a foot lashes out at a groin. Granted these men have been accused of crimes. But some of those who choose to inflict vigilante punishment on them have, if I recall, been guilty of baser offenses: the reporter who extorts from cops and establishments; or perhaps the photog who uses a masseuse’s body for free by threatening her with his connections.

But more than anything, this country is infamous for a law enforcement system that is so inefficient and ineffective, where there is never a guarantee that the man the cops haul off to the precinct is likely to be the man who deserves to go to jail. Woe to the man who is hauled off in front of the cameras by the police as a suspect – he is just as likely to be innocent as he is guilty.

Anyone who has watched any of the primetime newscasts must by now be familiar with the most common scene in police reporting. Whether the crime is rape, acts of lasciviousness, snatching, or petty theft, the cameras almost always seem to catch the exact moment when the victim and the suspect face off in the police station, and the victim, in a fit of anger, lashes out and slaps or punches the suspect in the face. The suspect reels, but remains silent, with his head bowed in embarassment and submission. Has anyone ever wondered how cameramen can be so skilled in timing that they always catch that money shot? It’s standard fare in police reports. In fact, it’s gotten to the point that it would be unusual if the story doesn’t have that shot.

The truth of the matter is that the suspect is often already sitting in a corner of a dingy cell when the reporters arrive at the station with their cameras and mikes. If the reporter is lucky, the victim is seated in front of the detective’s desk, giving a statement. First question out of the reporter’s lips often is: Where’s the suspect? Then, can you bring him out to face his accuser?

That’s all still peachy at this point. Then come the other commands from the journos – point out the suspect for the cameras! Come closer! Can you turn this way? Then, the inevitable. Is it true he molested you? Are you going to let him get away with that? Well, hit him! This is your chance! On the face!

Usually, and to her credit, the victim hesitates, as if unsure if she is really allowed to do just that. But the cameras are rolling, the lights are on, and the reporters are goading, so it must be acceptable, right? So maybe she lashes out with a nice slap on the suspect’s face. The suspect barely feels it. Or maybe the cameraman wasn’t ready for that shot. Maybe the camera lights weren’t on yet. Or maybe the reporter just isn’t happy enough with that angle. Or that slap. Do it again! Harder! And the victim begins getting in the mood, and draws in before letting loose with a snappier slap. Sometimes, it would take several slaps and punches, or several takes, before the camera teams are happy with their footage, and the suspect is led away to his jail cell, the victim takes her seat again, and the camera team leaves in search of another crime to report, or perhaps another crime to commit. The suspect retires to a corner of his cell, no doubt hoping that there aren’t any more camera teams on duty that night. I would really hate to be wrongly accused of anything when there are newsteams around.

And there was the petty corruption. This was a time when there was still an absolute ban on all forms of pyrotechnics. Typically, policemen would haul in a huge cache of confiscated firecrackers in the weeks running up to Christmas. It was not unusual for reporters covering the story to ask for some "samples" of the confiscated goods, and neither was it unusual for cops to give them away, or take home some for themselves. So whenever there was a big haul of firecrackers, reporters would rush to the precinct responsible for the confiscation to report on this blatant criminal violation of the country’s anti-firecracker laws. Then after the coverage, the reporters, myself included, would often leave with bags full of firecrackers, courtesy of the friendly station commander.

The same courtesy also extends to other less harmless hauls. I remember one night when a reporter came back to the press office with some marijuana. Marijuana, then as now, is illegal. The stuff was confiscated by police from drug addicts somewhere in Manila, and the cops divided the loot and gave some to the reporters. This guy generously offered to light up a joint for the rest of the bunch, but someone wisely pointed out that the press office was right behind the front desk of the WPD, and it may be a bit embarrassing for everyone, especially if we didn’t offer any to the desk officer on duty. So we all went to another empty room elsewhere in the WPD headquarters to try this new stash. Suffice it to say that the first joint I ever tried was smoked inside the headquarters of the Manila Police, courtesy of Manila's Finest. It must have been a particularly fine joint, because I don't even remember getting a buzz.

There’s a certain sadness in covering the police beat that takes a certain kind of reporter to discern. Despite the occasional action, one is always face to face with the ordinary sadness of ordinary life and ordinary death. In fact, the real danger is of death becoming so ordinary to people who are always exposed to it, and therein lies the real sadness. Too many police reporters have become so immune to emotion that they can stick a knife back into a dead body just to make for a better photograph. Its a tragedy partly borne of the stereotypes formed around reporters in general and police and war reporters in particular. If the British stereotype is the stiff upper lip, the reporter stereotype is the stoic, heartless, emotionless, and detached observer. Many take the stereotype a step further, adding cruel, inebriated, loud, and insensitive to the mix of descriptions. Your father died? Tough luck, life is cheap. Your sister got raped? Was she asking for it? Don’t get me wrong; I am describing the stereotypes that a lot of reporters have been trying to fit into. I’m describing what is, not what should be. In covering the joys and travails of humanity, we seem to have lost our own sense of humanity as well.

That’s why you have a lot of reporters who try to swagger like their nuts are too big, who belch loudly, scratch publicly, and use profanity like they were badges of honor, who act like bad boys because they think that's what they have to do to look like reporters. The truth is that the loud ones are usually the more cowardly louts, while the really brave reporters just go about their business quietly. Its like your dick - if its not big enough, you feel the need to keep pointing to it just to remind people you have one.

Most of the stories we generated at night were crime stories, with an occasional feature thrown in. But there were other things we witnessed that never saw print, at least not the way it should have. On many an occasion, we were witness to a practice called zoning. They also call it the “saturation drive,” which makes it sound as harmless as a newspaper drive. What happens is that police operatives cordon off a particular area in, say, a squatter community. Everyone who happened to be in that “zone” was then picked up and hauled off to the police station for questioning. It’s a throwback to the hamletting system established by the Americans during the Vietnam War, adapted to the Philippine counterinsurgency war, and later adapted to the anti-crime fight in urban areas. The logic, if you could call it that, was that you could identify a criminal because of the way he looked, even if he wasn’t performing a crime at that time. Of course the police never put it that way, but it was obvious that that was the logic. Hundreds of bareshirted grimy sweaty men were hauled off like cattle to the nearest precinct to be inspected for gang tattoos or drug paraphernalia and weapons. There, they would squat on the floor, their elbows on their knees, their tattoos screaming in wild red green, purple and blue swirls, their eyes darting around as police picked out their likeliest suspects. Once in a while, some weapons would be found, and an arrest would be made. But for the rest of those unceremoniously dragged off from their families just so they could be “invited for questioning,” it was just another night of harassment by the police. After the zoning incident, they would just be told to go home, as if nothing happened. No apologies necessary. It’s as if to say that it’s just part of our job to treat you like cattle just to make sure the rest of Metro Manila is safe, and it’s part of your role to be get hauled off to the station and be treated like mindless obedient cows. Surprisingly few people ever lodged complaints, even though it was a gross violation of rights. Imagine doing that to residents of ritzy Dasamarinas Village in Makati. Oh the fury and the indignation of the human rights violations! But of course, you won’t find criminals there, right? At least not of this small caliber. They would only be here in Balut, Tondo, plotting with the rest of the great unwashed for the overthrow of the pink-skinned and the freshly scrubbed. Yet like those before us, most of us took the practice for granted, satisfied with just recording the number of arrests and the weapons found, if any, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to arrest and detain an entire community just because we didn’t like the soap they used, or because they couldn’t afford soap at all.

I turned twenty on my first month on the job, in November 1987. For my birthday celebration, Gerry hauled us off to Quiapo for a double feature in one of the seedy moviehouses that featured x-rated inserts in b-movies. That was how I spent my birthday, watching Scorpio Nights and some other forgettable film [who cares about titles? we weren't there to critique the storyline anyway] in a hot and humid moviehouse where most of the audience would rather stay standing than sit on the hard sticky chairs. It’s like walking into a steam room, since the airconditioners were not working, and everyone was sweating from both the ambient temperature and the collective body heat. The guy playing the films didn’t bother with aesthetics. He had randomly spliced assorted x-rated clips of naked men and women with dirty soles [sorry, you can’t help but notice] huffing and puffing away into the double feature, without any regard as to whether the story still made any sense.

These moviehouses were known hangouts of closet queens and ageing male and female prostitutes who, for reasons you can very well imagine, can only peddle their wares in the dark, and Vincent had to fend off advances from people who were getting attracted to his balding pate which shone like a beacon in the moviehouse. The place stank, the air wet and humid, and we felt itchy all throughout the double feature. Afterwards, if I recall correctly, we graduated to a small restaurant in one of Quiapo’s nooks for a quick cheap snack before our editors found out what we were up to.

It was a sad funny way to celebrate a birthday. But two decades later, we would look back at that day and remember it as one of the more memorable birthday celebrations I had. The cheapest, too.

Of my time in the police beat, I remember the Dona Paz tragedy with the most vividness and clarity, and the images always come back easily, perhaps too easily.
That Christmas Eve was particularly memorable, and it didn’t help that every morning for several weeks, I would see the dirty sneakers I had left outside our doorstep and be reminded of things that I would rather forget. I would always see those sneakers, and every time I would promise I would get around to washing the congealed blood off the soles before I finally bring them into the house. It would take months before I finally did that, yet I still did it gingerly, holding the sneakers under a gushing spigot and hoping that the water pressure would be enough to clean the shoes. After that, I think I dunked the pair into a bucket of soapy water and left them there for a few days. But it was not the images that would haunt me. It was the smell, a minor miracle considering how my wife says my olfactory senses died a long time ago. It was a smell that I kept remembering at the oddest and most inconvenient times, as if it was always there lurking, waiting to be resurrected at the slightest trigger. For a while, the memory of that smell terrified me, especially when it came at night.

I also covered much of the hearings by the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA) on the culpability of officials of Sulpicio Lines for the disaster. Sulpicio officers were grilled repeatedly over charges of overloading and negligence. I was given the Marina assignment because the hearings were held in the Marina offices just across the WPD headquarters along UN Avenue.

Much was made of the issue of overloading because it was a safety issue. The Dona Paz was crammed with some 5,000 passengers, but its manifest listed only 1,500 passengers. What this meant was that there were 3,500 other passengers who were not listed in the Coast Guard manifest. What this also meant was that there was a huge likelihood that there were not enough safety devices like lifeboats of lifejackets to go around.

Ship overloaded,
Sulpicio admits
The Manila Chronicle
Jan. 1 1988
By Ed Lingao
Correspondent

An official of Sulpicio Lines, owners of M/V Dona Paz, yesterday virtually admitted that the ill-fated vessel was overloaded when it collided with the oil tanker Vector in Tablas Strait between Marinduque and Mindoro last Dec. 20.
Vicente Gambito, Sulpicio vice president, said they had compiled at least 600 names of passengers who were not included in the manifest.
“We’ve collected around 200 personal lists, with a total of around 600 names,” he said.
The Coast Guard-approved manifest listed 1,523 passengers and 58 crewmen. Only 26 survived the collision, considered the worse peacetime sea disaster.

This particular story, which saw print on the first day of 1988, drew the ire of Sulpicio officials. Days after it came out, one of Chronicle’s business/shipping reporters approached Vincent and myself to tell us that Sulpicio’s VP Vicente Gambito wanted to talk to us in person.

The meeting was arranged in a fancy French restaurant in Paco, Manila, whose name I could not pronounce. Being police reporters, we felt so out of place when we entered the restaurant, as if we had just walked in bare naked. Gambito invited us to a table and, without allowing us to warm our chairs, he proceeded to berate us for what he called inaccurate reporting.

In essence, Sulpicio was contesting our headline that they had admitted to overloading. What they had admitted to, he said, was that they had unlisted and unmanifested passengers. This is not the same thing as overloading. Overloading, he insisted, meant that the ship was no longer shipworthy because of the excess number of passengers on board. Perhaps overcrowding was the correct term.

We just stared at him, dumbfounded. I did not know what to say, or how to argue back. He may have had a point, technically speaking. The ship may have been overcrowded, but the more technical-minded may claim it was not necessarily overloaded. On the other hand, we felt that Sulpicio was splitting hairs to sidestep culpability. The point was that there were three times the number of allowed passengers on the ship. It was not a question of one or two passengers who were not listed in the manifest; it was a question of 3,500 people who were not in the list.

After his monologue, the Sulpicio official just stood up and left us. Apparently, he didn’t think that lowly correspondents deserved too much of his time or presence.

Then there was the question of which ship was responsible for the tragedy. The few survivors said that the Dona Paz rammed into the oil tanker M/T Vector, causing it to spill oil, which then caught fire and destroyed both ships. But Sulpicio would insist that the tanker rammed the left side of the Dona Paz, creating a huge gash that let water in. Panicking passengers rushed to the right side of the ship by instinct, causing it to list to the right and capsize into the burning sea. With both ships rusting at the bottom of the Tablas Straits, the truth may never be known.

The arguments would go back and forth, and litigation would cross continents for the next two decades. A class suit filed by the families of the victims failed to prosper because the filing fee was too large. These families banded together to form the Bulig Bulig Kita movement, or the Let Us Help Each Other movement. I haunted their offices in Quezon City constantly, talking and sympathizing with family members, all the time conscious that there were entire families who could not be represented here because they were all lost at sea.

The dead who were lucky enough to be recovered were placed in sealed metal boxes, which were then crammed inside wooden caskets. Having seen the bloated condition of the bodies in Funeraria Popular, I cannot and do not want to imagine how morticians were able to fit the bodies inside metal containers that could squeeze inside regular caskets.

All told, less than 300 bodies were recovered out of 5,000 souls. A few were returned to Manila, where a common funeral wake was held at the Rizal Memorial Coliseum in Manila. I remember the long lines of caskets on the basketball court of the stadium, with the small square glass window through which one normally views his deceased loved one. But instead of the calm face of the dead, you could only see the smooth burnished surface of galvanized tin. The metal containers began to bulge and leak because of pressure building inside that comes with decomposition, so there was a persistent smell of death. At one point, the Manila City government decided to close off the stadium for a day to fumigate the place and prevent an epidemic. I remember, after everyone had been asked to step out, peering inside the stadium and feeling my hair stand on end; the stadium’s strong vapor lights cut through the fog of chemicals descending on the caskets, creating a surreal scene in the middle of the basketball court. Suddenly, the death of 5,000 people was a very lonely affair.

After twenty years, most of my time as a police reporter is already a blur. I do remember much of the frustration and anger, and the sense of exploitation. We were, after all, asked to do so much, and paid so little. I would be lucky to get a thousand pesos a payday, and I was already considered one of the high earners among the correspondents. I remember, too many times, emerging from the Manila Chronicle office in Bonifacio Drive, or from the WPD headquarters along UN Avenue, and breathing a long heavy sigh. At night, I would try to keep myself busy in between calls to the various precincts and police district headquarters by burying my nose in a book. But you can only read so many pages before someone disrupts your reading with cussing and swearing and farting. It would have been nice to have the mobility to go around Metro Manila looking for enterprise stories at night, something I now encourage among reporters. But at that time, that was practically impossible for a solitary correspondent who had to cover the entire Metro Manila at night without a vehicle, a cellphone, pager, or radio, or an allowance, or even a guaranteed retainer. It was passive police reporting, I admit. The tabloids and TV reporters had it better; they had a service vehicle with a driver, two way radios, and a man in each district headquarters. At first I would hitch a ride with the tabloid jeeps whenever something broke. Later, I would hitch a ride more regularly with an ABS-CBN cameraman, Jun Lontoc. I remember that I would at times join the other tabloid reporters on their coverages, not because the story had any value to the Chronicle, but because it gave me a closer glimpse at another facet of life that I never see. Or perhaps I was already bored. On these trips, I would explore the dark alleys and warrens of Tondo and see a life that was worlds apart from the gated subdivisions of Quezon City.

I remember, after getting tired of swatting mosquitos while reading my book in the press office, emerging from the WPD headquarters for a breath of fresh air. I’d plop my ass down on the steps fronting the headquarters and take out a cigarette, my millionth for the night. There, I would watch the lights of vehicles flash by, count the roaches and the cigarette butts on the ground, and glance at the occasional crook that the cops would bring in, morbidly hoping that he had committed a crime sufficiently grave to be worthy of the Chronicle. I had to be selective with the crooks I cover; the Chronicle doesn’t write about just any crook and crime. So there I would stay for around half an hour, swatting at the mosquitos on the steps of the WPD, killing time until I had to return to swatting the mosquitos inside the press office.

By one in the morning, I knew there was already no way I could force a remat of the Chronicle even if the sky fell down. By that time, the night editor would also be either dead drunk or fast asleep or both. The newspaper had already been printed, and was about to be bundled off to newspaper distributors in Manila’s port area. That’s the only time I would shoulder my pack, step out of the WPD entrance one last time for that day, and walk briskly to Taft Avenue for a jeepney ride to Quezon City. If I was lucky, which was seldom, I could get a ride from Taft to faraway Tandang Sora in Quezon City. If I was unlucky, I would have to get another ride in Quiapo. At that time of the night, drivers wait for their jeeps to fill-up before being dispatched, so I had a lot of time to observe my fellow passengers, partly out of curiosity and partly out of the need to identify potential muggers early. This was long before the age of the call centers. The people who rode the jeeps at that time of the night were interesting people indeed. Some were bargirls getting off early, still heavy with make-up and the smell of cigarette smoke; others were night shift workers, tired and wasted, their heads lolling around before dropping down to their chest or on the poor fellow beside them before they suddenly jolt awake. You know the man beside you in the jeep is dead tired when he reaches up and grasps the rail on the jeepney ceiling, rests his head on the crook of his elbow and instantly falls asleep without ever letting go of the rail. I’ve done that myself several times, and thankfully, never had my pocket picked. And of course there were those who are headed home after a night of carousing, red-eyed and with breath stale with beer and yosi.

I would get off at the corner of Tandang Sora and Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City. From there, I would walk some three or so kilometers to my home inside one of the subdivisions deep inside Tandang Sora. It wasn’t really a very long walk, although it could get tiresome if you have to do it at the end of each working day. By that time, it’s already 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning, and the tricycles were no longer allowed inside most of Quezon City’s gated subdivisions. I could take a cab, but I couldn’t even afford the flag-down rate, much more take a cab every night. So every night, rain or shine, I would have to take a 30 to 45 minute walk home.

The walk was also an opportunity to de-stress and disengage from the world I left just an hour ago. I would play games with my mind, staying off the road and trying to blend with the shadows, avoiding the lamplight. I suppose there was a certain logic in my madness; I wanted to avoid getting spotted early by potential muggers. In those years, Tandang Sora was pretty much unpopulated, with tall cogon grass dominating both sides of the street. Everytime a vehicle would come up behind me, I would look down at the lengthening shadows so I could, without turning around, see if anyone was behind me.

On bad nights, it would rain hard. Since I had never made it a practice to bring an umbrella, I would just put on a jacket and a floppy hat, and walk home just like any other night except that I had to be more careful that passing cars don’t bump into me. I would get home soaking wet and shivering, but somehow feeling a little cleaner. I’d strip off my clothes and sit down with a heavy sigh.

And it wasn't a sigh of relief. With that sigh comes a question oft repeated by many caught in this kind of life: would there ever be more to my life than chasing ambulances and making a living off the dying? Such is a reporter's life, but coming from college, it was easy to rebel.
After half a year, I finally did. I told Cris that I had had enough of being exploited, enough of living like a bat. So I resigned, vowing never to return to journalism, and promising to find a job that would make plenty of money with as little work possible. Chris had a knowing smile on her face. She said, ok, just come back when you want. Maybe she knew something I didn't.

From journalism, I jumped to corporate public relations. I joined the PR machine of the defunct Magnolia, a company that made ice cream, fruit juices, and soft drinks. The pay was good, the working hours were much better, and the people actually looked and smelled clean. I lasted two months.

I have nothing against corporate PR, but it was extremely difficult for me to make the transition from my world to theirs. Their world revolved around ice cream and fruit juice, and the never-ending battle against the competition. Of course, much later I would get a taste of that myself with the never ending battle between ABS-CBN and GMA, but that was far in the future. I was with people who would rather die of thirst than drink a glass of the competition's softdrink. I was supposed to think Magnolia every waking minute, and even when I was asleep. It was too much for me.

So when I came crawling back to Cris, she gave me that knowing smile again, as if to say, we’ve been waiting for you, you lasted longer than we expected. Without a question, she threw me back into the fray, and I started getting more assignments, even from the lifestyle section. It was almost inconceivable, a police reporter writing for Sunday lifestyle, the chronicle's famed features section.

Things changed somewhat when I returned to the Chronicle. I was still assigned to cover the WPD, but I was beginning to get more assignments during the daytime. That may not sound like a big deal to most, but it was at the time. Daytime meant making the normal deadlines, and getting to write more stories, and actually seeing them in print. Daytime work also meant I wouldn’t have to live with the ghouls at midnight, and I could have some of my life back.

After months of living like a bat among cavemen, it was refreshing to work with daylight all around you. Items were so much clearer, although issues were not. Why, now you could actually see the gunshot wound! There was a lot more variety in the kinds of stories you could tackle. In working the day shift, I began covering less of the dead and more of the living.

Nemesio Prudente was one of the luckiest persons in Manila. He’s been the subject of countless assassination attempts. Now, those two statements may sound like a contradiction. But the fact is that despite so many attempts on his life, the president of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines lived through all of them, to simply expire of old age in a Cavite hospital in March 2008.

When I first joined The Chronicle, Prudente had just been the target of another ambush attempt. On November 10 1987, unknown gunmen shot his car full of holes near the Lambingan bridge in Santa Ana as he rode to his office at the PUP campus in Santa Mesa. In doing so, they also put some holes in Prudente himself, but not enough to kill him. It was Prudente’s lawyer who was killed in that ambush.

Then on June 30 1988, or less than a year after the first ambush, gunmen peppered his convoy with some more bullets. Prudente was badly wounded, but survived the attempt. Three of his bodyguards who were riding in the lead car did not.

It was puzzling for the uninitiated. Professional hitmen trying to kill a school president? Was it an argument over grades? Prudente had created a lot of enemies among the resurgent right even before the shaky Cory years. Prudente had served as PUP president from 1962 to 1972, when it was still known as the Philippine College of Commerce. That early, the nationalist and outspoken Prudente, who encouraged activism and nationalism in the school, was already targeted by elements from the Marcos military and police. So when Martial Law was declared in 1972, Prudente was one of the first to be arrested and thrown in jail.

When Cory took power in 1986, Prudente was reappointed to his old position in the renamed Polytechnic University of the Philippines, or PUP. Prudente never forgot his old mission of spurring the student body into a more active and militant role in politics and society. But his enemies never forgot him either. Rightist elements suspected that Prudente had allowed the left to use the PUP campus as a base for leftist rebels and assassination squads as well.

It was a hairy time to belong to the legal left. Rightist hitmen were assassinating leftist leaders and labor leaders. Kilusang Mayo Uno chairman Rolando Olalia was tortured and mutilated before he was finally murdered, his body dumped in an empty lot in Antipolo with his underwear stuffed in his mouth. Young activist Lean Alejandro also met the same fate. Rightists in the police and military, the same people who tried to topple Marcos before they were saved by People Power, were now putting immense pressure on the Aquino government to let go of suspected leftists in her cabinet. The pressure would occasionally find an outlet in the numerous coup attempts against Cory. In the first three years after Edsa, the Cory government always seemed to be tottering on the brink of collapse, as the security forces tasked with defending the new democracy were always of suspect loyalty. Two years into the new government, Cory had to use a pressure valve. Acceding to demands from the right, she let go of Labor Secretary Augusto “Bobbit” Sanchez, Presidential Spokesman Rene Saguisag, and Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo. This stabilized the situation somewhat, at least until the next coup attempt in 1989.

But the rightists weren’t the only ones with death squads. This was also the heydey of the Alex Boncayao Brigade, the communist hitsquad more popularly known as the sparrow unit. Young sparrows would case police and military officers accused of crimes against the people, and shoot them down in broad daylight when the opportunity arose.

This had also been the problem in Davao City in the last years of the Marcos regime. The sparrows had free reign over the city, assassinating their enemies at will – at least until government found a solution: vigilante justice.

Local police and military officials organized vigilante squads and hunted the sparrows down. Thus was organized the infamous Alsa Masa, the Force of the Masses, a group of paramilitaries answerable only to their police and military handlers. The Alsa Masa movement was whipped into a frenzy by a popular AM radio announcer in Davao named Jun Pala, who paraded around town with a pistol tucked into his waist.

Borrowing from the experience of the Alsa Masa, the Manila Police under then Brig. Gen. Alfredo Lim organized its own vigilante force, headed by the colorful police commander of the Tondo District.

Colonel Romeo Maganto is neither telegenic nor photogenic. Yet he was probably the best known and most sought after [at least by the media] policeman in Metro Manila in the late eighties because of his quotable quotes and his propensity for staging dramatic performances for the press. Maganto is short, dark and stocky, and tends to talk to everyone like a policeman interrogating a suspect. But in that sense, he was perfect for his new role as the godfather of Metro Manila’s anti-communist vigilante force. To him, it seemed, everyone was guilty of something until proven innocent. Communists were peering from every street corner, just waiting for the right time to assault us with quotes from Karl Marx or Mao’s little red book. Like most people, he probably wasn’t really a rabid anti-communist; he was just a man who rabidly went after whoever his superiors said were the enemy. Thus, the raids on squatter colonies and the “zoning” became more frequent, as police operatives turned the squatter shanties inside out to hunt down the sparrows. In all these raids, no sparrow was ever arrested, although a whole lot of people lost a lot of sleep, not because they were guilty of assassinating enemies of the people, but because they simply didn’t smell good enough. But then again, who could complain? Certainly not Manila’s jaded press.

I remember one weekend, when Maganto invited media to his Police Station 1 in Tondo for a photo-op of him and his men training his vigilantes in the fine art of killing people. In a makeshift shooting range at the back of the station, Maganto and assorted wannabees hefted .45 caliber pistols and bravely dry-fired at paper targets for the cameras, pretending they were criminals, leftists, and perhaps mediamen. Naturally, some mediamen with their pot-bellies and their oversized sunglasses, joined in to show off their pieces. They lined up as well and proudly dry-fired at the paper targets, pretending they were evil editors and deskmen, or cheapskate police station commanders. Of course, Maganto, with his grim countenance and his shiny .45 pistol, ended up splashed all over the front pages of Metro Manila’s dailies the next day. I suppose that was also his intention. But Maganto also miscalculated. The ensuing outcry from the photographs of armed vigilantes in Metro Manila streets forced the government to clamp down on Maganto, preventing him from arming his gang of volunteers. In the end, Maganto agreed to just arm his volunteers with nightsticks. Still, the zoning of squatter communities continued.

Thus, it was hardly a surprise that someone with that bad an aim would want to kill Prudente that badly. Months after the 1987 assassination attempt on Prudente, Attorney Artemio Sacaguing of the National Bureau of Investigation, the agency tasked with investigating the incident, would confide to reporters their initial finding – that the ambushes were masterminded by a very senior police official. His only other clue – the official was one of the highest ranking officers in Manila. Needless to say, that finding was never reflected in the official NBI report. In 1999, almost ten years after the second attempt on Prudente’s life, five Manila policemen were convicted for the Prudente ambush. With that, authorities declared the case closed, although one would wonder why five ordinary policemen would take it upon themselves to repeatedly try to kill a prominent leftist; somehow it felt like authorities took the easy route of bagging the triggermen while letting the mastermind get away.

ed's note: this is the first ten pages of one chapter of a book I'm writing. Please feel free to comment. Will post other pages and chapters later. The book is tentatively titled Correspondent. Please feel free to post comments on the writing and the details. If you were mentioned in the first few pages, that should tell you something about your age :)

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Two hundred years before the Christian Century, the Roman Empire saw the birth of the earlier kind of opiate for the masses. In Rupert Matthew’s book The Age of the Gladiators, Rome’s patriarchs and politicians adopted and modified the Etruscan tradition of sacrificing men to honor their esteemed dead. Thus was born the Roman munus [munera in the plural form], the bloody public fights by gladiators that had started off as “obligations to honor the dead” but soon became instruments to entertain and enrich the living.

The first gladiators were ordinary slaves, thrown into a makeshift arena in the public market with crude but lethal weapons. But much like today’s TV audience, the Roman public soon grew tired of the simple hacking and slashing, and began to demand more, in today’s terms, production value from those who sponsored the games. Realizing that ordinary slaves untrained in the martial arts died too fast to keep the crowds sufficiently entertained, the sponsors of these munera began to stage even more elaborate shows, featuring gladiators trained in special schools, fighting in specially built arenas that featured trapdoors, wild animals, and exotic weapons. Matthew writes that some of these veteran gladiators soon became entertainers as well, spinning and leaping and sometimes juggling their weapons to the delight of the crowds, even though a simple hack and slash would have sufficed.

The rich and powerful who sponsored these games also realized the power they had over the Roman mob. The holding of an extravagant and much celebrated munus would almost guarantee a man’s election to high public office. This was, after all, the era where Rome was defined by two words, and they were not Republic and Empire, but Bread and Circus. It could also guarantee an unpopular Emperor’s hold on power. Soon, rich families were spending fortunes for the smallest excuse to have a munus, no matter that the deceased to be honored probably died several years ago. Several Roman Generals took this route to become dictator of Rome. Roman Emperors emptied the coffers of the treasury to hold fights that lasted for weeks and involved thousands of gladiators. Gaius Julius Ceasar even flooded a portion of Rome and staged naval battles using real, although scaled-down warships.

The rich Roman businessman, patriarch, or politician who sponsored the gladiatorial fight, he who wanted to woo and awe the public with a garish display of blood and gore, was called an editor, from the Latin phrase E DITUS, or to put forward. The editor had yet another power; in the event a gladiator was severely wounded or disarmed in the ring, the editor alone had the power of life and death over the poor fellow. The mob of course needs to make its opinion known – a clenched fist for a missus, or a reprieve and a chance to fight another day, or a stabbing motion with the thumb, to mean no mercy. No thumbs up or thumbs down, as the popular myth went. The editor would invariably follow public opinion, since it was to court public opinion that he spent for the munus in the first place.

Thus, a gladiator’s life or death depended on the whims of one man called the editor, who, depending on his scruples, may choose to challenge the mob’s wisdom, or surrender to its appetite for entertainment.

After two decades in print and television, it all begins to make sense.

----------------------------------------------------

October, 1987

I'm not really sure why I chose to apply with the Manila Chronicle. I could have tried the Inquirer, which had a much bigger circulation. But the Chronicle sounded pretty prestigious, with a nice line under the masthead that read: Number One in Readership Quality. It was also another good way of saying we didn’t have the circulation. It was basically a business-political broadsheet, while the Inquirer was called a tabloid in broadsheet form, even by its own reporters. Of course I could have just been lazy - the editor in chief, the respected Amando Doronila, was a cousin of my mother.

Not that I expected to be allowed to be lazy. I was a correspondent, and correspondents, as I said, were paid 12 pesos per column inch, not for stories that you submit, but for stories that see print. With that kind of a deal, no amount of nepotism would get me a bigger salary. It didn’t even guarantee a fixed salary. It meant hard work, good writing, and a good nose for news.

My first boss was Cris Cerdena, a petite young lady who manhandled all the correspondents. She was the metro editor, which meant that, for all the correspondents, she was either the Virgin Mary or God Almighty. She gave me a cursory exam, stuffed my biodata under a pile of papers, and inflicted me onto the world. She also gave me my first assignment, which was an innocuous feature on the flora being planted on the center islands of Roxas Boulevard that would later come out on the second to the last page of the Chronicle sometime in October 1987. The story struck me as somewhat odd. Why would anyone want to read about flowering plants in the middle of the old Dewey Boulevard, I asked myself as I balanced in the middle of the island while vehicles whizzed by on both sides. At best, I hoped it was a test, to see if I could make an uninteresting topic somewhat vaguely interesting. At worst, it could mean that my editors thought I was as useful to them as a calachuchi was to a truck driver during rush hour.

It was my first byline. I think my mom even clipped the boxed article, although I’ve since lost it. No big deal really, except that the next time I was peeing in the john, the old man Doronila would unzip at the urinal beside me, and let fly more than just his afternoon coffee. Good feature, Doro said, except that there was a complaint. Complaint? Controversy over calachuchis along Roxas boulevard? What gives?

Your plants, Doro said. A plant expert called to say that the plants on the accompanying picture were not calachuchis. I zipped up as calmly as I could and told him that the people who planted them said they were calachuchis, although frankly I wouldn't know the difference between a tossed salad and a venus flytrap. Besides, I didn’t pick the photo that came out with the story. The accompanying photo may really have been wrong. But the point was made - you never believe everything they tell you.

Chris stuck me in the Western Police District, which was a relatively good beat for a police reporter. My partner was Vincent Atos, a young correspondent/photog who often gets mistaken for a Japanese journalist because of his chinky eyes, round face, and his helpless stutter. In the beginning I felt like Vincent resented my intrusion into his territory. Correspondents can be very territorial, especially since they only get paid per column inch and every story they file counts. Vincent would eventually warm up, and we would get along with the rest of the gang just fine. Later, it turned out that Vincent was simply quiet and taciturn towards everybody, at least until you get him laughing, after which his stuttering would be overtaken by his helpless giggling.

I said the WPD was a pretty good beat because it’s the anchor of Metro Manila police reporting. On a given night, Manilenos seem to like giving their police force the greatest number of beatings and stabbings than the rest of the other districts combined. Proof of this was the fact that Manila had an entire police district all to itself, while other police districts like, for example, the Northern Police District, had jurisdication over three or four towns. There was a major hitch though - I got the late afternoon and night shift. What this meant, in an era that preceded the pagers and the cellphones, was that I would only get published if my story was big enough to rouse the night editor from his drunken stupor to "remat" or change the front page. In other words, it’s either a breaking story big enough for the front page, or it wasn’t big enough to see print at all. At that time, the front page closed much earlier, and changing the front page was a mighty affair that took a great deal of arguing, cajoling, and threatening. This was before it was a fad to have a computer in the newsroom; everyday, the clackety clack of dozens of typewriters was the music of the newsroom, and it was a point of pride for a correspondent to have a new ribbon or a fresh scroll of newsprint in his old typewriter.

What this meant was that, on a normal day, I would almost certainly not get printed. Vincent would get the day stories that would make the first edition. In addition, stories that happened the night before that were not big enough to tickle the night editor’s fancy were written and re-angled by Vincent for the first edition. Working the night shift was really a losing proposition for a broadsheet correspondent, although it meant big bucks for correspondents of the evening tabloids. The trick, I learned, was to churn out features and stories behind the headlines, which they lapped up. After a while, they started giving me the anchor of the front page, the bottom part of the page that usually had a news feature.

I was also lucky because these were extremely interesting times. Gringo Honasan had just tried to kick Cory Aquino out of Malacanang, and the hunt was on for the poster boy of RAM. So “happily”, once in a while, a bomb would go off at night, a cache of weapons would be discovered during a late night raid. These events kept me alive, and kept the night editor grumbling. The Chronicle also had a concession to the poor correspondents that would often be helpful. Many times, a story would be bylined by several names: staffmembers who are senior reporters who get a regular monthly pay, and correspondents who live on the column inch. The paper's policy went like this - with stories that are jointly bylined by a correspondent and a staffmember, the correspondent gets paid for the entire length of the story regardless of how much he contributed to it. For example, if the editors wrap two paragraphs from me with a 20-paragraph story from staffmember Patrick Paez, I get paid for the entire 22 paragraphs. On a busy month, I could squeeze into the headlines almost every other day.

Here’s a good example – my first real story for the national page. Since I covered Manila, I also covered the Red Cross, whose offices were along Bonifacio Drive. Less than a week after getting “hired” by the Chronicle, Cris told me that a landslide had occurred in Kalinga Apayao. Now, I had no idea where Kalinga Apayao was, or whether it was part of the Philippines. But the instructions were simple enough – call up the Red Cross, and see what details they have. So I picked up the phone and did just that. A few details here and there, and I got my first banner story without even leaving the office

LANDSLIDE
KILLS 40 IN
KALINGA

By Ed Lingao
Correspondent
The Manila Chronicle Oct. 28 1987

Forty people were buried alive in a landslide in Kalinga Apayao, triggered by the heavy rains of typhoon “Pepang,” the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC) reported yesterday.

Evelyn Litap, Kalinga Apayao Red Cross administrator, said the landslide hit Barangay Macarian Balatoc in Pasil, near Tinglayan, forcing at least 12,812 inhabitants to flee.

Tinglayan was rocked by earthquakes last June.

Litap added that 58 families were rendered homeless by the typhoon in Tabuk, the capital town, and are now staying in a schoolbuilding.

The story went on for some eight more inches, much of it details from other staffmembers. I don’t even remember how much of the words were mine, and how much were the editor’s. I was so happy to get a banner story that I didn’t care that I never heard of Kalinga, and would never imagine sticking my nose there. Five years later, I would finally visit Kalinga Apayao, and come home with my tail between my legs.

Before the 15th or the 30th of the month, the correspondents would start collecting their published stories and pasting them on sheets of bond paper to submit to the library. The librarians would then take out their rulers and measure the column inches, for payment by the cashier. It should be a pretty honest arrangement, except that editors sometimes neglect to put the byline.
In cases like that, the librarians just take your word that it’s your unbylined story, or they ask the editor. Once in a while, some correspondents would use this system to pad their earnings; its not hard to blame them, since the paper requires them to work seven days a week with no allowances or guarantees that their work would be used. Things came to a head when the editors caught a correspondent with a heavily padded submission. Apparently, this particular police correspondent wasn't a very good cheater - some of the articles he submitted to the library were clipped from the foreign news section.

The Chronicle newsroom was a large, old fashioned affair, with the news editor Rolly Fernandez seated in the middle and everything else radiating outwards like spokes on a wheel. Well, that was the general idea. Honestly, the physical newsroom arrangement looked more like domino tiles run amuck. Rolly was a salt and pepper type of a guy. We didn’t really get to talk to him as much, us being lowly correspondents and bottom feeders. But we build myths and legends around people we see often but seldom get to talk to. Like we do with the Pope, I guess. In our minds, we painted Rolly as a gentle, fatherly guy, who strokes his mustache as he ponders on the wonders of the universe or figures out which correspondent to send to the morgue, literally or figuratively. He was probably sports minded in a couch-potato way, quiet and reserved until liberated by alcohol, with an occasional crack of wit. On the surface, and this is where our imaginations really flourished [we are, after all, supposed to be writers], he looked so much like the basketball player Mon Fernandez that we decided he was probably a brother of the cager. Decades later, with Rolly manning the Inquirer Baguio bureau and the rest of us dispersed elsewhere, we realized that most of our guesses were correct. Except for the last guess – no one bothered to confirm it, as if afraid to destroy the myth.

Characters were legion in the newsroom. There was Cris, my boss. In the pecking order of things in the newsroom, she was still somewhere in the bottom rung, handling the Metro section. Which is to say, most of the editors probably picked on her. So logically, she picked on us. Her pen was eloquent, her appetite overwhelming, and her mood swings legendary. Woe to any reporter who gets her goat when she’s just hit a bump with her boyfriend-photog, a ladies man named Gino.

Then there was Rusty, a gentle man with a jagged name but a smooth literary and journalistic style. Rusty is the quintessential deskman, the type you would cast in a 50s movie as a newspaper editor with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth. In fact, with his salt and pepper flattop, he could pass off as Peter Parker’s mean-spirited newspaper editor in the Spiderman movie series, if he just adopts a mean disposition and puts on a lot more weight and height. He just looked so… newsy in an editor kind of way. When I came into the Chronicle, he must have been in his fifties already, although it’s really hard to tell. He was, and two decades later, still is, single but married to his journalism. He was, and maybe still is, in his fifties, a never aging icon in a newsroom. During the day, he would consume vast amounts of copy with the intensity of a brain surgeon, proving himself to be one of the best wordsmiths this side of the south harbor. At night, after the newspaper has been put to bed [yes, that’s the term we use, no malice there], he would graduate with the rest of the desk, Cris included, to a Malate bar to consume vast amounts of alcohol, still with the intensity of a brain surgeon. Rusty apparently believes in doing everything with passion.

There were plenty of other quirky characters that we bottom feeders got to observe from a distance, Doro being the least of them with his big pipe and an aussie drawl so hard to understand that you simply nod and say yes sir to whatever he says and hope that he wasn’t asking for your name. Alan Robles with his sharp wit that would leave us in stitches; The golden girls [no reference to age here] Malou and Sheila who were high up in the pedestal for us along with the Dalai Lama. Then there were the disciples, also known as staffmembers – Patrick Paez, who was later to transfer to television; Lito Zulueta, or Lito Zu, perpetually wagging his finger skyward and pontificating endlessly on religion, morals, or literature, a quirk we quickly attributed to his apparent lack of a sex life.

And there was Manny Mogato. Ahhhh who could forget Manny Mogs, a bear of a defense reporter who would fall asleep while seated in the front row during a high level press conference and proceed to snore like a rusty sawmill. Fellow reporters like to recall an incident where Manny fell asleep during a press conference of President Fidel Ramos. Naturally, Manny chose to sit at the front row. Naturally, too, Manny began to snore. Loud. With a grating crashing scraping sound that reverberates from the bottom of Manny’s generous belly before bubbling out of his equally generous lips; it’s a sound that would send war veterans running for cover. It was so loud that even the President was for a moment unsure what to do - ignore the incessant rumbling that was loud enough to make NORAD raise the alert to DEFCON 4, or call a cease-fire and declare an impromptu siesta? In the end, FVR, ever the suave media manager, and having endured Manny’s quirks when he was still Secretary of National Defense, simply smiled at the embarrassed reporters and quipped that Manny appears to have fallen asleep while the President of the nation was holding court.

And here is where Manny works his magic. Manny immediately jolts awake, raises his hand, and asks a smart follow-up to a question that had been asked while he appeared to be fast asleep. It’s something he does often. Apparently, Manny has mastered the art of listening and absorbing data even during deep sleep. Minus the snoring, it’s a talent every reporter wishes he had.

There was one more character in the Chronicle story, although he was never in the newsroom, at least while I was there. There was a homeless vagrant who inhabited the small crowded parking lot of the Chronicle offices. He had long dirty matted hair, and his face and rail-thin body were long stained with grease and dirt that no amount of rainfall could wash away. He was there, rain or shine, night of day. At times I would catch him shivering in the rain, curled up under a tree. Everytime I was in the Chronicle, he was there in the parking lot, an unofficial parking attendant of sorts who was tolerated by the Chronicle guards. The Chronicle staff had named him Rambo, for no apparent reason other than he probably looked as bad as Rambo after a torture session. His vocabulary also appeared to be as rich as Rambo’s. On occasion, he would be helpful, guiding cars that were backing up inside the crowded parking lot. Once, I learned too late that he had just learned the gestures of a parking attendant without necessarily understanding them. One time I brought my dad’s car to the office, I followed his hand gestures and promptly backed into a tree. I leaned out the window to chastise him, only to see that he was still gesturing to me to back up even though my bumper had already acquainted itself with the tree.

The scuttlebutt was that Rambo used to be a deskman for the Chronicle. Of course that wasn’t really likely, and Geny Lopez probably wouldn’t have liked the idea of one of his wordsmiths sleeping on the pavement. Not good for morale. Still, it was the popular myth that went the rounds, and terrified the young employees of the newsroom. Here, in the parking lot, was proof positive that journalism was for saints and/or madmen, and a reminder that you often can’t really tell the difference between the two, not even with their clothes or their smell. But if it was terrifying for young reporters, imagine the impact of this message on the older deskmen like Rusty - Rambo the deskman was driven mad by bad copy. Beware, the wrongly used word is really mightier than the sword.

As for the correspondents, we had our own little corner by the entrance of the newsroom, where the ricketiest and most obsolete typewriters were set up. It was always a mess, and no one owned any particular table or typewriter. In fact, correspondents had no right to own anything, least of all their time. The first thing any correspondent does when he gets to the newsroom is to locate a free roll of newsprint and scroll it into a free typewriter. In those days, we didn’t type on bond paper – that’s too expensive for the type of copy we churned out. Our typing paper came in rolls from the press downstairs, in brown newsprint with the regular width of 8 inches, ending in a hard cardboard roll. It sort of reminds one of toilet paper, which in itself may be a hidden message, since we use it for our copy. It was actually a practical way of doing things, since correspondents tended to have great difficulty choosing a way to start their stories with. It is not unusual to hear a load groan, and a tearing sound as a correspondent ripped off the first two inches of his roll. Later, after the copy is submitted to Chris, we would hear, from her side of the newsroom, an even louder groan, with sounds much similar to the ripping of hair and gnashing of teeth.

This was when correspondents [and reporters] would still come to the office to file their stories. Since correspondents never seem to earn enough, they usually don’t have the money to commute to the Manila newsroom from Malabon or Pasig just to type out a story that may or may not be used anyway. A lot of copy was turned in through phoners. This was way before the age of the fax machine, and eons from the internet age. Eventually, deskmen tended to develop that funny crick or angle in their necks from cradling the phone and shouting at correspondents over scratchy phone lines. They also sometimes develop a tendency to talk out of the corner of their mouths, a result of doing much of their business over the phone.

We lowly correspondents often kept to ourselves, murmuring and whispering in the corner behind the hulking typewriters, dreaming of a day when we would be regularized, or at least, get a new typewriter ribbon. For many of us, many typewriter ribbons would pass us by, but the day of regularization would never come. Once in a while, an odd staffmember or two would grace us with their presence, and we would stare wide-eyed and gape in wonder at these mythical beings who received regular paychecks.

This was our newsroom, circa 1987. Computers were still far in the future; computers were for launching ICBMs and solving the mysteries of the universe. Typewriters were for writing. Liquid paper worked too slowly. And given the vast amounts of corrections necessary, you may as well use a paintbrush. The trashcan was much more efficient. You literally tore out whole paragraphs, cut and pasted lines, and if really unlucky, the copy editor would summon you, and in front of all your peers, ask you in a voice dripping with sarcasm to sit beside her and just tell her the whole story from the start so she can write it from scratch.

It was difficult adjusting from the colorful adventures of college to the dark seedy life in the night shift. College, after all, clothed us with that feeling of invulnerability and omnipotence, as if we could change the world a different way each day. But reality was different; it was here where I learned that the police beat would change a small part of you each day, in ways you would never have imagined or noticed. During the daytime, the press office was peopled with colorful, cussing, belching and farting police reporters of all size and shapes, and smells. Once in a while, a reporter would throw his gun on the table, use language so colorful that you don't have to know the dialect to get the message, and hit another guy on the head. This was on a good day. On a bad day, there weren't any people around at all, which meant that everyone was out, and that you were getting scooped.

The Manila Press Office was a hole in the wall just behind the front desk of the Manila Police headquarters along UN Avenue. A swinging glass door would bring you to a small narrow room dominated by a wooden table topped with fake wood, with benches on both sides. A television set sits on a shelf above an annex room, that holds several small wooden lockers. Sometimes, a group of reporters would shut the door to the annex so they can make their deals in private; other times, a reporter would bring a lady in and shut the door. On the other side of the main room is an anteroom with a cement toilet. Although the toilet was the smallest part of the press office, the whole place reeked of stale urine and sweat. Despite the smell, some reporters would conduct their secret business here, away from prying eyes.

The favorite pastime then was the game of dominoes. For some reason, cards never seemed to have caught on. One would almost assume that rough and tumble veterans of the police beat would play poker every night in a haze of cigarette smoke. But no. WPD’s press corps preferred arranging and rearranging small black wooden tiles and putting white dots end to end. Perhaps it had to do with the solid feel of the wooden tiles, which you could slam on the wooden table with a hard satisfying clack during a particularly heated bout. Somehow, slamming cards on the table didn’t seem intimidating enough.

I remember Teddy Laway and Teddy Junior, the father-son tandem of the Journal group. Teddy Laway got his nickname from his propensity for showering everyone within a three feet radius with a healthy splatter of saliva and digestive juices. And that’s when he's not yet excited. He looked like he was born here in the Manila police press office, and grew old here; most of the police characters from both sides of the fence seemed to know him. He’s been in the police beat so long that some of the veteran policemen probably learned the ropes from him. It didn't matter that he didn't seem to care much about writing his stories. Often, I would hear him dictate his facts to his editor over the telephone. Clearly, his desk editors did the writing for him. A lot of reporters during that time didn't know a verb if it tried to hit them in the face. There were plenty of reporters who were former photographers, who, before that, were former drivers. That’s because some editors didn't mind asking the driver to take a photo when the photographer was absent; and when the reporter was absent, editors didn’t mind asking the temporarily promoted photog to get details and ask questions as well. Blink long enough, and your driver could end up with a byline. Naturally, the quality of reportage suffers. Still, many editors would rather rewrite a badly written story than deal with a cub reporter who can't get the story at all. It’s not to say that the college grads were better journalists, or more morally discriminating. There were some reporters from prestigious Catholic universities who reinforced the idea that a good education won’t necessarily make you a better person; it could, given the right circumstances, however, make you a better crook.

His son, of course, was Teddy Junior, also known as Bong and it seemed that his father made sure he was born here as well. Father and son would work together, copying stories from each other and from other reporters. Often, they didn’t act like father-son at all. I would hear them curse or shout at each other like decent competitors would. And there was Angel from the Manila Bulletin. If people named their babies based on first impressions, Angel's parents must have had a healthy dose of irony. The guy was big, black, and scary looking in all senses of the word, with eyes that glared at you even when he smiled. He seemed to prefer sitting at the end of the table, although it may have been because his large size wouldn’t let him squeeze onto the benches on either side. He was gentle to cubs like myself, but otherwise he could practically threaten to sit on anyone who dared cross swords or words with him.

And there were Edong Reyes and Edd Reyes, both veteran photogs for the Journal group. It was confusing to get their names right at first, until we got to calling Edd Reyes "Edd Baba", for reasons I no longer have to expound on. Edong Reyes was a class act on his own. He was as rough as the roughest could get, and he could cuss like Donald Duck on steroids. Rumor had it that he lost a testicle when a grenade exploded near him during coverage of a rally in Mendiola, although I don't recall anyone ever mustering the courage to ask him if it was true. Long after I left the police beat, I was somewhat flattered to learn that he still remembers my name. He would greet me whenever I dropped by the press office. It was only later I realized that it shouldn’t have been too hard, since we had the same first names.

There was also Macon. How can I forget Macon. A small, fragile-looking girl reporter for one of Manila’s tabloids, she was crippled by polio at a young age. Yet she had a character and stamina that were hard as nails. Every day, well into the night, she would do the rounds of the WPD, scrabbling around with a crab-like walk that would have shamed the lazier reporters into doing some real legwork. She didn’t just limp; her polio was far too advanced for a mere limp. One of her legs was so badly deformed that you had to give her a little more space whenever she passed by. Yet she would cover just like anyone else, run after stories with the fastest reporters in the press corps, and not expect any special treatment from her colleagues at all. Whenever fellow reporters would whimper about how bad they had it, or how hard their jobs were, or complain about the hand that life dealt them, all I had to do was remember Macon and feel ashamed for myself. Many times I wondered why she didn’t get a job that required less time on her feet. She showed an amazing determination to get her job done, decently, in as dignified a manner as her disease allowed her. Long after I left the police beat, I would still bump into her, older and wiser, with a child of her own, still racing after the sensational stories to make her front page, never realizing that hers was the best story of all.

There was Ka Ruping, or Rufino Miranda of the Ang Pilipino Star Ngayon tabloid. I think he was really named Ka Rufing, after his first name Rufino, but you know how it is when men try to take on a tougher edge so as not to be labeled sissies. Holed up in the press office where everyone tried to show that they sweat testosterone, we tended to drawl a bit more, cuss a little louder, scratch our balls in public, swagger with a lazier step, all because we thought this was what our environment called for. It was basically idiotic, and a glaring sign of immaturity, of course, but when you’re alone at night and trying carefully to make friends with police characters, impressions seem to matter a lot. Thus, Ka Rufing easily evolved into Ka Ruping, all because you don’t want to use the letter F too much. But I digress.

Ka Ruping lived on a world all his own, and would have little to do with the other mortals in the press office. He was always muttering about outscooping the mediocre reporters from the other tabloids. For someone who worked for a political newspaper, I had some difficulty relating to the sense of scoops of the tabloid reporters. But Ka Ruping was definitely one of the more enterprising ones. While the rest would move in a dense noisy pack, Ka Ruping would only move alone, haunting the halls of the WPD and the NBI like a shadow, pressing flesh with confidential agents and cops. Of course, Ka Ruping had his own quirks. He was one of the older reporters in the police beat, having pushed past fifty several centuries ago. But be careful if he offers to shake hands; he has a viselike grip that he liked to show to unsuspecting new guys. Those who know better than to shake hands with him aren’t spared either. He may just reach down and grab a chunk of muscle from your thigh, and yank it up with such force that the muscle contracts and spasms up and down your leg like a mouse trapped under your skin.

Also, I have never seen the man without his baseball cap, proudly embroidered with the name of his publication. This man really believed in having pride in his work, and wore it on his head day or night. Really, until now I have no idea if Ka Ruping was curly or straight-haired. He also complained loudly and openly of corruption among police reporters, especially the cartel that controlled the press office and basically held police officials and precinct commanders by their balls. No one had any illusions that he was clean as a whistle, although, true to character, Ka Ruping appears to hate corruption all the more when it’s done as a pack.

One particularly slow night in the press office sometime in 1988, Ka Rufing barged in and started cussing at all Christians in general. Apparently, the guy had suddenly gotten an epiphany of sorts, although it was not clear if this religious experience was in any way assisted by spirits of the physical or ethereal kind.

You Christians got it all wrong, he raged. All of us were lapsed Catholics, but it was a really slow night, so we decided to bite.

Ok Ka Ruping, what did we do this time?
Fools, he thundered! Don’t you know that the man on the cross you worship is not even Christ?

Whoa, stop the presses. This was getting deep, even for Ka Ruping. And Holy Week was still way off the calendar.

So who’s the unlucky guy, then?

Read your Bible, Ka Ruping snorted. Carefully. Christ fell three times while carrying the cross to calvary. On the third time, the centurions ordered Simeon, a poor fellow who just happened to be passing through, to carry the cross the rest of the way.

That is in the Bible, he said. But did the Bible say that Simeon gave the cross back to Jesus? No! The Holy Book says the man carrying the cross was crucified on Golgotha. Therefore…

Now, we were no experts in Biblical verses, but we still had much difficulty grasping Ruping’s radical logic. Nevertheless, Ka Ruping would not be put off. Proof! I have proof, he said.

What were the seven last words? My God, forgive them, for they do not know what they do. Clearly, these words do not number seven. Perhaps in ancient Armaic, the numbers would fall into place?

There was a moment of silence as everyone digested the import of Ka Ruping’s revelation. Someone had made a mistake, and the poor fellow on the cross was spelling it out for everyone, yet for two centuries, we who claim to know the Good Book have ignored the obvious and the literal in place of more spiritual explanations?

Yet more proof! Ka Ruping was definitely on a roll.

The man who was nailed to the cross looked down at Mary and another man weeping at his foot, and said:
“Woman, behold thy son. Son, behold thy mother.”

By that time, the logic had gotten much clearer, although epiphany was still to descend upon us. Was the man on the cross trying to tell the whole world that mother and son were at the foot of the cross, and an unlucky stranger had been nailed in the son’s place?

We looked desperately for any sign that Ka Ruping was joking. No such luck, although we snickered behind his back the rest of the night. Many times, the mad would have a logic more sensible than that of the sane, and in hindsight, Ka Ruping made a lot of sense in a lot of things, much more than a lot of people I knew then, as now.

And then there was the bunch I hung out with. Gerry Lirio, AKA Gerry Libog, AKA Gerryli, was the closest I had to a mentor, demented as he was. He was the Manila police reporter of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, who, with his partner Omar Acosta, took me under his wing. It’s not like they had any choice. In college, our teachers required us to log several hours of internship in a media organization. I ended up in the Inquirer, with Gerry and Omar as my trainers. Of course, there was no formal training to speak of. That simply wasn't their style.

It was Gerry and Omar who made life somewhat bearable for Vincent and me. They hung around the station during the day, and prodded us along and in more or less the right direction. Gerry had that devil-may-care attitude, and giggled so adorably that the hospitality girls of Happy Sauna loved having him around so much they started giving him discounts. That’s not to say that Gerry didn’t have a serious side; he’s won several awards for the Inquirer for writing several investigative pieces, although personally I think he’s spent a little too much time trying to investigate Manila’s nightlife. He’s also the type of guy whose age is difficult to define. Twenty years ago, he looked like he was in his late twenties or early thirties. Last time I saw him, he still looked and laughed the same.