006 ~ Hallowed Histories

Last week, on the day the world celebrated the UN’s 62nd founding anniversary, the Philippines mourned the death of an Armed Forces of the Philippines lieutenant colonel, who succumbed to malaria while serving as a military observer in the Sudan.

The sudden passage creates another somber moment in the long-running career of the global kawal, Tagalog for soldier, and a forbidding addition to the memorial of the fallen in Haïti, Liberia, East Timor, Vietnam, and Korea.

It doesn’t matter that some of them perished in action, fighting for the general good with "extraordinary bravery", then being honored with the Dag Hammarskjöld Medal in the Service of Peace, the US Congress Soldier’s Medal, or the sole Philippine Medal for Valor conferred on an individual in the line of international-peacekeeping duty. It doesn’t matter that the rest died of disease, accident, or some other kind of non-hostile misfortune.

What matters is that until the time of reckoning with their personal fate, these outbound Filipino soldiers all lived a consequential period of resuscitating a near-dead peace, of breathing light to a benighted land, and of improving other people's odds of finding better destinies.

The 16-year-old PNP Contingent, early into its endeavor, lost two men (Cambodia, 1992-93), not to enemy fire.

Before the untimely demise (the deaths came within a few months of each other), the police officers withstood the grind of staff work; community immersion; high-risk patrolling; and adapting to the overseas-service environment, which was a painstaking process for a neophyte contingent.

Early into the mission in Khmer territory, the two noncommissioned personnel (with ranks loosely equivalent to police master sergeants) accomplished as ordered, improvised and innovated as time-wisened enlisted men were expected to do. So that when they departed, the statistics* to which they were reduced did not appear in the records as squat little figures, and in vain.

Toward the end of the road, they were paving the way for sobriety in a hideously genocidal society. In their own unassuming ways, they were advancing a campaign that in a less than a year's time was written down in humankind’s annals as the UN’s first successfully concluded peacekeeping operation.

It was just very sad that they couldn't come home "vertically", at everybody's prayer during the contingent send-off, to jubilate the triumph that they'd helped achieve.


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*The Filipino police officers were two of the 61 international military and civilian police personnel of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia who died while in mission.