War and remembrance II

BENCHWARMER

Ramon Dacawi

BAGUIO CITY -- Baguio will mark its liberation from the Japanese forces to the day 67 years ago on April 27. Still, the significance of the event seems not to resonate. It seems felt only among the dwindling ranks of veterans and elderly civilians who fought for liberation and survived the horrors of a war too remote in the past to be recalled.

            To help them understand and appreciate the freedom and peace that their families now enjoy, children of this city will read from the accounts and recollections of some of the heroes who liberated Baguio at rites on Friday morning at the Veterans Park along Harrison Road.

            As did kids read from the accounts of heroes who were  at the “Fall of Bataan” and the infamous “Death March” immediately following, in memorial rites in the same sacred grounds last April 9, before a few surviving veterans who had inched their way to the park to remember  .

            The kids read from the memoir of Sgt. Florencio Esteban, an Ibaloi hero who was there at the “fall” and who survived the Death March. They will read again from his notes on the 67th anniversary of Baguio’s  liberation this Friday.

            “The story of the liberation of Baguio city has been told and retold – an old record played over and over again,”. Esteban had written. “Yet, it should be one of the stories that should be ingrained in the minds of every Baguioite,”

“Why?,” he asked and went on to answer why.

            “We always commemorate June 12th; July 4; April 9th; and lately, the EDSA Revolution of 1986. In the same manner, April 27th should be a red-letter day for Baguio City because of the significance that the event carries.”

He asked: “If we cannot forget the Killer Quake of July 16th (1990) that destroyed properties, closed our roads, resulted in the loss of lives, how can you forget the liberation campaign which had the same effects as the….earthquake?.” .

            From his account and those of other heroes, kids will re-tell the three-pronged attack of combined Filipino and American forces who came up to liberate Baguio via the Kennon Road, Taloy Road (now Marcos Highway) and Naguilian Road (now Quirino Highway).

            Kids will recall how, during the advance of the Allied Forces, then Lt. Francisco Paraan, reacted upon seeing his war-torn city from where the Naguilian police checkpoint now stands.  “I knelt and kissed the ground,” Paraan recounted in his message at the “Fall of Bataan” rites at the Veterans Park in 2008.

“We were home,” he recalled, fighting back tears. He was then 91.

            His words triggered a sudden and powerful reconnection among his fellow veterans. The message of being home resounded through the park that the city fenced recently, if only to ward off boys practicing with their skateboards and drunks lobbing their finished gin bottles on the wall roster of heroes belonging to the famed d66th Infantry.

            After the war, Paraan served Baguio as chief of police. Following the 1986 EDSA Revolution, he was appointed city mayor. Sometimes it takes a hero to recognize and honor another. So as head of the Baguio Jaycees in the mid-50s, he initiated and supervised the construction of the Rizal Monument beside the Burnham Park.

            This Friday, kids will also retell the account of the late Baguio newsman Willy Cacdac  of that time he and the late Lt. Eugene Pucay Sr. made a stop-over and stood on a promontory overlooking the Loo Valley in Buguias, Benguet.

 “We lost many men here,” Cacdac heard the the old man murmur.

“I looked at Dad Pucay and he was silent, as if in prayer, with tears rolling down his cheeks,” Cacdac recalled.  

            Despite his diminutive frame, Pucay, an Ibaloi patriarch and philanthropist of Guisad Valley, was the best base stealer at the baseball games in Burnham Park before the war. Later, he became a pillar in the building the YMCA of Baguio, the local boy scout council, the Masons, Baguio Central University and other community institutions. He also served as city councilor.

            These and other anecdotes  will spice up the Liberation Day program chaired by city councilor Peter Fianza who also headed the rites last April 9.

 Tuba town, Baguio’s neighbor to the south, will celebrate its own Liberation Day on April 26.The observance brings to mind the heroism of Sgt. Adriano Carantes and two other men of the famed 66th Infantry who, near Ansagan on their way to liberate Tuba and Baguio, knocked out two machine gun emplacements of the Japanese. (e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.)