Guerillas

While serving in the Pacific, most of my orders for my LCT (Landing Craft, Tank) were simply a TBF message to proceed to a coded point in the Leyte Gulf, and then to another. These meant a ship was waiting for us, where we would take on a cargo and later beach it at a coded location.  We didn't believe that our progress was much of a secret, as we were quite sure that Japanese hiding in the hills were watching our every move. They couldn't know our cargoes exactly; but if they were as smart as we (and they were), nobody was fooling anybody.  It just didn't matter.

Sometimes, though, we actually did something secret.  Like the time our cargo was a group of eight Philippine guerrillas and their officer.

Arriving at a beach well south of our usual haunts, we were met by the Philippine officer (a man in his late twenties) and his crew of eight, all of them under twenty, which become our secret cargo.  The officer was a handsome, clean cut, articulate person.  The eight who boarded with him were something else. They could have arrived the day before from East Los Angeles.

The nine young men came over our ramp like cats over a fence.  They were lithe as gymnasts, smoothly muscled, their eyes flicking this way and that like Mafiosos on a job.  The officer approached, saluted, extended his hand, identified himself, and never smiled.

I returned his salute, and shook his hand.  The salute part was awkward, as no LCTers bothered with any protocol, nor among officers, and, on my ship, between my crew and me.

I offered him and his men coffee, a shower, and whatever else we might do for them.

He spoke beautiful English when he thanked us for our hospitality.  His crew accepted the coffee but were disinclined to converse much with my crew. None of them spoke much English and little more Spanish. Their fluency was in Tagalog. It might as well have been Navajo.

Ignoring the nearly vertical sun, they sat on the deck in a tight ring.  At least one, usually two, constantly swept eyes over the area. Every time a door moved the slightest bit, an extra wave tapped our vessel, or a new sound from beyond the ship occurred, all eight heads flipped.

The officer, a lieutenant, told me that he had four years of engineering at Manila's university and hoped, “after this,” to do graduate work at the University of Southern California.

“Your crew?” I asked.

His face clouded.  “They only know to murder,” he said too softly for any of them to hear. “They'll go back to their villages; but they won't adjust well.  They'll drift to Manila, or another city, and do what they've been doing now since Bataan -- murder.  They're restless now because we've only gotten about a Jap a day for the past week.  We know that there are a few thousand in those hills.” He pointed north.

I smiled. We'd been sailing by those hills several times a day for weeks, usually close enough to see parrots.  We'd even considered inspecting a waterfall we could see back a short distance in the hillside.

“USC,” I said. “It has a fine engineering department.  Lots of the students are Arab.”  The officer nodded.  “And, at USC, about 25 per cent of the students will be Nisei and Sansei.”

The officer pointed to his eight young men.  Very softly, he said, “They don't know anything else.  They couldn't live there.”

“You?” I asked.

He didn't answer.