BATAAN: A Message to the Filipino People

BATAAN

by: Bro. E. Soriano as recited by Bro. D. Razon

Twenty years ago, after I have shed the last drop of my blood in the gory battlefields of Bataan and Corregidor. I face my Creator, with an overwhelming pride in my heart.

"God," I said, " I have done my share. I have sacrificed my life so that my people may live in lasting peace."

Now I stood once more at the presence of God,

"Go back,” he said. "Look at your people in your country today. See how they made a mockery of what you have died for. See how they have destroyed the very essence of democracy."

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I have come back, not as a living man, but as a ghost, and this is my story.

My father, my mother and I were living peacefully in a small mountain farm. Suddenly, a group of Japanese soldiers swoop down on us. My Father and I were hog-tied, and before our shocked eyes, my mother was abused, and was raped.

After their sadistic thirst was quenched, they killed her in cold impunity, and abandoned her mangled, bloody, and lifeless body in the dust.

The next thing I knew, I was lifted up by a group of kind Filipino soldiers. They brought me back to their camp alone, yes alone, for my father has already died.

The next thing I did when I felt strong enough, was to ask for a gun, and began fighting the enemy.

Not only to avenge the death of my father and my mother, but to die, it need for, a free, and a democratic way of life.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there in Bataan I fought, and there in Bataan, I died.

That was 20 long years ago, now, as I look around me I see my people fighting and killing one another, I see them raping our own women, butchering our own children, and destroying our own homes, what possible power, could have deprive this decency, that they would now violate the sanctity of our women. What possible power, could have twisted the hearts and the minds of our people that they will now fight and kill each other.

In sheer desperation, I tried to bluff out all these things from my mind, but they all come back to me in all its painful and brutal bewilderment.

I aid them to my Creator and cried out,

"God, forgive them, for they know not, what they do."

Source:
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