Prologue
Arnel Calaoagan, lieutenant colonel, is the latest in a long line of Army officers to either ship out of the island or retire from service.
Before Calaoagan, who led the 79th Infantry Battalion in a two-year duty tour, those who also shipped out after becoming battallion commanders were now Colonel William Pesase of the 62nd and Col. Van Donald Almonte of the 94th.
At the 303rd Infantry Brigade level, two outstanding leaders – Innocencio Pasaporte and Orlando Edralin – have also hung up their uniforms.
Before Edralin, Major General Michael Samson also led the 303rd briefly before he was eventually promoted as Third Infantry Division chief.
I can only assume that Pasaporte and Edralin are now living happy, contented lives of peace with their families.
That kind of peace, relative it may be in the province, is the same one these warfighters sought to bring to Negros that had, like many blighted parts of the country, been wracked by an internecine strife over more than half a century.
This conflict, proudly billed by the Communists as a civil war, had been intensely felt in the island where feudalism had long existed as part of the cultural fabric mainly because of the sugar industry that had long been the backbone of the local economy.
I used to write about the island where I was born as a place of hunger, misery, and suffering as if that is the only truth. I wrote it in my youth not from a deep sense of nuanced understanding but out of spite, out of a sensevof righteousness learned from the Communist Party as an urban operative doing infiltration work in the press.
As I grew into what I am now, older, hobbled by two strokes and, hopefully, wiser, I first checked my files and now my conscience and came to a renewed understanding that while there are inequities in the place where I came about as me and as a journalist.
This realization, grounded on the journalistic command I learned fron the great Ed Murrow, came about after decades pf promoting strife, hatred and a sense of entitlement that only the Left knows what is best and right for the people even if its diabolical incarnation, the Communist Party of the Philippines, is nothing more than a syndicate dressed up as an ideological movement with its supposed adherents spouting Marxist goobledygook only they, and perhaps Hell’s minions, can understand.
But I digress.
The point of this article is that Calaoagan and the other officers I have mentioned should have been honored both formally and non formally by Negrenses.
Perhaps all of them should have been declated adopted sons because they, more than anyone, have allowed poor Negrenses, especially those who have strayed into the path of armed resistance, to feel a renewed sense of hope, and lead productive lives once more.
After all, it was under their watch that the province was placed umder a Stable Internal Peace and Security Status with the dismantling of guerrilla fronts or areas once terrorized by the CPP and its armed wing, the New People’s Army.
Declaring these officers as adopted sons is a clear, unequivocal message to the terrorists: we stand behind those who fight for us; we stand together against you.
