Van Donald Almonte has called a woodland patch rimmed by streams in the village of Ayungon town, Negros Oriental his home for more than two years.
He came to this place called Tambo, named after edible bamboo shoots, on a month when the northern winds or the amihan were about to end.
It is here where he and hundreds of fighting men and women live, lose sleep, and get in harm’s way at the headquarters of the 94th Infantry Battalion.
Also called the Mandirigma Battalion.
He has missed his children’s birthdays and wedding anniversaries with his wife over those years.
In the same number of years, his presence in Negros was hard to miss – Van Donald Almonte, lieutenant colonel, “batcom” to his men, “berdugo” to terrorists, as he led the charge on what looked then as an impregnable enemy.
Not much is known about the Lieutenant Colonel except that he is the fourth commander of the 94th Infantry Battalion, a maneuver unit of the Philippine Army that had been assigned to “dismantle” the Central Negros Front 2 of the New People’s Army.
That front, born and raised in the mountain villages of Carabalan and Buenavista in Himamaylan City, was the first area of influence established by the then regional committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines headed in the 1990s by then island top Communist Frank Fernandez.
It was Fernandez who headed recovery efforts for the CPP in Negros when it launched its Second Great Rectification Movement after most of the NPA’s armed force bolted to form the Revolutionary Proletarian Army.
Fernandez, a former Negros priest, was captured on 27 March 2019 in a military operation with his wife, Cleofe Lagtapon, also a ranking rebel leader, in Liliw, Laguna.
He was then 71 and is now in jail with Lagtapon.
CN2 was hailed then as a breakthrough in the recovery efforts in Negros island, praised within the CPP as “proof of the correct line” of going back to its founder, Jose Maria Sison’s exhortation that the protracted people’s war will win the “Philippine national democratic revolution with a socialist perspective.”
In fact, CN2 held the “record” of most soldiers killed in a single tactical offensive when its fighters ambushed a military truck on a steep road in Bulod, a mountain community in Carabalan on 20 August 2000.
That ambush was led by Romeo Nanta alias Juanito Magbanua, later the NPA’s top commander in Negros when he was killed by a rifle unit of the 94th in October 2022.
Former cadres, however, disputed this account put out by a CPP online publication in Negros island as they pointed out it was not Nanta who led the Bulod offensive but “Elias,” a former NPA from an urban poor community in Bacolod City.
The supposed revolution has dragged on for more than 50 years, outlasting the self-styled revolutionary guiding light, Sison, who died in 2022.
Like Fernandez, their waterloos happened close to significant dates – Joma died on 16 December, less than two weeks away from the 54th founding year of the CPP while Fernandez fell two days away from the 29 March anniversary of the NPA.
When Col. Van Donald (short for his official title Lieutenant Colonel Van Donald Almonte) became the fourth battalion commander of the 94th on 11 March 2022, he was given only one specific order: to destroy the Central Negros Front 2 of the CPP-NPA
It was a task that seemed daunting to observers but if Col. Van Donald was disturbed, he did not show any signs of it.
Like the the United States 101st Airborne that forged the then novel concept of airborne warfare into combat, Col. Van Donald, like those who commanded before him, forged the nickname of the 94th into battle.
If August 20 was the red letter day then for the CN2 guerillas, Col. Van Donald rewrote history when the 94th burst into the limelight only six months after taking over as batcom.
On 11 October 2022, police and soldiers scouring a sugarcane plantation in the upland village of Carabalan found the body of a man as the sun was about to rise.
It was around 5:25am, former Army general Innocencio Pasaporte told DNX on that day.
Pasaporte, then commanding general of the 303rd Infantry Brigade, which commands maneuver units in the province, among them the 94th, broke the news that the body was that of Romeo Nanta, then the top commander of the NPA in the island who was positively identified by his former comrades and through intelligence photographs.
Nanta, who also goes by the nom de guerre Juanito Magbanua was also the public face of the NPA, serving as its chief spokesman.
He was then known as Negros island’s most wanted terrorist for a series of crimes from murder to extortion to the torching of private property.
For the first time in a long time, an NPA commander was killed in combat, felled in the same village overlooking the same mountains where he once led the slaying of the Bulod 17.
For the first time in a long time, Col. Van Donald and the 94th rewrote the tale of Negros Communists and showed that they are not the invincible Red warriors they once thought themselves to be, glorified in poems and songs by their ilk in the cities who have never seen combat.
That first was followed by equally significant combat wins – the death of Ericsson Acosta on 30 November 2022, a month after Nanta’s death, and less than a year later, on 20 April 2023, the death of Rogelio Posadas alias Ka Putin.
Posadas was the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Philippines killed in combat. Or at least the first reported one.
The secretary is the highest Party rank after “chairman,” that was accorded for a very long time only to Sison.
Secretary, commander, ranking cadre – the 94th mowed them down with Colonel Van Donald leading the charge, historic wins for the Army in Negros that earned for the 94th the tag of the “fightingest battalion” from then Third Infantry Division chief, retired Lieutenant General Benedict Arevalo.
It needs to be pointed out that the Communist terrorist movement is a monolithic organization, which means it cannot function properly without its supposed leaders or syndicate heads, former cadres and military analysts said.
The Carabalan battles later proved to be a turning point for Negros Communists who faced, as the Army said, a “leadership vacuum” that led to the toppling of all their fronts in the island.
By December last year, the Army Third ID reported that the Central Negros 2 Front had been “dismantled” after more than just a year of the 94th’s campaign in the cities of Kabankalan and Himamaylan combining Focused Military Operations, intelligence work and civil military operations.
Urban Communist operatives usually appropriate literally titles to themselves or to any of their armed fighter who dies in combat. To them, they are deep in “Marxist or aesthetic” theories, terms that sound palatable to foreign funding organizations.
While Colonel Van Donald Almonte came from the Philippine Military Academy, where officers are steeped in theory and tradition, he does not speak with the air of an intellectual snob.
There is no talk of military ethics, ancient warfare or combat tactics unlike Communist urban cadres who see themselves theoriticians even as they squabble over spellings of words in Scrabble.
He speaks plainly, reflecting the simplicity of the situation on the ground but made complicated by the Communist terrorists through supposed “context” and terms like “dialectics,” “historical materialism, “among other verbal mumbo jumbo even as the CPP continues to rake in millions from the masses they “fight for” and from their extortion activities couched in fancy terms like Rebolusyunaryong Buhis sa Kaaway nga Sahi (Revolutionary Taxation on Class Enemies).
“I feel happy when our soldiers tell us that people in the communities tell them: the armed men don’t come here anymore forcing us to give them something since they had an armed encounter with you,” Col. Van Donald says when asked what gives him a sense of fulfillment in directing the fight in Central Negros.
“Fulfilling po sa amin na mga sundalo na iyung mga kapus sa buhay di na nila pinagsasamantalahan (We feel fulfilled as soldiers when they don’t exploit anymore those who have less in life),” he adds.
“Kapus sa buhay” is a deep phrase in Filipino, a description of those who literally have less in life but have to part with what little they have to armed rebels who, as later events would show, can kill without compunction as shown by the Fausto family massacre in Buenavista village in Himamaylan.
But even as Col. Van Donald fights for the poor upland folk to have more spoonfuls of rice and more uga or dried fish or ginamos (shrimp paste) on their children’s plates, the supposed defenders of the people only see him as their worst nightmare, using, among others, words like “bloodthirsty,” “fascist,” or “berdugo (executioner)” to describe him.
Perhaps it was the slogan coined by Arevalo: “loved by the people, feared by the enemy” that has made many officers like Almonte simply go on with their jobs.
“Ginagawa ko lang naman po ang aking trabaho (We are just doing our job),” was his standard reply when asked to comment on rebel propaganda.
Many years from now, the name of Van Donald Almonte will be spoken either with respect, reverence or revulsion, depending on who gives the narrative.
To the young officer who is leaving his command this week, he’d rather be known as one who fought to give Negrenses hope and opportunities for the provision of basic services from government like schools, clinics, food, and roads – services simple and essential that were denied citizens because of the rebels or bad governance.
Asked if he sleeps well at night for fighting for the people, Colonel Van Donald flipped the question.
“The question is not if we can sleep well at night; what is important is that the people we fight for can sleep soundly at night,” he says.
In an island where soldiers rarely get to be told “thank you for your service” or where peace is paid for by those who fight in blood, sweat and tears, officers come and go like the seasonal winds.
Van Donald Almonte, Lieutenant Colonel, leaves behind his fighting men and women as the amihan winds stop to blow but he leaves behind a chance for Negrenses to finally have peace.
