OPINION: Pencing by Mario O. Feliciano, Jr.

‘Reminiscing SouthCom Days’

AS I read the August 26 banner story, “Vinluan retires as WestMinCom Chief,” what went to my mind was the days of the SouthCom’s prime era back in the 1970s -- till I left my beat covering military affairs in the late 1990s.

To begin with, I started to cover seriously SouthCom (now WestMinCom) when I was taken in by then fledgling national broadsheet Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI), a notoriously known adversarial national daily during the dark days of martial law under the dictatorial regime of then President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

My first taste of baptism of fire was under its then SouthCom Chief Lt. Gen. Delfin Castro, though I was already a budding radio news reporter for defunct dxLL in the 1970s during which I gained much experience in field coverage together with those veterans, the late Vic Arevalo, Vic Pena, Rene Fernandez and all the rest now gone to the great beyond, as well.

One that stuck to my mind up to now was our round-the-clock coverage of the much-celebrated May 1976 plane hijacking staged by the MNLF guerrilla fighters who wanted to escape out of the country en-route to Libya. The rebels hijacked the commercial plane in Davao airport, and was forced to make a brief stopover here at the Zamboanga City International Airport to add more fuel intended for its long journey when surrounded by soldiers from SouthCom headed then by Rear Admiral Romulo Espaldon.

It came to a bloody ending when troops finally decided to assault the plane’s aborted flight that sat days and nights at its tarmac resulting in 13 killed and 22 others wounded, to include foreign passengers, apart from all the hijackers found later dead inside the plane, after the rescue mission was over.

It was big news all over the world, except in the Philippines where all bad news was censored by the Marcos regime. That was the start when the adrenalin in me was craving for more such a bedlam. It was crazy!

And under SouthCom’s leadership of Lt. Gen. Delfin Castro, the crucial period erupted when “People Power” caused the ouster of the ‘despot’ Marcos who was eventually sent into exile in Hawaii on February 24, 1986. By the way, Marcos died at age 72 on September 28, 1989.

SouthCom found itself at the center of the battle of nerves, as the AFP forces in the whole of Mindanao were fragmented in their allegiance: it was either they were for Marcos (whose AFP Chief was Gen. Fabian Ver) or for the rebel soldiers’ two ace leaders PC/INP Chief Fidel Ramos and Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile who both turned against the distraught Marcos government, and sided with the widowed Cory Aquino’s ardent call for “People Power.” Cory, who later was catapulted to the presidency, is the wife Senator Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino, Jr. whose August 21, 1983 assassination fuelled the “People Power” revolt in the country.

Castro was known as amongst the “loyalists” of Marcos in the AFP, thus replaced by the Cory government and SouthCom saw itself under a brand-new, and fresh leadership, mostly led by the PMAyers who were then treated as “second fiddle” to the “Vanguards” from where General Ver came, and molded to a four-star general under the Marcos dictatorship.

First SouthCom appointee under the new Commander-In-Chief, the first woman to do so, President Cory Aquino was General Jose “Jomag” Magno, then General Cesar Tapia, next was General Manuel Cacanando, Rear Admiral Carlito Cunanan, Romeo Zulueta, Gomersindo Yap, Orlando Soriano, Edgardo Batenga,  Angelo Reyes, and all the rest reigned mostly by PMA graduates.

It was under General Castro that I found myself at a crossroads of my being a news correspondent of a highly critical newspaper like the Inquirer. Castro, without my knowing, was said looking for long who this Mario O. Feliciano, Jr. (also Jun or Jay Feliciano)? I had butterflies in my stomach when suddenly the late Vic Pena, who, in his entire career as dxLL’s radio news chief reporter, covered SouthCom as his daily beat every morning, informed me and said: “Jun ta busca contigo si General Castro, cay sobre saltao le con el de uste mga writeups na Inquirer (Jun, General Castro is looking for you because your write-ups in the Inquirer gave him worries, so much). Whether he was joking or not, it definitely gave me a chill to the bone because in those days, if you wrote something bad about the military’s anti-insurgency campaign in the South, you’d find yourself in big trouble.

Good, when General “Jomag” took over, SouthCom transformed itself as more friendly to the press. That gave me a complete sigh of relief. But the presence of still a slew of Castro’s people inside SouthCom, hounded those supposedly “blacklisted” to include this writer, under its former command.   

 

But it was under General Soriano when the military formed the SouthCom Defense Press Corps (DPC), through the initiative of his Chief of Staff, Colonel “Boysie” Braganza who later became the first WesMinCom commander when he rose to the rank of Three-star general. But correct me if I’m wrong, not very sure if he was.

The PIO then was Lieutenant Colonel Fredesvindo “Teddy” Covarrubias, now a retired Air Force colonel. Incidentally, I was elected as its first DPC President until I went into a hiatus due to health reasons. And my journey as PDI news correspondent ended, as well.

While in and out of hospital in those years, I got lost about SouthCom days. But, what I still can’t forget was my series of scoops, and or, I would say, too, my big stories that hogged the headlines of PDI, Tempo and other national dailies (as wires stringer), - the massacre of 14 marines and 4 militiamen in Barangay Tuburan, now a town in Basilan province in the early 1990s; the kidnappings of foreigners, to include priests; the death of Marine General Arturo Asuncion in a helicopter crash in Basilan; the Ipil attack in 1995; the Misuari epic peace talks with the Philippine government that heightened the martial law era fears; the wave of bombings attributed to the Moro insurgents and the birth of the Abu Sayyaf in the late 1980s, et cetera.

When I turned to God completely and was born again in the spirit sometime in mid-2000, SouthCom met its demise, and changed into what it’s now the WestMinCom.

The rest is now part of its dramatic history in the AFP saga that continues on, up to now in Mindanao. As to when can its soldiers go back to barracks again for good, and return the country’s genuine peace and order to its former place, truly the envy of our neighboring nations during the pre-martial law days? The right answer can only come from the AFP itself. But, in the end, only God can tell when, if He wills to, and nobody else can stop it from happening. He’s the One orchestrating our lives every day. Just put our faith and trust in Him, and the worries in us will just vanish away. Believe me! (jayfeliciano2@yahoo.com)