Three Filipino Women Read Online Free Page B

and I was shocked and frightened.
    After Lopito’s death, Narita went into mourning, wore the black dress of widows and—as an informant told me of this period—she was if anything more chic in her black dresses. But her grief was real. You cannot live with a person for five years and not have the slightest attachment to him. She retained her married name and preferred to be addressed as Mrs. Reyes even when she went into politics. And her children, too, though they were not Lopito’s—shegave them her husband’s name. Senator Reyes knew this and it is perhaps for this reason why the Old Man is happy with her children, too.
    What would a young, beautiful widow in the Philippines do if she had brains and money as well? The world is wide open and it was at this point that Colonel Antonio Cunio came in. But first, may I point out one basic problem that I also encountered when I started this study.
    I had wanted to do a survey of women in politics and we have many examples that date back to the earliest days of suffrage or, if you will, to the revolution against Spain when our women played a vital role. But by zeroing in on a particular subject, a woman I knew very well, I could detail the personal incidents, pry into motivation—all of which cannot be quantified, but which are important in any study. This would, probably, be termed as psychohistory or psychosociology. But I am not one to bother the general reader with obtuse jargon that is often the mumbo jumbo of muddled thinking or which is simply bad writing.
    At first, Colonel Cunio, who is now retired, did not want to talk. I had to rely on the usual tricks of the interviewer to thaw out his reserve. I told him that I need not mention his name in the study but afterwards, he gave me blanket authority to use all the “facts” with his name if I wanted to.
    As it turned out, he was loquacious, proud of his Korean War record, proud of his machismo.
    All that he described happened during the time I was at Cambridge. I had not seen Narita since I left for the United States although in my third year there, I learned that she was in New York. Colonel Cunio was a Philippine Military Academy graduate; he prided himself on his knowledge of Philippine politics and grudgingly admitted that Narita was bright, particularly when sheanalyzed the Far East. “I don’t know where she got that smattering of Japanese,” he said wryly, “but when she started talking about periods in Japanese history, and Korea, too, she really had the field to herself.”
    T APE T WO
    Colonel Antonio Cunio, retired:
    I got my commission in 1947 and that same year, I commanded a platoon in the Huk campaign in Central Luzon. I was a junior at the PMA during the war and could have gotten my commission in the field … Nothing spectacular about World War II; we were disbanded in Cagayan and there was some guerrilla work. I was in several operations, including Four Roses—that was when William Pomeroy, the American communist, was captured. I also saw action in the Korean War, I suppose you have read about that although you may have been quite young then. Our battalion figured in the Imjin campaign and that was where I got this Distinguished Service medal. Well, actually, it was a retreat, for the Chinese were coming at us wave after wave and I led a company through a pincer movement. We lost five in that encounter, but I can assure you the Chinese lost many more. They were so close, we were fighting with fixed bayonets. We did no hand-to-hand fighting, but we were lobbing grenades. The barrels of the automatic rifles were hot and still they came, blowing their bugles. I had a flesh wound in the thigh—I did not even know it till one of the men pointed to my bleeding leg and they bandaged it to stop the flow. I was weak but you can rely on this old Tagalog blood to carry me through.
    After the Korean War, I was sent to command schools in the United States and that was where I had my first white woman.