| InsurrectoChris Santiagofor David Fagen Corporal, U.S. Army (1898-1899); Captain, Philippine Republican Army (1899-1901)Our worst enemy is General May: rainy season, the lieutenant means, monsoon much like Tampa’s summer storms. Roads become marsh; not just flooding but fever, a fire that hollows me out. We throw lifelines to overturned ferries; casualties grow long.Incessant drizzle. Letters take too long to reach home. I prefer carousal, cards: dismay in officers’ faces when I cross the line. The guardhouse my second home. My fines soon add up: a month’s pay. Most of it earned, so far, by killing time, not ladrones: we marchto summits, spy gugus drilling below; march back down to find the enemy long gone—only grinning farmers left. Hellfire spits the lieutenant, scanning ridges, amazed to have been rolled by shoeless bandits again. Soon he’ll snap, like the officers in Samar who linedup boys young as ten—sympathizers, aligned with insurgents. (So said General Smith.) Marshaled them, blindfolded, to clearings. Too soon for them to swell the soil; long rest for short lives. Their will bewilders me— faced with Gatlings, Krags, methodical shellfirethey ambush hand to hand. Bolos; sniper fire in enfilades. Harass our lines then beat back to boondocks, a maze of jungle, cordilleras, rice fields, marsh. Land surely rich with poetry—tulang in their tongue—land like home: typhooncousin to hurricane. When the monsoon shifts, so do I—I snap, desert for foreign fires. Rope can kill black soldiers but not disease, lungs like ours grittier, the C.O.s say; we’re maligned but nicknamed “Immunes.” My old unit marches, black against brown. Under white. As if to makethe Far East a second South. I captain a line for the Filipino side: a turncoat, merging nations. Our flag has no color. Soon it may. |
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