Words and photos by Dionesio C. Grava
Just 13 days to the day of the 70th Araw ng Kagitingan (Day of Valor), Guillermo Rumingan, a disabled Philippine Scout, joined comrades who had gone ahead to the Great Beyond. He was 86 then and had been in poor health, the report said, but was a valiant fighter to the end.
Rumingan was 18 when he joined the guerilla movement and together with other Filipino patriots and their American counterparts fought a brutal war to rid the country of cruel colonizers in that long ago war. Sometime later many of the fighters had to move to Bataan and Corregidor and for months had been on the trenches against all odds, equipped only with a antiquated Enfields and Springfields and scarce ammo, languishing from a dearth of food and medicine, without plane support and no artillery piece. No Uncle Sam even, some derided.
Besieged by a vastly superior and well-armed enemy they finally were ordered to give up. Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainright, who took over from Gen. Douglas MacArthur as commander-in-chief, summed up the situation in a report to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “There is a limit to human endurance and that limit has long since been past. . .’’ The surrender preceded the infamous 109-kilometer Death March for the vanquished troops starting from Bagac, Bataan to Capas, Tarlac.
The former Philippine Ambassador to the US. Albert Del Rosario summed up that war, thus: “When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in December 1941, they faced a defending force of ten divisions of the Philippine Army (consisting of 20,000 regulars and 100,000 reservists who had been trained only three months before the war), 11,796 Americans and several regiments of the Philippine Scouts who had been part of the US Army in the Philippines for many years before the war. On 03 April 1942, General Homma staged his final offensive against the Fil-American troops in Bataan who were already severely weakened by scarce food supplies and medical supplies, especially against malaria. In Corregidor, about 15,000 American and Filipino troops valiantly defended the island-fortress against the Japanese forces until its fall on 06 May 1942.”
To this day, many of the surviving veterans still feel bad at the U.S. government’s strategy at that time to delay the promised succor in favor of the Europefirst policy. For a long time, too, many Filipino veterans expressed bitterness at the perceived unfairness of a system that deny them equal pay and benefits enjoyed by their comrades of other nationalities in that same war. Hopes for fairness acquired utmost urgency with the passage of time amid the lingering reality that each year thereafter a WWII commemoration could be the last for many of them.
For more than six decades after the war ended Rumingan and many of his former Filipino comrades-in-arms were involved in another kind of battle. They were in a campaign no less intense and challenging and heart-breaking: the fight to regain the recognition, honor and respect and benefits they richly deserved but unjustly withdrawn from them. That struggle was fought with lobbying efforts, massive protest actions, die-in activities, public chaining, hunger strikes and even a caravan from the Equity Village in Los Angeles to the center of government in the White House. Finally their lobbying efforts led to the granting by the US Congress of the sought-for VA medical coverage and much needed compensations. A report from Manila dated, Feb. 3, 2012, stated that according to the US Embassy in that country “More than 18,500 Filipino World War II veterans or their family members last year received a total of $214.4 million (about P9.22 billion) in benefits and services from the United States’ Department of Veterans Affairs.”
The benefits included pension payments ($186.5 million); one-time equity compensation payments ($15.07 million); medical services ($10.7 million), and education-related funds ($2.12 million). It added that this year–the 90th anniversary of VA operations in the Philippines–the US government has allocated $192 million (about P8.25 billion), or $16 million (about P688 million) per month, in disability compensation to approximately 15,000 beneficiaries.
These monthly payments were in addition to the one-time lump sum payments made to Filipino World War II veterans or their dependents as part of the Filipino Veterans Equity Compensation
Program (FVECP), the report said. The number of paid veterans exceeded the estimated 18,000 prior to the FVECP benefits becoming law, the report said. In 2010, FVECP-related payments totaled $112,841,204 (about P4.85 billion).
After so many years reneging on a promise to the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who fought for the United States during World War II, the U.S. government finally decided to extend payments to the few veterans still alive. Finally the guns in all fronts in that long ago war have fallen silent. Or, are they?
Apparently not. Many insist that the payments and benefits the veterans recently received were not a full compliance of what were promised them. It may be recalled that US President Roosevelt commissioned some 250,000 Filipinos to served in the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). After the war, however, the US Congress through the Rescission Act of 1946 singled out the Filipinos out of the 66 allied nationalities — stripping them of the promised full benefits as American veterans. One veteran, Franco Arcebal, was famously quoted saying, “we are loyal to the United States, except that the United States has forgotten us.”
Arturo Garcia of the Justice for Filipino-American Veterans-Los Angeles Chapter recently informed PinoyWatchdog of their organization’s support of a bill introduced by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco/San Mateo). H. R. 210, the Filipino Veterans Act of 2011, provides that all World War II Filipino veterans should be fully eligible for the same benefits that other U.S. veterans receive.
A similar bill that has collected 90 co-sponsors in the House also aims to completely overturn that same Rescission Act. Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV), a co-sponsor of that bill, also wants a hearing to ascertain why the “Veterans Administration has denied over 24,000 claims” of Filipino veterans. The report mentions of “challenges the Veterans Administration faces in verifying the service records of the Filipino Veterans” and of the need to “identify options for correcting this injustice.”
There are also suggestions for a letter of apology from the U.S. president in the same manner that the first U.S. President Bush had given each Japanese American interned during the last World War a personal letter of apology in addition to a lump sum payment of $20,000 each in 1990.
Meanwhile, the 70th anniversary of the Fall of Bataan came and many seemed not to be aware of it. To think that only a few years ago such a day and other Filipino veterans commemoration always buzzed with grand activities and celebrations extolling the deeds of our war heroes.
On the last few years the former warriors who once held the overwhelmingly mighty Japanese invaders at bay for some three months with virtually nothing more than heroic will, would drag their tired bodies stooped with ailments and the weight of years to such an event. There used to be so many veterans organizations claiming to champion what was termed then as their long unrecognized deeds.
Could it be that having finally received some form of payments these veterans now prefer to bask in well-deserved anonymity or had gone back to the Philippines? Additionally, many of them had succumbed to natural attrition and the few still around are so burdened with age and ailment such that mobility is a big problem. Are we seeing the last of their breed? Isn’t it incumbent upon us being the beneficiaries of their sacrifices to continue honoring these men and women who rose to defend the homeland and their people in the process risking their lives and enduring extreme hardships?
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