PMA vs. USMA (West Point) on Honor Code

BY MORTZ C. ORTIGOZA

I thought Philippine National Police chief Director Allan Purisima would be the guest of honor of the Moises J. de Guzman Memorial Lodge No. 161 held on March 27 at the air-conditioned gym of the Narciso Ramos Sports Complex in Lingayen, Pangasinan.  Instead he sent a subordinate, Colonel Raylan Malenab.

It was my first time to witness the meetings and rituals of the masons attended by some friends in the business and police circles.

FILIPINOS AT THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY: Standing only at
5 feet 4 inches, Army 2nd Lt. Christy Isis "Ice" Achanzar, a native of Davao,
 made history in May 31, 2008 as the first Filipina to graduate from the male-
dominated United States Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York.
 She is also the first female cadet from the country’s premier military school, the
 Philippine Military Academy (PMA) to enter Westpoint. She also earned the
prestigious Superintendent's Award for Achievement, an award of gold wreath
 insignia bestowed to the top 20 percent of cadets who excel in academic, military
 and physical programs of USMA.

Although I was late to arrive, I was “stunned” when I entered the gym seeing a sea of white long sleeves and barong clad guys with apron strapped on their body and calling some of their colleague “kuyang (big brother)”.

I thought I entered the wrong place where there was also a convention for waiters that was going on.
“Dami namang waiters dito!” I told former police provincial director Colonel Sonny Versoza (PMA ’84).

Amused,  he told me they were not waiters but members of the masonry.

Kidding aside, one of the speeches given by  Colonel Malenab to them was that if they want to help the needy they should help silently and not crow in public about it.

In my decades as media practitioner, one thing I lauded on that affair was that it could shame the banquets prepared by politicians in their official and unofficial functions. The masons treat was a bacchanalian feast literally at it’s finest.

Son of a gun, aside from the sumptuous foods like the roasted hogs in a five or six stars hotel proportion, a carabao was roasted and served by real waiters (not those apron sporting masons) to every round table inside the dinner room of the Complex.

Thanks Mr. Gerry Padilla, cousin of former Army chief Major General Restituto Padilla and protégée’ of The Tabako, for inviting me to your affair.

Now I know how delectable is the “lechon na karabao!”

***

Talking about “chief of intelligence”, I heard from some sources that the snappy Lt. Colonel Rod Castro, the spick and span conscious chief of police of the humongous San Carlos City, will be leaving soon his post and take the “S-2” or the Intelligence branch of the PPO.

“Bakit ganoon, e San Carlos City ang top three na pinakamagandang position sa Pangasinan after it lodged out years ago “S-2” as the most prestigious post,” somebody quipped.

I heard that Castro, PNPA class ’99, applied for the S-2 when he heard that PNPA alumnus Lt. Colonel Froilan Lopez, another officer and gentleman, will be transferred outside Pangasinan due to Chief PNP Purisima directives that all police officials who served more than ten years in the PPO all over the country would be reassigned outside their post .

Castro, an intelligence buff and what the American politico-military author Bob Woodward called“Courteous Joe (Rod, a son-in-law of a general, calls everybody in sight “sir” or “maam”), has been No.1 in his schooling here and abroad. These plaudits are even conspicuously posted on the wall of his office in the City.

Before becoming the chief of police San Carlos, "Courteous Joe" Rod Castro was the chief of police of Sison, Pangasinan under then Mayor (now Congresswoman) Kimi Cojuangco, aide of former Local Government Secretary Jess Robredo, and operation chief of the PPO under former Provincial Director Col. Marlou Chan (PMA '85).

 ***

I just read recently the rejoinder of retired Lt. Gen. Edilberto P. Adan in a column of Cecilio T. Arillo at the Business Mirror, affiliate of the chain of businesses of tycoon Antonio Cabangon-Chua, that a newsman drops at our house regularly for free.

Here’s some of the excerpts of Adan, whom I met at the PMA when I worked there on its information office in the late 1980s, letter:

“I am disturbed and hurt [by] the continued bashing of the PMA on the decision of the PMA Honor Committee to recommend the dismissal of Cudia for violation of the Cadet Honor Code.

The honor system is for, of and by the cadets. The cadets enforce and police the system themselves. The Code is simple but sacred to them: a cadet does not lie, cheat, steal [or] tolerate [the] violation of the Code [by] his or her fellow cadets. Violation of the code has only two consequences: either dismissal or resignation from the academy. For many people, the punishment might seem harsh, but that is how the Code has prevailed since the first prewar class of the academy”.

MY REPLY: Many people General Adan did not only see its harshness, but its arbitrariness, and grave abused of discretion among the members of the nine (9) honor committee (HC).  Thus, it was a welcome news that the father of beleaguered 1^st class Cadet Jeff Cudia has filled a petition for intervention by forcing the Academy to give his diploma and an honorable discharge order saving other citizens of this country in filling a taxpayer suit in the Supreme Court for grave abused of discretion and squanders of scarce government monies to those cadets who chose to leave PMA because they violated the three “mortal sins” of lying, cheating, and stealing.

The government spent two million pesos for each cadet to graduate at the Long Gray Line in Fort del Pilar in Baguio City.

***

I am not necessarily against how a cadet is thrown like garbage by his peers after being found guilty violating the Code, but we have laws too where a citizen can file injunction to the courts questioning the misused of millions of pesos of taxpayers monies.

If laws that have been passed by congress have been questioned by citizens at the highest tribunal where the latter dealt them as unconstitutional or illegal, how much more the decision of the HC – a mere body of cadets - implementing a Code that did not even pass Congress.

I would not raised a fuss here if PMA is a private institution, cadets there can do whatever they want to do among themselves similar to what they do to offenders of the Code, but Jesus Christ My Lord in Savior, these boy-soldiers who have still water behind their ears are squandering precious government funds of a country reeling on budget deficits.

***

Here’s General Adan again:

“The Honor Committee found Cudia guilty and recommended his dismissal for telling a lie on why he was late, and not because he was late for his next class. It was unfortunate that he was a prospective salutatorian of his graduating class. The adverse reaction of many sectors outside the PMA is understandable. They would tend to sympathize with Cudia, but in the process, discredit, if not destroy, the institution”.

MY REPLY: PMA would not be destroyed if SC or congress passes a law mitigating or regulating the “brutality” of the Honor Committee sacking a guilty cadet there.

Does it mean that if one is found lying and he would not be sacked but instead given another punishment or demoted to a lower class from the Academy, does it mean PMA becomes a lesser institution that it is now today?

If that would be the case, then the United States Military Academy (USMA) in West Point that pardons an offender of the HC could be a wimp.

But that was not the case; instead it was PMA, that is brutally stringent on the HC, that could shame West Point in producing the most heinous scalawags in uniform. Have you heard about the likes of former PNP chief Avelino Razon (who is incarcerated now at  Camp Crame for malversation in connection with the alleged bogus repair and maintenance of 28 police armored vehicles to the tune of P358.58 million in 2007 and 2008),plunder accused Generals Carlos Garcia, Jacinto Ligot, Angelo Reyes, and Lt. Col. George Rabusa, and Supt. Dionesio Borromeo, former Dagupan City chief of police ( who is jailed at Muntinlupa after he was accused of allegedly protecting a trillion of pesos worth of illegal drug shabu laboratory in La Union), and Euro Generals?

***

West Point did not produce officers like those suspected malefactor- generals. Instead it produces lesser evils, if one wants to call it,  like 4- Star General David Petraues (USMA ’74) having a sexual affair with fellow alumni the athletic, pretty, and charismatic Paula Broadwell (USMA ’95, Harvard); Major General Henry Jervis Friese Miller who blurted out the time and place of Over Lord landing of the allied in France during a drunken stupor in a bar that made Supreme Allied Commander 5-star General  Ike Eisenhower (his mistah or classmate at USMA) demoted him to Lieutenant Colonel and booted him out of Europe; 4-star General Stanley McChrystal (USMA ’76) whose military aide  was reported by news magazine Rolling Stone quoting McChrsytal heaping insults to Vice President Joe Biden and Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative for Afghanistan. McChrystal, whose strategy the surge in Afghanistan had been making progress, submit his resignation to President Barrack Obama because of those faux pas with the reporter: and the most historical sacking of a West  Point alumnus Great Military Tactician 5-Star General Douglas MacArthur, architect of the great Inchon landing and Allied Supreme Commander in the Korean War (where my father and West Pointer and former President Fidel V. Ramos saw action), who was booted by President Harry Truman with the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after MacArthur wanted to expand the war with the Chinese and eventually “nuke” ‘them to smithereens after the Sinos refused to sign the peace pact asked by the United Nations.

Susmariosep, if Truman did not boot out MacArthur the military wimp Philippines now is worry-free where to get those billions of dollars to buy those squadron of jets from South Korea, helicopters and ships from Europe and America to contain the expansion of Mainland China in our island territories.

PMA grow up!