By Mortz
C. Ortigoza
The first
time I saw my military father ready to die for the motherland or probably for
my mother, I was in Grade 5 in M’lang, Cotabato Province.
He was
then on a soldier’s pass when he brought me and my kindergarten brother Gabriel
to a rickety worn out wood walled barbershop which, I still remember, was owned
by the father of my playmates Stephen and Toto Felipe.The latter, a rugged boy,
had fisticuffs with me, but that’s another story.
 |
| My father Retired Air Force Lieutenant Marcelo Cruz Ortigoza, Sr. Papa was probably the most pro- United States’ soldier. When we lived at the Philippine Military Academy, Baguio City in the early 1970s I saw him bought and crowed his U.S made fatigue uniform, duffel bag, charol black shoes, and boots from stores in Quiapo selling Yanks made soldiers’ paraphernalia. |
When we
were seating at the worn-out barber couch elevated by small wood boxes to raise
our heads, some peasant women running and shouting with their lungs out that
the Black Shirts (precursor of the Moro National Liberation Front) were already
at the periphery of the Peñaranda Hospital.
The
hospital was more than a kilometer away from us.
Immediately
my father told the frail looking barber Mr.Felipe to forego our military white
style wall haircut (that I detested because I envied the mop haired Beatles)
because he had to secure us and promised to return with his weapon and later
with us whose side of the heads were already shaved just like those plebes at
the Philippine Military Academy where my siblings and I were born.
