The Life of a Story in Progress 008: Keeping an eye out

In 1969, I lived in the Diamond Subdivision a few miles off-base from Clark Air Base in the Philippines. I’m not sure why we lived off-base. Especially in the Philippines, where there was sufficient security concerns to warrant having armed guards at each street intersection. To make the visual all the more surreal, these guards would be situated in the midst of an array of stacked sand bags, standing and holding their rifles at their sides, clearly ready to fire. 

This was alarming, and my father explained to us that they were there to protect us (everyone in the subdivision) from the “huks.” The huks were a group of resisters to the Japanese occupation (of 1942) and were known as the Anti-Japanese Army. Their full name was “Hukbong Bayan Laban sa mga Hapon" 

Since World War II had ended in 1945, one might wonder why it was necessary to be on alert for the peasant resistance 24 years later.  I can’t answer that question and neither could my father when I asked him.

I used to walk past them all the time when I went to visit a friend who lived elsewhere in the subdivision or when I went to the little sundry kiosk near the entrance of our little community. They never looked directly at me, they never smiled and they looked really scary, yet I pretty much ignored them and didn't often think much about their presence and what it meant.