I just wanted to share with everyone the article below re General Esperon:
General Calm By Rodel Rodis, Nov 07, 2006 (edited)
Three days after the Thai coup, Gen. Esperon accepted an invitation to speak at a forum at the University of the Philippines, the undisputed hotbed of student activism. On his way out of the forum, the unarmed general was pelted with eggs by a group of radical students. The general ducked and quipped that the students were "bad eggs with bad aim".
Hermo, as we called him, was cool even when we were classmates at Philippine Science High School (1965-1970). We were the second batch of students at the new government-created special school that was modeled after the Bronx High School of Science in New York. About 5,000 students from all over the Philippines took the entrance test which awarded government scholarships to the top 150.
Many of our classmates had humble roots like Hermo who came from Asingan, Pangasinan, one of seven kids whose father was a public elementary school teacher and whose mother was a homemaker.
"We had a small farm," Hermo told me once. "We had a few pigs, chickens, and we grew vegetables in our backyard. Every time we needed money to pay for tuition, we sold a pig."
Hermo was an athlete in all sports. I remember playing soccer with him on the dusty grounds of our rented school site, together with classmates like Roger Calunsag, Lazaro "Lazzie" Silva, Alex Belone and Pastor "Sonny" Mesina. Hermo and Lazzie were close and were leaders of a tight circle of friends called "XYZTS" because, they said, they would be friends forever, from ABC until XYZ.
They became activists, as we all did. It was the times, paraphrasing Bob Dylan, they were-a-revolting.
Our batch graduated from high school during the First Quarter Storm, the historic first three months of 1970 when tens of thousands of students marched in the streets of Manila to protest "fascism, feudalism, imperialism and bureaucrat capitalism". Despite our school name, we majored in the isms.
After graduating from high school, however, we went our different ways. Hermo and Roger accepted scholarships to the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) while Lazzie went to Ateneo and Alex and Sonny went to the University of the Philippines.
For Hermo, it was matter of timing. The PMA scholarship offer came in January of 1970 while the others would come in May or June, if he was lucky. "I came from a poor family. I couldn't risk waiting for something better down the road that I might not get," he said. The PMA was a bird in the hand.
Lazzie joined the local Ateneo chapter of the militant student group, Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK Association of Democratic Youth), which surprised many because he was known as a fun-loving guy and because his father was Lt. Col. Lazaro Silva, Sr., a former Army intelligence chief.
Lazzie's radicalizing experience occurred in February of 1971 during the "Diliman Commune" when UP students barricaded the campus to protest a steep oil price hike. A crazed right-wing professor shot at the students and killed Sonny Mesina, who was Lazzie's closest friend. A few months later, while attending a protest rally in downtown Manila, Lazzie saw government soldiers from a rooftop open fire on a group of rallyists, killing four laborers. That was it.
When President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, Lazzie joined the underground, organizing against the dictatorship. Towards the end of 1973, Lazzie was arrested by soldiers who saw him in possession of anti-Marcos leaflets, an offense which caused him to be jailed for six months.
After his release from prison in the summer of 1974, Lazzie decided to head for the hills to join the New People's Army (NPA). On August 13, 1975, government soldiers tracked down Lazzie's unit and a gun battle ensued. Lazzie decided to hold off the soldiers by himself to allow his comrades to escape.
By that time, Hermo had graduated from the PMA and was in an army intelligence school in Pampanga when he heard of an NPA guerilla killed in a skirmish, reportedly the son of a former army intelligence chief. When Hermo learned it was Lazzie, he felt deep pain.
Hermo almost didn't graduate in 1974 because the PMA feared that, because of his activism in high school, he might be another Victor Corpus or Crispin Tagamolila, two PMA graduates who defected to the NPA in 1970 after raiding the PMA armory.
"They couldn't prove their charges against me beyond a reasonable doubt so they let me graduate," Hermo said.
Hermo's star rose from army commander all the way to the top of the military heap, Armed Forces Chief.
Soon after assuming the helm of the AFP, Hermo visited Inupacan, Leyte to view the recently discovered bodies of 87 NPA cadres who were killed by their comrades who thought they were "deep penetration agents", among more than 500 NPA soldiers who were executed from 1985 to 1987 when the NPA engaged in a fratricidal internal purge. If Lazzie had not died in 1975, would he have been one of those buried in that ditch because his father was an army intelligence chief?
Whatever he may have felt about his past activism, Hermo is now determined, according to the newspapers, to "neutralize the communist New People's Army (NPA) before President Arroyo ends her term by 2010."
Now and then, though, Hermo still talks of his old friends. Roger Calunsag eventually became a (Rear) Admiral. But many of his old friends are not around anymore. Like Lazzie, Alex Belone joined the NPA and was killed in an encounter with the military in Sorsogon in 1975. Unlike Hermo, they did not make it to XYZ.
