Farewell to a warrior who fought with honor!

There are warriors and noble knights. There are killers and butchers. Both can be fierce in battle. But the true warriors are those who fight with honor.

Such a knight, a paladin (to recall the old-fashioned term which still resonates) was Rafael "Rocky" Ileto. He was brave in combat, gentlemanly in peace. He stood up for principle to the very end.

He was the lone general who had rejected the Dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos’ "Letter of Instruction" of September 21, 1972 – the martial law decree under which 400 of us, led by Senator Ninoy Aquino (who ended up my cellmate in Fort Bonifacio) were arrested between midnight and crack of dawn.

Ileto, who was then Vice-Chief of Staff, could not be arrested, publicly reprimanded, or disciplined by the resentful Marcos since he was so popular with the soldiers that the army might have revolted – so he was "punished" by being sent away by Macoy as "ambassador" to Iraq and Turkey, and later assigned to Thailand and Laos.

Tears sprung unbidden to my eye when I learned yesterday of Rocky’s death of a heart attack. For I remembered him – young, strong, and vigorous – an officer leading his men into combat: The "Father of the Scout Rangers". It was the great Ramon Magsaysay who had told him to forge, into finest steel, a small elite force, to be the cutting edge of the war to crush the Communist Huk rebellion, which had been more powerful and more fanatically devoted to the "dialectic", for that matter, than the present New People’s Army.

The message went out yesterday, by immediate cellphone text (in this nation which is the Texting Capital of the World) to all armed forces officers and men in the field, announcing Ileto’s death and declaring: Few men have the honor of having added a glorious unit to the Armed Forces of the Philippines. General Ileto had that distinction, we salute him proudly! May he rest in peace.

* * *

Rocky, I learned later, had been scheduled to go to the United States this October for a special ceremony at his alma mater, the US Military Academy (West Point), honoring his 60th anniversary as an alumnus of the Point. He had graduated from the institution in 1943.

I also contacted Captain Dennis Eclarin, one of Rocky’s favorite protégés, who had fought with distinction as a Scout Ranger in Mindanao (including the Camp Abubakar battle) and is the author of the Scout Rangers Combat Guide, whose updated 2003 edition is being published by The Philippine STAR, yep, by us, but still pending approval by the Armed Forces Chief of Staff. Dennis, himself a West Point graduate (1993), is currently Director of the Center for Character Development in the Philippine Military Academy.

Dennis had visited Rocky Ileto at his sickbed in the Philippine Heart Center two weeks ago. Ileto, already very ill, had beckoned Eclarin to come closer. He whispered: "Dennis, don’t forget those three words: Duty, Honor, Country, I live by them."

Truly, he lived by them.

By the way, the motto of our PMA obviously derived from this West Point slogan, is: Courage, Integrity, Loyalty. Rocky lived by those ideals, too.

We expect our current, and 32nd AFP Chief of Staff, General Narciso L. Abaya, both from PMA (Class ’70) and West Point (1971), a former commander of the Southern Command in Mindanao, to be guided by both.

Many civilians, including politicians in high places, civic and business leaders, churchmen and academics too often scorn our warriors as rough-cut and violent (as some occasionally are), but it is our soldiers and policemen who keep us safe and free.

* * *

In a long-ago book, the famous and controversial Major General Edward Geary Lansdale wrote about how the Scout Rangers were "born" and about the youthful captain who had trained and led them, Ileto.

Ed Lansdale, born in Detroit in 1908, had graduated from the University of California, L.A., then served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during World War II.

A career officer in the US Air Force, he had retired with the rank of major general in 1963. He had, however, arrived in the Philippines in the 1950s as an "adviser" to then Defense Secretary Magsaysay. Together with his assistant, Colonel Charles T. R. Bohannan, he had helped Monching Magsaysay flesh out the Battalion Combat Teams (BCTs) which were to become the sledge-hammer of the military – in tandem with Colonel Napoleon Valeriano’s PC "Nenita Unit", the Death’s Head unit (the original "Men in Black"?) which tore out the guts of the Hukbong Magpapalaya ng Bayan (HMB) movement.

Lansdale helped RM develop tactics in the Huk campaign that were to become a model for military action against Communist rebellions in Asia, although they didn’t work as well in South Vietnam to which Lansdale was assigned later. (Since Pol Valeriano, one of Lansdale’s trusted assistants after Valeriano’s retirement from our military, had a hand in training the Cuban exiles which subsequently undertook an ill-fated invasion in the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) which failed to get off Playa Giron and overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro, it is presumed that Lansdale had played a key hand in this chapter, too).

It was Lansdale, incidentally, who was the role model for the hero of the bestselling novel of 1958, The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer which is too often, confused for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. In the latter novel (remember the recent movie starring Michael Caine?) the Quiet American was the blundering "villain", while in the Ugly American, despite its name, the successful and brave hero was a Colonel Hillendale – quite clearly a play on the surname Lansdale.

This is what Lansdale had recounted in his autobiography, entitled In The Midst of Wars, and subtitled, An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (Harper & Rowe, New York, San Francisco, London, 1972):

"The concept of the Philippine Scout Rangers was a coffee klatsch contribution by a young Filipino captain who had graduated from West Point, Rafael ‘Rocky’ Ileto. His idea was to set up small teams of volunteers, each made up of an officer and four men, who were to be given intense training in jungle warfare, scouting and survival. After training, each team would be sent to a remote area to make contact with the enemy – either keeping the enemy under close observation until detailed information was gathered or eliminating him by ambush or surprise attack. The choice would be left to the team’s on-the-spot decision. Magsaysay immediately took to the idea and put Captain Ileto in charge of the program. Soon a Scout Ranger team was attached to each BCT. The parceling of the Scout Rangers among the BCTs proved to be a provocative seeding of the morale of the armed forces.

"The volunteers in the Scout Rangers were no shrinking violets. Coming back from their hazardous patrols and their contacts with the enemy in remote hideouts, they would boast about their exploits while relaxing with the soldiers of the BCT; the talk made the enemy seem less fearsome and even started shaming the troopers into emulating the Scout Rangers. If the Scout Rangers had remained a separate elite unit, in the manner customary in more conventional armies, their exploits would have meant little to other soldiers. It would have been a case of ‘let those nuts do it – that’s what they’re paid for.’ However, with a Scout Ranger team living and operating with a BCT, its men set immediate examples for the soldiers of that BCT.

"One morning, for instance, I visited a BCT camped near the ‘Zig Zag’, the twisting climb of highway across the mountains from Bataan and Subic Bay to the central lowlands of Pampanga, where exhausted American and Filipino troops had passed in 1942 on their ‘death march’ after defeat on Bataan by the Japanese. On that historic ground, I talked to the BCT troops about the latter-day war in which they were engaged. Huks were close by, the troops said. While we were talking, the Scout Ranger team attached to the BCT came in from a two-day patrol in the surrounding jungle. The rangers began to tease the BCT troops about having seen them the night before, allegedly protecting the highway by driving along it fast in trucks, the BCT soldiers hunkered down in the back of the trucks ‘like rabbits’. A whole Huk squadron could have been hiding next to the road without the troops seeing them. Some protection! The BCT soldiers were silent after this teasing. I left them and drove on to Subic Bay. That night, I drove back across the ‘Zig Zag’, nervously alert as the dark jungle growth pressed in against the highway, hiding Huks in ambush for all I knew. I came upon soldiers walking along the shoulder of the road and stopped to talk to them. They were the BCT troops with whom I’d talked that morning. I noticed other troops in among the trees, moving parallel to the road. Apparently the BCT troopers were out to show their Scout Rangers that they knew how to conduct a real patrol too. I wished them well and drove on."

That’s how the Scout Rangers of the young Captain Ileto inspired their comrades in the Army to emulate what they did – shucks, in fact shamed them into becoming efficient combat men, not slackers. When morale goes up, victories ensue – and you have an army that fights.

Sure, there was a dark period some years after the triumph over Communist insurgency (salamabit, the NPAs were resurrected by Joma Sison as Maoist guerrillas) when a scandal involving abuse and arrogance in the 1960s led to the Rangers being disbanded. They were restored to active duty later, however, and took part – on the rebel side, mind you – in the 1989 RAM-SFP-YOU coup attempt of December 1989 – when they occupied the financial district of Makati for several days until their "surrender" was negotiated.

Even then, the "hostages" in the 5-star hotels and the business district praised the Scout Ranger "rebels" for their discipline, their courtesy, and their correctness of conduct. They were permitted to march, with their weapons, "back to their barracks", where they surrendered to the government!

The Scout Rangers sometimes rile their comrades in the Army with the brag that "there are only two kinds of units in the Philippine Army, the Scout Rangers and the rest". (They were the ones who rescued Gracia Burnham, from the Abu Sayyaf with, alas, the deaths of her husband, the missionary Martin Burnham, and nurse Ediborah Yap in what was known as "Operation Daybreak".)

The three S’s still characterize the Rangers: Spirit, Skill and Stamina.

Their song still rings: "We strike; We who are happy and free; birds of same feather, we flutter together, Scout Rangers of fortune are we… We fight like a panther, and conquer the hardships always!"

Corny, even ungrammatical. But speech was never their forte. Action was – and still is.

Adieu, Rocky! Away from the "Combat Zone", into the peace of heaven, with our Supreme Commander, God our Father. May the God of battles and everlasting peace take you to His bosom for a soldier’s rest.

A grateful nation, I’m confident, sends your courageous soul off with a proud and admiring salute!