Col. Ariel Querubin

In the Line of Fire: Col. Ariel Querubin

Selflessness is a virtue hard to come by. Perhaps more so in situations of unimaginable duress, like in combat, for example. Yet there are those, like Col. Ariel Querubin who stood out because they stood up.

During an assault on an MILF camp in Lanao del Norte, Querubin’s batallion found themselves outnumbered and facing heavy artillery fire from enemy lines. Without thought for his own safety, he moved positions, drawing fire towards himself with the end view of revealing where the firing came from.

As Col. Querubin himself admits it didn’t occur to him for a while that he actually had a pregnant wife at the time who was about to give birth in a few weeks’ time. “All I thought about was that my men depended on me,” he said.

The battle raged well into the next day, and under his able leadership they repelled wave upon wave of enemy reinforcements and continued attempts to encircle his unit.

Inspiring his men to the hilt, Querubin’s unit broke down the last line of defense of the rebel stronghold. As a result they captured the MILF’s Camp John Mack, the group’s most strategic staging area for operations.

Col. Querubin cheated death, and several weeks later his wife would give birth to a healthy son.

For his efforts, Col. Querubin was awarded the prestigious Medal of Valor award in 2002, a privilege and an honor reserved for the most exemplary heroism and sacrifice displayed by a soldier. It is also the military’s highest honor.

"You should be proud of his courage and bravery," the President herself stressed during a speech she gave in Col. Querubin’s homtown of La Union. Quickly she then added that Querubin and his brigade would be awarded medals of honor.

Col. Querubin, a 49-year-old husband and proud father of seven is very thankful for the recognition that was given him for his performance. “It was overwhelming,” he said. “to finally get this recognition after all these years was a culminating achievement.”

In recognition of the hardships that a soldier faces, the Medal of Valor award goes with some humble benefits including priority in promotion to the next rank, medical benefits, scholarships and tuition privileges for the awardee and their dependents.

And yet the work continues for Col. Querubin. Until now he works most of the time in the field, usually coming home just once a month for no more than a week at any given time. How does he balance his life then, as a soldier and as a father? “I make sure I spend quality time with the kids, since I am gone most of the time,” he explained. “My wife will tell me, pagalitan mo si ganito, si ganun, and I would say, hindi ako, gusto ko pag uumuwi ako masaya sila at nami-miss nila ako.” He believes his distance should not give his children a reason to be even more distant.

He is fierce in maintaining that the Marines play an indispensable part in society. “We have to contribute to nation-building. Kung saan kami mag-operate, pag-alis namin we want to see that there has been progress in the community.”

Col. Querubin has been in active duty for almost 33 years, and says that he is most proud of the support given by his family and his peers. The warmth that reciprocates all he has done for the job makes it worthy. “Love of country talaga ang nagtulak sa akin,” Col. Querubin explains on the reason why he wanted to be a Marine. “Naramdaman ko na dito ang calling ko.”

And what is it about the Marines that has made him stay in for 33 years? The cutting edge, he says, is in the kind of discipline tahtthe institution practices. “We make sure na ang mga tauhan, marunong rumespeto ng ibang tao,” he says. “Mataas ang credibility rate ng Marines, at pag may lapses, seryoso kaming wag marumihan ang reputasyon (ng Marines).”

The story of the likes of Col. Querubin stresses the obvious, which a lot may forget. A Marine is also a human being, with aspirations and dreams. The service that they extend to the country oftentimes demands the loss of lives, and yet at the end of the day, they too, have families whose future depends on waging the battles that hope to secure for us a better future. All it takes to do his job, as Col. Querubin has shown, is to think less of one’s self and more of others.

"like two skins, one inside the other"

Song of the Moment: Biglaan, 6 Cycle Mind
To Do (tasks, not people): prepare (?)
Current State: sleepy
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if there is one image from brokeback mountain i will remember, it will be this. yahoo reports that the props had gone up in auction and sold for something north of a hundred grand. wow.



from annie proulx's short story:

"The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands."

Anticipation

Song of the Moment: Separate Lives, Phil Collins
To Do (tasks, not people): paper trail
Current State: whoozy
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i had my list, but it was no use. packing my bag proved a business in haste. i unhanged about seven shirts off the closet, threw them down as if i was moving out and everything had to be cleared.

i pulled open the drawers on the cabinet in the other room and took out three sets of underwear and socks and hankies. mom comes up, stands in the door and hands me a bunch of plastic bags. 'don't pack too heavy, you don't seem able to take a bag that big,' she tells me.

i disagreed. iona's bag, as it happens, is a 70L backpack, roughed and rugged down by several travels without its owner. iona and i had met up one early morning in october last year. we had pancakes at mcdonalds when she lent me the bag for a trek up pinatubo. i cancelled that trip after my companion, tune, backed out because her mom had a heart attack.

but now we were all systems go for the highest peak in luzon, and iona was quick to point out: 'it's the second time my bag will go up pulag, without me.'

'i'll tell you all about it,' i rib her, giggling, on the day i tell her where i was going. and i think about what exactly i will be telling her as i fold my stuff and put them in the bags mom gives me. waterproofing, i heard erik call it. we were not crossing any river, but apparently it's standard practice to waterproof a bag. 'expect rains, it's extreme weather condition, it's the coldest time of the year there,' i remember yvonne saying amid the noise of mallrats chattering and patrons dining at the foodcourt during our pre-climb meeting in Gateway a week prior.

the briefing had been quick and direct. there was the imagined fear of hypothermia. 'you could stay two days in baguio to get accustomed to the weather,' adviced eileen, as we were drawing up my to-bring list a week earlier. 'i don't have the luxury to do that,' i say. so in a nutshell i was imagining how cold it was, but the chance to do something new was a warm hearth inside that inspired more than cowed one into stepping back and saying, no, i can't do this, and come up with a thousand reason not to.

when one wants something so bad, the will can and should always trump doubt.

the packing is done. some shirts i had taken out of the closet went back in. the weaving blanket, the rubber earth pad, the skyblue cotton jacket with white stripes running along the sleeves were suddenly weapons against the fear that i would freeze to death up there.

'if hypothermia sets in,' explains bong on what the best remedy was, 'you'll need body heat to warm you up.' joseph adds in 'you'll just lose focus, your mouth will clatter'.

information none of which, of course, my mother needed to know. i kiss her goodbye, spared some pocket money which was in her pocket by the time i left, and i went to c3 for coffee before heading off to the terminal.

eileen and enteng drop me off, stayed a while when we waited for the team to assemble. "thank you guys so much for supporting me in this," i tell them in the car on the way to the terminal. i felt like a part of me wasn't going back. rommel and yvonne were already there, and she turned over my share of the group load, a bag of vegetables with eggplants, cabbage etc., for the sinigang -- day 1 lunch.

the terminal is rather cramped and unkept. there were thick, dark puddles where buses stared back at you, unmoving; people sat sleeping on unscrewed chairs, some with huge carton boxes were sitting, all were in cue for business that perhaps varied from visits, to dead relatives, to a long weekend ahead, or to simply get out of the box that is the city.

one by one the team members arrived -- bong, then tune, 'seph and pastor. elaine was nowhere in sight. By the time the bus pulled over to the front and we loaded our bags on the compartment, elaine, tune and I had between us about half a dozen missed calls and received calls and by the last minute elaine shows up and we were off to baguio by 10.15 on the dot.

As the bus slowly made its way out of the streets of cubao to the expanding lanes of the expressway i couldn’t shake the feeling that leaving meant leaving some loose strands hanging behind. And yet forward we went, and I was clueless to what lay before us beyond what I have read or heard. So I could say I was suspended in time between the unfinished and the unknown. But there are times when even if you can't tell for certain just where exactly it is you're going, you go ahead. Because as much as you spend time taking in everything you see or hear or feel on the way to that unknown place, the destination is still all there is to the journey.

NEXT: Dawn in Baguio and the Dirt Road to Babadek

some open space

Song of the Moment: Comfortable, John Mayer
To Do (tasks, not people): rest
Current State: weak from the fever
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"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it and if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."
- from Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx



Brokeback Mountain is all about the locational politics of same sex relationships. Where does it happen, and how, and who makes it happen and who puts it there?

Wrong place, wrong time, it seems, in the most brazen of terms. Jack and Ennis are reduced to occassional trysts in a sanctuary where they can be with who they really want to be with. Because everytime they went down from Brokeback they had to go back to a life that while I don't think was any less fake, wasn't what fulfilled them either.

But because being up in Brokeback feels like getting sucked into an entirely different universe, they are, in Jack's words reduced to having "high-altitude fucks 3 or 4 times a year". Not only because Ennis isn't settled with himself (and remains that way until the end) but also because there is no place for this set-up in Wyoming in 1963, in much the same way there is no place for it anywhere today.

Straight society will put up with the reality of these relationships only insofar as it doesn't have to witness firsthand, its expression. Perhaps worse than hatred is the condescension that comes from people saying it's okay to live with homosexuals for as long as they do their business somewhere else.

That's the problem Jack and Ennis had back in the fictional milieu they lived within in 1963. That's the same prejudice that gay people still have to contend with today. Straight society will more or less "recognize" the existence of gay relationships, but it doesn't want to see it.

What is needed to break through the thick layers of prejudice that society has imposed on gay relationships is to assert "some open space" for the expression of a love that is just as valid as what we see between any other pairs. The woman sitting a chair away from me said "sick" under her breath in the early scene where Jack pulls Ennis's hand into his pants. it is highly doubtful whether she would say the same thing if it were a woman's breast Ennis was fondling. So indeed, bigotry is alive and kicking. And Ennis was wrong when he said "if you can't fix it you gotta stand it" -- the most memorable line in that movie, and not the other one you hear on the trailer. Gay people don't have to stand it, because it can and should be fixed.

Because for bigots, gay relationships belong somewhere distant and out of sight. Some place far-off like Brokeback Mountain. Any place except their own backyards. But straight society will never fix it. It's the one that has to stand it, get used to it. And this love should be asserted and not quarantined into our own private Brokebacks.

possessions

Song of the Moment: Perfect Situation, Weezer
To Do (tasks, not people): unwind!
Current State: frayed nerves
~~~~~~~~~~




so when i woke up this morning my palm had suddenly gone dead on me. last night i began having trouble turning it on, and my immediate suspect was the underclocker program i had put in to supposedly save up on batt life. as a multimedia handheld the zire is pretty awful when it comes to charging (read: sock it in everyday for 2 hours tops). but when i tinkered with the setting for the pxaclocker, my handheld went cuckoo.

so the whole morning i was frantic. i was thinking there went my thousands and thousands of pesos into waste, and i was holding a very expensive piece of junk in my hand. i was close to breaking down when my handheld wouldn't turn on despite my repeated attempts at a hard reset. i'm still in the honeymoon phase, you see, because the handheld has been with me for just a little over a week. so the possibility that it had broken down was just petrifying.

thankfully though, with a little help from my source and a hard reset, my handheld came back to life. the only trade off was that all the pics i took from last night's fair are now kaput. everything else had been hotsynched yesterday before i left the office including a very important essay i am working on.

it just got me thinking as i was re-arranging my pics on my palm. i had become attached to my palm in so short a time. so maybe the pricetag was sufficient reason in itself. and yet i couldn't imagine how ruinous it would be for my resources to have to go to all the trouble that comes with a possible repair. i would be devastated.

and yet, can gadgets breaking down really be as devastating as any tragedy that involves people? i guess i just want to keep my frayed nerves in check. i remember how depressed i got when i lost my old philips ozeo in an FX.

so lesson learned: always double-check 3rd party software before loading them up. hehe. but seriously, i guess acquisition is not an entirely bad habit. but there's something telling about putting so much of ourselves in material things and losing sight of what life is like without them. from a time when i couldn't imagine life without my phone, i now can't imagine my life without my handheld. and yet, life goes on.

clarity

Song of the Moment: Push the Button, Sugababes
To Do (tasks, not people): play the day by ear
Current State: excited
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more than anything else right now, i pray for discernment. so on a day when everybody is with someone else, i conciously choose to be by myself. if only for a few hours. and so it will go down once this is up. because beyond the sad struggle of a face, i must learn how to love myself above anybody else.

ugly

Song of the Moment: Ugly, Sugababes
To Do (tasks, not people): get to that forum, get to that meeting, see if i can catch up with that meeting, get a massage, see if i can go to TpsK
Current State: frantic but sedate (?!?)
~~~~~~~~~~



i am reminded of this constant struggle i can't admit i've won yet. i'm not the most good-looking bloke in the line-up, yet i still have to remind myself sometimes that i'm not all that bad. sometimes it's the nose. sometimes it's the hair. sometimes it's the forehead. sometimes it's the teeth. most often it's all of them.

tune out. listen:

"People are all the same
And we only get judged by what we do
Personality reflects name
And if I'm ugly then
So are you."

people are beautiful because we love them. it's not the other way around.

how true, but almost impossible to live by.

PICS: Mt. Pulag, Benguet (Feb 2-5)

Song of the Moment: Please Send Me Someone, George Michael
To Do (tasks, not people): speeches galore!
Current State: dyslexic
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a walk in the clouds, indeed


me trying to cover up a GMA signage


en route from ranger station to campsite


at the hilltop immediately before the 45 degree summit assault.


sunrise at the summit


photo-ops with melody


natural high


melody and elaine at the summit


view of the "killler trail" via akiki. we took the "executive trail" via ambangeg.


pagod!

the whole set of pictures from elaine's digicam can be seen here. i hope to get more pics from the other bluehearts members later when we get to the post-climb meeting.

the narrative will have to wait for a while. am just too lost for words for this experience.