Roman: Enemy of the State (2)

Conclusion

ONE particularly humid afternoon of August 1986, a local Sanga sa Partido called for a meeting. Roman was at the other side of Agdao—there were no cell phones then, messages were sent by trusted “liaison” officers—when the memo came. He had just finished a “mission” that day and had forgotten his lunch.

The venue was a hut strategically poised on a man-made hill. From the hut, one could see who was approaching. When Roman took the last hairpin-turn to the venue, a ten-year-old kid rushed to him—with eyes wide pumped with adrenaline—hushed that earlier that noon a group of “government” looking men raided the hut and taken three of his comrades in handcuffs.

“Naa pay nagpabilin tulo ka tawo nagpahipi dira sa kubo, Noy (There are still three persons inside the hut),” the child whispered.

Years of training took over, Roman quickly deduced he could take the three armed men hiding by the side of the hut—he had encountered direr situations than this.

He cocked his 1911-Colt .45 then inched slowly towards the hut. As he was nearing the hut, he peeped through the hut’s stilts where he spied two silhouettes of men obviously with rifles.

“But wait,” Roman thought, “the kid said there were three.” But just as he was about to crawl away from the hut—“Click.” Before Roman could react, he felt a sharp pang on his side—the man clad in camouflage had slammed the butt of this M16 on his rib cage.

Tactical interrogation Splash! “Who is your recruiter,” the gravelly baritone voice asked again. Somehow, Roman was now hanging upside down. A muted thud then he felt an excruciating pain on his pelvis; the strike hit his lumbar muscles. Urine started to gush down to his mouth.

Another man, now slightly leaner than the other, swung a baseball bat to his armpit, sending exquisite pain to Roman’s solar plexus.

By now, Roman was already disoriented as to what time of the day it was, what day it was of the week and what week it was of the month. He woke up alone in a two-by-three-meter cell. The only illumination he got was the gleam from the seams of the steel door. He had soiled his pants so many times that the crotch had already caked.

Another week of what seemed like years to Roman, his captors transferred him to a regular cell. The bunker bed had foam covered neatly with an immaculately white bed sheets that bore: AFP Property, the pillow was not bad either. Some of his bruises and contusions have already healed albeit those that are usually exposed were still sore.

Scarred for life “Patya na lang ko (Just kill me please)!” It was just at the stroke of midnight, Roman lying rigid on his bed kept screaming, his hands clenched into fists. Beads of sweat slid from his temples down to his nape. He tried moving his toes—just as his therapist taught him, a couple of sessions ago—whenever the flashbacks gripped him into a virtual atrophy.

Failing, he tried to will his mind to force his neck muscles to bobble his head from side to side. As Roman did this, each shift wrought intermittent flashes in his mind, which consisted of four-second scenes of his ordeal, some years ago. Roman could smell the stench of urine in one of the flashbacks, putrid human waste in another. He sensed an electric rod grazing dangerously near his penis in yet one of the flashbacks.

Then the ultimate squall of sensation came. Gradually, Roman was gasping for air—it was as if a plastic bag was shrouded tightly over his head. At first, he felt ridiculous.

“This could not be possibly happening to me for real,” he thought. However, as seconds seemed to tick agonizingly slower than usual, Roman found himself in the threshold of asphyxiation. The dizziness he felt microseconds ago turned to panic. His body still shudders every time the flashbacks visit him in his sleep. Roman would still wince every time he urinates. He is deaf in his left ear. Roman survived a hypertensive stroke in the later part of 2009.

Now, 54 years old, he regularly attends psycho-therapy sessions with three other torture survivors during Martial Law in one of the local clinics in the city. Roman currently lives in one of Cagayan de Oro City’s 80 barangays, tending a small vegetable patch on his yard.

“I think I’ll never get over what I went through when I was captured during Martial Law. I hope that by telling my story, the new generation of students and young activists will never let a martial rule proclaimed again,” Roman said.