Tales of WWII life on a hillside in the Philippines

I shall begin on Easter

Sunday. Although camped upon a hillside that overlooked the Barrio de San Marcelino (Philippines) ... the sound drifted up on the breeze ... a sound I would hold in my fondest memories. “I would be true, for there are those who trust me; I would be true, for there are those who care.” It was sung in the Tagalog language that made it ever so haunting, enchanting ... a song from my childhood days.

There were four of us setting up a forward post. No one came down from Mt. Pinatubo, which we found active. All the hill tribes of the island were primitive with many different languages. All used spears or arrows with deadly venom on the tips.

As a 16-year-old soldier I had begun to feel at home on the island of Luzon. I loved Manila and the Philippines; loved everything about these enchanted islands.

Life in the islands was the greatest. Sometimes I spent week-ends in the tipi hut of a family. He had ducks in his backyard. And I took my Japanese rifle and we hunted wild pigs on Bataan Peninsula. I loved the many nightclubs and cockfight arenas.

I had become what the natives called a “Dhobie citizen.” DHOBIE is one who becomes a native of Luzon.

Everything grew on the islands -- hibiscus, bougainvilleas, jasmine and hundreds of varieties of orchids.

Geckos scrambled along the walls of our hut and exotic birds squawked in the mango trees ... I loved the lazy, palmy shores, beautiful butterflies, the dense jungle...

We were to build a church in the clearing near the Barrio, so it was to be built of nothing but bamboo and Nipa (palm) and

... when we finished we had a church that held 300 people. The hard part for me was the roof, which was laid on like the English thatch roofs, which are still used. So I could build my own church now if I had to. In that church you could hear every note of music -- no echoes.

While in the tropics, there was also danger other than the Fourteenth Imperial Army, or that dread sound of the Mitsubishi engine on the Zero

... diseases heretofore thought to be eradicated surfaced in the tropics. Beriberi, dengue

... dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, ... many ancient diseases came back...

I never had a cold while in the Army. We received excellent

defiance of the team owners’ attempt institute a new collective bargaining agreement that capped player salaries. Those salaries had skyrocketed since baseball’s reserve clause ended in 1975, ushering in the age of free agency in which players could field offers from any team interested in them. Free agency, the owners claimed, was financially unsustainable.

The players saw this as another

attempt to exploit them, pointing out that before free agency they were extremely underpaid, and when the players’ union later discovered that beginning in 1985 the owners had secretly agreed not to sign one another’s players — resulting in just a trickle of free agent signings of inconsequential players for the next three years — it sued, winning a $280 million settlement.

Thus, when the collective bargaining agreement between the players and owners expired

in 1994, no agreement replaced it and the players refused to take the field. The owners then locked the players out and cancelled the rest of the season.

As the 1995 season approached, 28 of the 30 owners announced they would field replacement teams, but in March of that year, then-district court (now Supreme Court) judge, Sonia Sotomayer, ruled in Silverman v. Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee, Inc. that the owners could neither implement a new collective bargaining agreement

nor use replacement players. Sotomayer’s ruling effectively ended the strike and the 1995 baseball season began on schedule.

At which point the fans weighed in. Infuriated that both the owners and players had sacrilegiously tampered with the American Pastime, attendance at baseball stadiums plummeted.

Attendance would remain spotty, until, in September, Baltimore Orioles third baseman, “Iron Man” Cal Ripken, broke the consecutive

games-played record of the

“Iron Horse,” Lou Gehrig. The televised game was halted as Ripken jogged around the stadium to the cheers of the adoring fans, which was labeled “The Most Memorable Moment” in MLB history. In its wake, most baseball fans put the strike behind them.

Unsurprisingly, given the strike’s repercussions, when the collective bargaining agreement renewed in 1996 expired in

2002, both the owners and players quickly agreed to a new one.