Thwack at reality

A cell phone snapshot became the last memory for a bunch of young boys before their flight to death.

The irony in that picture was that they were still being sent to a battlefield that they did not reach when they were killed in a crash of a Hercules C-130 plane as it landed in Sulu on Sunday.

As of this writing, more than 50 of the 96 passengers perished in that accident.

The C-130 is a sturdy plane. Eons ago, this rubbernecker had the chance to board one in a flight to Manila from Zamboanga, where a small bunch of sportswriters were stranded following the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s (MILF) bombing of the Zamboanga Airport.

It was considered a short flight, but the C-130 was slow and does not have seats. The experience was like riding a full train where one stands for the duration of the flight, his stance supported only by a harness he is lucky to reach and pick, or he leans on the shoulder of the soldier next to him.

That’s how spartan that plane was.

We were with several soldiers. Not one of them spoke a word.

Freshly harvested fruits and vegetables, several boxes of soaps and toothpaste — the smuggled brands that were features of the region’s barter trade with Malaysia and Indonesia — competed for space with us.

We were not soldiers and our knees gave way in the middle of the flight. Then we sat on the boxes lying on the side, earning sharp stares from the soldiers that we didn’t mind. We were too tired to take notice.

It was upon landing that we realized those boxes were the coffins of soldiers who died in battle with the MILF. We were so sorry.

My view of the uniformed personnel changed from thereon.

That C-130 that crashed could not be far from what we took on that day. It was acquired bare by the Philippines from the United States through a Foreign Military Financing grant program to strengthen the Philippine military’s logistical capacity for military and civil support operations, including humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief and distribution of Covid-19 supplies.

The last two of them were turned over to the Philippine Air Force on 19 February 2021. The one that crashed had three pilots and a crew of five.

Eighty-eight of its passengers were very young Army men. They were new soldiers who had completed basic training in Cagayan de Oro City and were to be deployed to fight terror groups in Sulu.

In a report, Lt. Gen. Corleto Vinluan said it was unlikely that the C-130 took hostile fire. Witnesses claimed it overshot the runway that strategically was not for big, bulky planes like the Hercules.

The runway was shorter than the other landing strips in the country. It may have contributed to the reason/s for the crash.

“The plane missed the runway and it was trying to regain power but failed and crashed,” AFP chief of staff Gen. Cirilito Sobejana said.

The sadder note of that incident was its proximity to yet another crash that happened just on 23 June.

It involved an S-70i Black Hawk Utility helicopter that crashed in Tarlac. Six people died in that accident.

The chopper was on a night flight proficiency training mission when it crashed. It resulted in the grounding of the 15 other Black Hawk choppers purchased by the Philippines from Poland to the tune of

$241 million in 2019.

Then a month before that, on 17

April, a pilot was killed and his three passengers were injured when their MD520MG helicopter crashed in Getafe,

Bohol while on an engineering flight.

It belonged to the Air Force’s 15th Strike Wing. The fleet was grounded, too.

On 16 January, all seven passengers of the UH-1H Huey helicopter crashed nose first in Impasugong town, Bukidnon, while on a supply run in the mountains near the town.

Those were four precious aircrafts lost in the first half of this year alone.

The country spent millions in dollars for the purchase of air and naval assets that are used in combat but more in humanitarian operations.

Their presence also adds respectability to our military in the face of external threats, although these are mostly used to combat internal threats, as the Department of National

Defense and the military conduct actions based on antiquated laws that are directed against the internal “enemies of the state.”

Most of these assets were hand-me-downs from the country’s more powerful military allies. The Hercules was among them, a vestige of US influence over the Philippine military that is hard to erase even with President Rodrigo Duterte’s open declaration of veering away from the country’s former colonial master.

It’s also a sign of the military’s current state that remains years behind its more powerful allies, susceptible to breaking at times.

“The sadder note of that incident was its proximity to yet another crash that happened just on 23 June.

“Country spent millions in dollars for the purchase of air and naval assets.