How the Magdalo Ruined My Dinner

July 26, 2003. The text came in at about 8:30 in the evening between bites of lechon kawali. “Unauthorised troop movements reported,” read the screen. While a text message is devoid of emotion and cannot convey urgency as emphatically as a human voice, it has its own peculiar tone which is just as effective.

I retrieved the bag I had just set down a few minutes earlier, and again slung it over my tired shoulders. As a reporter covering the police and military beat, the working day does not end when banks and offices close or even when the paper is put to bed. Troops, police forces, insurgents, criminals and in this case “rogue soldiers” don’t operate on a 9 to 5 schedule.

With the remaining lechon kawali and some rice packed into Tupperware, I headed back to Camp Aguinaldo. A soft wind swirled in Edsa’s emptying lanes as most people had already returned home, unable to hear the rumbles of restive soldiers trooping to the heart of Manila’s business district as they sighed into their pillows.

The military headquarters was beginning to tighten up when I arrived but was still allowing some vehicles in. The mood was tense and guarded as I neared the press office behind the bleachers where a few nights before, we had heard the camp’s base commander emotionally exhorting a group of soldiers to desist from any destabilising efforts. But the sombre feeling was broken when I entered the press room and was greeted by an almost festive atmosphere with regulars of the Defense Press Corps and colleagues covering the Crame beat whooping it up. “Wisegirl! Welcome to your first coup!” the veterans shouted gleefully.

Little by little, drowsy reporters wrenched from their sleep or gimmicks straggled into the press room in varying states of dishevelment and on the other extreme, stylishness. Anthony stumbled in with his hair still unbrushed, wearing wrinkled shorts and Islanders while Joy made her entrance in a dress and heels; the arrival of each new victim eliciting cheers and good-natured teasing from the rest of us who had already been corralled. By now, the press room had turned into a carnival of camera crews and print and broadcast journalists with its own burgeoning restiveness.

I squeezed into an empty space on the sofa next to Manong Cesar; a quiet, bespectacled man who had worked with the same tabloid for some 20 years and who often ghost-wrote articles for his daughter who worked at a rival newspaper. Soft-spoken, serious and the most senior among us, Manong Cesar did not join in the ribaldry. “I was here in ’89,” he said softly. “We had to run for cover when they started shelling the camp. A rocket landed just metres from the press office,” Manong Cesar said.

In 1989, I was a fourth grader waking up on holiday in the province to find my lolo sitting on my bed with a handheld radio pressed to his ear as he told my brothers and I that we would be staying with them indefinitely until things in Manila “settled down”. I remember my excitement at my suddenly extended vacation by the beach but also recall being worried by Lolo’s obviously distressed demeanour and wondered what he meant. When I heard the constant mention of a “coup”, I was perplexed at how such an innocuous one syllable word like a sound from the language of pigeons and babies could trigger such anxiety in the adults.

On old desktops lined against the wall, some reporters focused intensely on Text Twist or played war games, firing on tiny approaching enemies with bored strokes of their fingers while waiting for their editors to tell them that that they could return to their beds or parties. Others began writing their articles – templates of different versions of a coup quelled or a government toppled with blank spaces to be filled in later. Most continued to mingle around gossiping with each other or like me, smoking outside to watch fully armed soldiers march through the road between the press office and the auditorium, the sound of their boots in a perfect march rhythmically filling the cold night.

At about 11p.m., then AFP spokesman Lt. Col. Daniel Lucero entered the press room, informing the reporters that Camp Aguinaldo would soon be closing its gates as a “precautionary measure” and that access in or out of the military base would no longer be allowed. He added that anybody who wanted to leave should do so then. The announcement sliced through the babble and I could sense each reporter in the room withdraw into themselves as the potential gravity of the situation began to sink in. The moment of sobriety and reflection however was short-lived. Realising that the crew from a rival outfit had not yet arrived, a perky lady reporter from a TV station piped up. “So no one else can come in? When are you closing the gates?” she asked with a gleam in her eye, happier to think that her competitors would be pounding away outside Aguinaldo’s gates clamouring to get in than concerned about being trapped in a possible crossfire between government and rebel forces. Ah, reporters.

Shortly after, we were called into the Press Information Office next door to await a word from then Defense Chief Angelo Reyes. Reyes strutted in, dressed in his regular short-sleeved barong and feigning exaggerated bemusement at the pencil and camera wielding horde waiting for him, facetiously asked, “Why are you all still here?”

Appropriating Lucero’s desk, Reyes then cleared his throat and waited for the cameras to start rolling whereupon he launched into a speech about the military’s mandate and how government troops would remain faithful to the chain of command. “That’s what he said during Edsa Dos,” I heard Raffy mutter under his breath.

“There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing significant is happening. Everybody go home and get some rest,” shrugged Reyes as if the whole affair was just a terrible inconvenience.

“Sir, if nothing is happening, why are YOU still here?” Howie asked, his unassuming and almost innocent tone greatly contrasting Reyes’s bombastic attitude.

Reyes’s eyebrows raised, obviously offended at this quiet audacity. “I’m here because you’re still here and you asked me to speak to you,” the defense chief sputtered angrily. “Now go home!” We filed out of the office laughing at Reyes’s loss of composure. Nobody went home.

Suddenly, Joel, the DPC president who had been talking on his cell phone at a distance hurried back to the group. “It’s real. It’s happening. Soldiers with red arm bands are in Makati,” he said, his expression serious and sending us scrambling to our computers like a fighter pilots preparing to take off on an emergency mission.

In the early hours of July 27, some 300 soldiers now known as the Magdalo group descended onto the Oakwood hotel and Ayala malls, planting snipers on the roof deck and rigging mines around the premises, which their leaders would later claim were merely for pyrotechnic value. Accusing the government and military top brass of rampant corruption and complicity in a string of Davao bombings, the group led by five charismatic junior officers, called for the resignations of administration and military leaders. After negotiations, the coup/uprising/mutiny/rebellion was ended without bloodshed and the soldiers were driven back to barracks 18 hours after their “peaceful exercise” began.

“Ang bading naman ng coup na ito,” Joel said, shaking his head in disgust.

After filing my last story and clearing with the desk, I again relaxed on the sofa but resisted the temptation to fall into a deep slumber as Karl and Francis were laughingly taking pictures of other reporters who had succumbed to fatigue, their mouths hanging open as if gasping for breath after the marathon. I reached into my bag to pull out my neglected Tupperware and sighed. I had forgotten to pack utensils.