Staying strong, Army soldier starts rebuilding

INFANTA, QUEZON—Army Pfc. Jessie Ponce, a brawny 27-year-old soldier, took a deep breath and shook his head to hold back the tears.

“I don’t want to show them that I am affected, too. If we will all show weakness, nothing will happen to us,” Ponce told me inside the nipa hut that served as office to the First Infantry Battalion’s Bravo Company under the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division here in Infanta.

The youngest in a brood of six, Ponce lost a brother, a sister, a sister-in-law, two young nephews and two nieces in the storm surge in Tacloban City at the height of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” on Nov. 8.

His mother, Winifreda, brothers Philip and Eric, their families, brother-in-law Lilo and nephew Cesar survived. It was for them that Ponce had to show a brave front.

Of the nine soldiers from the 1st IB who hailed from Eastern Visayas, it was only Ponce who lost family members in the storm.

I had wanted to find Ponce.

The day after the storm, his brother Eric came up to me at the Tacloban police headquarters while I helped people make calls on the satellite phones provided by Smart, this time not as a journalist. In my battle dress uniform, I literally wore my other identity as a Navy reserve officer that Saturday night.

 

Death message

Eric caught my attention because he staggered towards me. He was obviously in pain. He had his right hand on his left rib, and he bent a little to the left. He had fresh, shallow wounds on his arms and legs.

“Ma’am,” he said with a faint voice, his eyes red. “I am Eric Ponce, a police officer. My brother is in the Army. His name is Pfc. Jessie Ponce. He’s assigned in Laguna.”

Eric struggled with the message he wanted to send: “Please tell him our brother, sister and their children are dead. Our mother is alive.”

Eric also told me that many of his fellow police officers in the city were either dead or missing. I promised him I would find a way to reach the military headquarters in Manila. Eric simply said, “Thank you,” and left.

It was only on the morning of Nov. 11 that I managed to inform Col. Romeo Brawner of the Armed Forces of the Philippines Operations Office about Eric’s request to send a radio message to his brother.

Little did I know that around that time, Ponce had already begun his three-day journey from Laguna, where the 1st IB was based, to Tacloban to check on his family.

In the days I spent in the broken city, I saw how trying to find each other after the storm became an excruciating pursuit because of the uncertainty of it all. The search ends up only in three ways—joy, sorrow or a mixture of both.

I had to know whether the Ponce brothers found each other. Eric asking for my help often played out in my head, even after I had returned to Manila.

Two weeks ago, I asked the AFP Public Affairs Office to help me track down Ponce. I was told he was already in Quezon.

“I talked to my sister and brother a day before the storm. I told them they should leave their houses and stay with my mother because her house had a second floor,” Ponce said.

Ponce was used to such kind of disaster operations. Along with his fellow soldiers, he would help people evacuate from their homes in preparation for the onslaught of a typhoon.

On higher ground

In fact, Ponce had helped some residents move to higher ground as rains also lashed parts of Laguna a day before Yolanda struck Eastern Visayas.

“I wasn’t worried when the storm arrived in Tacloban that Friday. I didn’t feel uneasy. I knew they were all in our mother’s house,” Ponce said.

Because he was in the field, Ponce got to see on TV what had happened in Tacloban City only on Sunday night.

“The news showed videos of Ormoc, Dulag, Tolosa, Palo and finally Tacloban. I saw how badly hit the city was. I began to worry. I became very anxious. I couldn’t reach my siblings on their cell phones. The next morning, I asked my commander if I could go to Tacloban right away to check on my family,” Ponce said in Filipino.

Ponce and the other 2nd ID soldiers from the storm-ravaged provinces were immediately allowed to go on leave.

He stuffed his bags with canned goods and clothes, especially the ones his family could use. He bought medicines for his mother, who was recovering from a mild stroke. He made sure he had enough money with him.

He took a road trip back to his hometown, which he left when he felt it offered him nothing much for his future.

 

Backtrack

Ponce went to Manila in 2007 and found work as a “striker” in a military camp. He befriended an Army sergeant who was assigned to the office of then AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Alexander Yano.

In the company of the men in uniform, Ponce decided he wanted to become one of them. His friend helped him sign up for the Army.

In 2010, on his first visit since he left home, he told his family that he had become a soldier.

“There was a collective shock on their faces,” Ponce chuckled.

He is, after all, the baby of the family. But they were all happy for him. He finally found a stable job to secure his future. But in 2011, his father Carmelito died of a heart attack. Moreover, he had lost contact with his eldest sibling, Alvin, who had left for Manila to find a job.

Ponce arrived in Tacloban City in the morning of Nov. 13.

“I didn’t recognize the city. Wasak talaga (It was ruined). I was disoriented. I couldn’t find my way to our village … to think I grew up in Tacloban,” he said.

As he neared their village, a neighbor rushed to him. “He told me that our entire village was gone, that there was nothing to go back to, and that I should go to the evacuation center because my family was there,” Ponce narrated.

The neighbor also told him who had perished.

The bodies of his older brother Giovanni and his young son Aljur were found, still in each other’s arms. Giovanni’s wife, Marichu, and daughter Princess were dead as well.

The remains of his sister, Jocelyn, were found in the debris more than two weeks after the storm. Ponce was at the site with Jocelyn’s husband, Lilo, when she was recovered.

Jocelyn and Lilo’s children, John-John and Sharibal, were also killed. The bodies of Princess and John-John have yet to be recovered.

At the evacuation center, Ponce found Eric, Philip, their mother, Lilo, and their nephew, Cesar, Giovanni and Marichu’s eldest son. At 4 years old, Cesar had suddenly been orphaned.

 

Story behind loss

There, Ponce learned what had happened. The whole family had sought refuge in their mother’s home but the water kept rising until it reached the second floor. They all hung on a wood in the ceiling but it gave in after huge logs hit the walls of the house.

Eric held their mother tight as they clung to the wood. But his siblings and their children fell into the water. Their neighbors struggled in the water as well.

Lilo tried to grab Jocelyn and their children but the current was strong. They just couldn’t hold on to each other. Something also hit Lilo in the chest, another log perhaps, that weakened him.

“Lilo was angry with himself because he grabbed every person he saw in the water and lifted them to wherever they could hang on. But his own family, he wasn’t able to save,” Ponce said.

“I told him there was no one to blame for what happened,” he added.

In the rubble of their mother’s home, Ponce and a friend took shots of hard drink. They needed the alcohol at night to numb the pain in their hearts.

Their village, Barangay 35 in Pampango district, was nearly deserted, but Ponce decided to stay in their home. It was there, under the night sky, that he planned what to do the next day: clear the debris in the house, see how he could repair the house, look for food, and find the bodies of his missing loved ones.

His military training kicked in, especially in the clinical planning of his activities and keeping his focus on the tasks he wanted to accomplish in a day. To do it, Ponce made a conscious effort not to dwell too much on his loss.

“Stay strong … don’t entertain negative thoughts,” Ponce would tell himself. His grief should not get in the way of his being a soldier as well. He was, in fact, in Quezon for his mandatory marksmanship training. He should not be distracted by his mourning.

He also made the decisions for the family, such as giving strict orders for them to stay in the evacuation center where at least food and water were being rationed regularly.

“I was the only one in our family who could actually think straight that time. Everybody was in shock. Lilo was often spaced out,” Ponce said.

 

New life

On Nov. 19, his sixth day in Tacloban, Ponce received a most-awaited news: his wife, Shielma, had given birth to their first child.

“I didn’t know you could be happy and sad at the same time,” Ponce said. His mother cried upon learning that she had a new granddaughter.

Ponce was to see baby Reign Jeshiel only on Nov. 30. As expected of a soldier, he reported first to his unit after leaving Tacloban the day after Jocelyn’s body was found.

“My daughter looked so fragile, I was so afraid to hold her because I might break her bones,” Ponce said, adding that Shielma, a schoolteacher, thought he was acting crazy.

Ponce was grateful that his wife and her whole family understood why he had to rush to Tacloban even when she was so close to giving birth.

Yesterday, he was back in Tacloban City. He brought his mother’s medicines again and he began to repair their house. Ponce was also thankful that the military understood his need to attend to his family.

Shortly before the storm, Eric was persuading him to spend Christmas with their mother and the rest of the family in Tacloban.

Dec. 24 is Ponce’s birthday, which coincides with Eric’s graduation from police training that would finally make him a full-fledged cop. By that time, Shielma should have already given birth.

For Ponce’s family, there is so much to celebrate this Christmas.

“They asked me to bring only one thing, a ball. They told me that John-John and Aljur were always fighting over one ball they had in the house,” Ponce said. “It’s so easy to buy one. But there’s no Aljur or John-John to give it to now.”

Ponce said he had yet to think about his birthday or Christmas. He’s still trying to comprehend the tragedy, and in picking up the pieces of his family’s shattered life, he’s taking it one day at a time.

 
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