U.S. Navy to the
Rescue Again
In the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, one man
desperately seeks contact with his uncle in Virginia who served in the U.S. Navy
By David Feith
'I have an uncle there
in the U.S. Can you help me to contact him?"
Trudoro Dado Tan is yelling
this plea at the top of his voice, but it's nearly impossible to hear over the
roar of the two MV-22 Osprey aircraft on the grass behind us. U.S. Marines have
just arrived with large boxes marked "USAID" and "From the
American People." Inside are woven-plastic tarps to serve as temporary
shelters—the first relief supplies seen in this remote fishing town since Super
Typhoon Haiyan made landfall six days ago, bringing rain, rushing water and
winds three times as strong as Hurricane Katrina's.
"I don't have a
house—my house was blown down," Mr. Tan shouts. "We have no food, no
shelter, no medicines. . . . There is no electricity here, no signal in the
cell phone. Nothing. Nothing at all." Middle-aged and wearing a tattered
green T-shirt and shorts, he introduces himself as a local police officer and
points to his son standing nearby.
A crowd of perhaps 200
has gathered, with more arriving from among the surrounding homes, none of
which appears intact. Several have striking, pastel-colored exterior walls that
survived the storm, but their pinks and oranges and greens serve mainly to
highlight the gnarled wood exposed where their interiors and roofs used to be.
Having caught a ride
to town on one of the Marine aircraft, I am the first outsider that Mr. Tan has
been able to speak with since the storm. Hence his plea about contacting his
uncle, who "doesn't know about us because we don't have
communication." He says his uncle's name several times, but I can't make
it out between the language barrier and the Ospreys. So he writes it out in my
notebook and shouts some further detail: The uncle lives in Virginia and is
"retired U.S. Navy."
Guiuan and the other
areas most devastated by Typhoon Haiyan lie around Leyte Gulf, scene of the
U.S. Navy's decisive victory over Japan in the biggest naval battle of World
War II. Gen. Douglas MacArthur went ashore at Leyte province's Red Beach on
Oct. 20, 1944, two years after withdrawing from the Philippines with the
promise "I shall return." A 10-foot-high statue of MacArthur now
stands at the site. It survived the typhoon, but four miles away is Tacloban
(population 220,000), where an estimated 95% of homes were destroyed and the
U.S. military is centering its relief efforts.
So history is echoing
in the current disaster, a fact underscored by the story of Mr. Tan's uncle,
Gumersindo Dado, a Guiuan native who served 20 years in the U.S. Navy and now
lives in Virginia Beach.
Reached by phone
Friday morning, Mr. Dado first expresses relief. "Ever since the typhoon
touched down in Guiuan I've been calling" without getting through.
"Every night I go to sleep at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning
after trying to call them. I only last for an hour, and then I call them
again." He laments, though, that I have no news about other relatives,
such as his two sisters (including Mr. Tan's mother). All I can say is that Mr.
Tan mentioned nothing about casualties in the family.
Soon Mr. Dado is
explaining, in Filipino-accented English, how he joined the U.S. Navy in 1959,
at age 24, having never seen America. "We didn't have to be U.S. citizens
to join—that was quite a privilege for Filipinos," he says. Especially
since in his childhood, "saying 'America' or 'USA' meant saying 'Oh,
that's the one, that's the best.' " He was 7 when the Japanese bombed the
Philippines in December 1941, and he got "candies and chocolate" from
the U.S. troops who recovered the islands three years later.
After high school Mr.
Dado "couldn't get a job in the Philippines" except as a messenger in
Manila, "so I wrote a letter to the U.S. Navy at Sangley Point," a
naval station outside the capital. A written test, a physical exam and a few
weeks later he was off to basic training in San Diego, one of 10 Filipinos in a
company of 60.
For the next two
decades he was a U.S. Navy cook on land and at sea—at Pearl Harbor, Norfolk,
the USS Fletcher and many other postings that he proudly rattles off (along
with the alphanumeric abbreviation of each vessel). When North Vietnamese
torpedo boats fatefully attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in August
1964, Mr. Dado was there aboard a destroyer deployed from Subic Bay, in his
native Philippines.
He retired in 1979,
then worked security at a Virginia hospital where his Filipina wife worked as a
nurse. Their four children include a son born at Pearl Harbor who earned a
lieutenant rank in the U.S. Navy. And almost every year Mr. Dado traveled back
to his now-stricken hometown.
"I'm waiting for
them to open communication in Guiuan so I can call," he says. In many
areas that won't be until Christmas or later, Philippine officials warn. If so,
Mr. Dado will keep waiting, comforted at least that his gritty nephew and his
brethren in the U.S. military are doing their best amid tragedy. Theirs isn't
the first shared U.S.-Philippine crucible, and it likely won't be the last.
Mr. Feith is an
editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Asia.
Helpers in action
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