Unsung heroes: Dad, the Major

ANOTHER Memorial Day is upon us. I think of my dad - an Army man, through and through. The Army-Navy game every winter was the one football game he would never miss even though he didn't have a stake in the game other than he was in the Army. 

Unlike other veterans he never talked about what he did during World War II or the Korean War. To this day he remains an enigma to me.

So last week, out of curiosity, I Googled his name "Melchor V. Diokno." He died before this computer age so I was surprised to see his name pop up. It turns out there's a webpage about him and his service in the Philippine Scouts, an elite unit of the U.S. Army. His uniform is on display in a museum at the San Francisco Presidio. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: I crecently hecked the webpage of my father and it is no longer available. Does anybody know how to retrieve it?

So, another chapter is filled in about a man who rarely talked about himself. Maybe it's because no one asked him about his war experiences. I tried to get him to open up his experiences in the military, but he would divert the conversation to something else. 

There are a few tidbits gathered through the years: Such as when he found his way home after being a POW, he was so emaciated, dirty and "smelly," his daughter Benicia ran into the house because she didn't recognize him. My mother also said that he was in charge of the grave detail of the POW camp. The POWs used the daily ritual of burying the dead as a means of escaping the camp. The prisoners would be hidden from the guards by placing the dead prisoners on top of them. When the guards were not looking, they would dash into the surrounding jungle.

It seems the more I learn about him, the more questions are raised.

Many of my nieces and nephews also knew another side of him. He had this ability to pull candy out of their ears. Sure, maybe they were humoring an old man but he took so much pleasure in their company and the surprised and delighted look on their faces when he would seemingly find candy in their ear. 

My father had hoped to continue his service but after being skipped over for promotion, he retired as a major. I know he was disappointed. In today's context, I can't help but think he was denied the promotion to colonel not because he didn't deserve it. He didn't fit the prototypical image of a high-ranking Army officer in 1954 America because he was not brash enough or loud enough, short of stature at 5'2" and his skin was several shades too dark.

I don't know how many Brigade commanders sought him as their Executive Officer. He was forever the XO, excellent at managing day-to-day but in the eyes of his superior officers, but not good enough to lead. Sound familiar?

But he couldn't fathom that the country he fought and bled for might be capable of discrimination. He didn't say a single disparaging word.  In the view of that generation of immigrant soldiers, America could do no wrong.

He was proud of his service to his country -- as I am proud of him, as all of us should be. This Memorial Day, don't forget him and the other Asian/American servicemen and women of that first generation who served their adopted country.

One of my greatest regrets is never sitting down and having a serious conversation about what he did in WWII and his views of the state of Filipino America. Let this be a message to all of you who have never really talked with your parents. Do it!

Here's a column I wrote for the Contra Costa Times (June 27, 2004) for Father's Day:

Unspoken conversations with my father

MY FATHER was a man of few words. We didn’t have long conversations. He never dispensed advice like the father in “Father Knows Best.” He would rather show than tell.

One day when I was 7 or 8, he took me to get a haircut at the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown. I thought it strange because for two bits, we could get a haircut just down the street at Mr. Willis house. A former barber, Mr Willis had set up shop in his garage and that’s where everybody in the Warren Way neighborhood got their haircuts.

The I-Hotel was home for many of the manongs, the elderly men who made up the first wave of Filipino immigrants who came to the United States in the 1920s-1930s. They found jobs in California’s farm fields and worked in the kitchens of the city’s hotels and restaurants. Some found a career in the Merchant Marine and lived in the residence hotels of Manilatown between journeys.

The International Hotel, the last vestige of San Francisco's Manilatown. 

Manilatown used to stretch for blocks along Kearney Street, just below Chinatown. The Filipinos and Chinese shared Portsmouth Square where they would get some sun, gossip or play checkers or mah jong. By the time my father and I made our trip, the financial district had gobbled up most of Manilatown. All that was left of the Filipino neighborhood was the hotel, two Filipino restaurants and the pool hall across the street managed by a white woman who had married a Filipino. Still, for hundreds of bachelor men (because immigration law limited the number of Filipinas) it was a home.

We walked up the hotel’s stairs and knocked on one of the doors. Inside were a couple of elderly men waiting for a haircut from the room’s tenant.

In the corner there was a single bed, a bureau where a statuette of the Virgin Mary was framed by a pair of unlit candles, a cushioned chair covered with a crisp, white doily, and a high stool on which one of the men sat with a bedsheet draped around his neck. Old photos were pinned up around the small room. It had the smell of a barbershop with the feint presence of after-shave and Pomade. One small window opening to Kearney Street below lit the dim world encased in that room

”Captain,” they greeted my dad, “How are you, sir? Have a seat, sir.” My father retired as a major but apparently, old habits died hard for these men. Both of us got our hair cut for a buck and a healthy tip.

They talked in Tagalog with my father. I was never sure how my father knew these men so far from my little world in suburbia. By the respect they showed him and because they addressed him by his military rank, I surmised that perhaps they used to serve together in the military.

After I got my haircut, my father took me to a restaurant downstairs on Kearney Street. To
my surprise, the owner greeted my father like an old friend. He ordered some Filiplno dishes that he knew I liked: dinaguan, adobo, kare-kare and pancit (translation: pork stew, chicken or pork in a savory sauce, braised ox-tail spiced up with shrimp paste, and a Filipino variation of chow mein.) My father grew more mysterious to me. The man I never knew. Why was he so well known there?

I didn’t know then what I know now. My father wanted to expose me to a world beyond Warren Way where we lived with other families of Filipino/American soldiers, airmen and sailors. He wanted to show me that not all Filipinos were as well off as we were on our blue-collar street. And I learned there was more to my father than I knew.

One night, my father came back from one of his innumerable meetings. He was excited. “We got the money!,” he exclaimed to my mother. It turns out he was part of a group trying to get funding to build retirement housing for farmworkers. He and his group were able to raise the money through grants from Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to build Agbayani (Heroes) Village in Delano, where retired farmworkers, usually without family to take care of them, could spend their retirement. The magnitude of my father’s late night meetings took years to dawn on  e: That he knew Larry Itliong, one of the founding Filipino leaders of the United Farm Workers, was astonishing to me. As a veteran, my father went to the commissary at the Oakland Army Base to buy groceries to bring to the grape strikers. He lived part of the Asian American history.

Ironically, I found myself covering the eviction of the I-Hotel’s manongs as a reporter for the Philippine News. The lessons my father sought to teach me in that single visit came flooding back in an “ah-ha” moment as Manilatown’s last building fell to a wrecking ball.

After my father’s death, I found a faded snapshot of a young man, in white blousy shirt, dark pants, boots and — this is what stood out — a red sash around his waist. The man in the picture was dashing and handsome in a Rudy Valentino kind of way. His smoldering, dark eyes stared defiantly back at the camera. I couldn’t believe it was a photo of my dad in a heroic pose, feet firmly planted and fists on his hips , as he perhaps saw himself at that stage of his life.

It’s funny but we usually think of our fathers as old men. We forget that once they were young and facing life with youthful optimism with all the world at their doorsteps.

My dad suddenly died years ago, before we could have that father-son talk that both of us seemed to avoid. Just as I was realizing the value of what he taught me, he was gone. I like to imagine that if we had a that conversation, we would have had lots to talk about.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow @DioknoEd on Twitter or at his blog Views From the Edge.