Just for  glimpse!

War is not a question of what is Right but what is Left.

What I know  little of East Timor brings me back to my college years at the University of the Philippines.  It was in the early 80's that the idea started to badger my curiosity when it gained few articles in the Philippine Collegian trying to find any relationship between what was gaining as human rights debacle in the  Philippines and the reports of  in-country atrocities   and sufferings of the people of East Timor.  I've been hearing the name "Ramos-Horta" during those pristine years at the  University where there was too much of idealism and radicalism.  But little that I knew that East Timor would endure anything under the Indonesian rule just to break free from  the  cloak of the "red and white" even it were to take them  almost 25 years.   The toll was heavy, though.

It wasn't long enough when I found myself involved  in the peacekeeping mission in East Timor.  Almost jumping to be successfully recommended and eventually selected  by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, my chosen profession five years after I graduated from the University,  I had mixed feelings  of  what was lying ahead especially in the  same place that had given me sharp  associated contradictions and  memories . It easily subsided by the mere thought of  receiving an ample allowance which others would then consider as a windfall. I didn’t passed on any scruple of leaving my  part-time teaching at the University of the Philippines at Clark. And even much that I care of my family of  three beautiful kids and one loving wife.  It has not been this way since we had each other that  daddy would  be among the 9,000 strong multi-national force of 24 nations in East Timor.