Page 17 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

PART ONE
PASSENGER ON A SHIP

To the small, wiry man on deck, the city across the water would have been barely
recognizable. The smoke of war had cleared—a few months had passed since the last
shot had been fired in a bloody campaign to drive out the invaders—but much of
the rubble remained; indeed the city itself was a mound of rubble, many of its old
majestic landmarks gone up in dust and smoke.

In the city’s oldest section, within the stone walls of Intramuros, an entire procession
of churches—the Manila Cathedral, Lourdes, Santo Domingo, San Francisco, San
Ignacio—had crumbled to the ground; only San Agustin remained. Of the city’s many
universities and colleges, only two colleges—Letran and Sta. Rosa—withstood the
bombs and the artillery. The City Hall, the Post Office building, and the Metropolitan
Theater were all vacant hulks, their bone-white shells pockmarked in thousands of
places by sustained bombardment between February and March 1945.

The man on board the Navy ship was too far to see these details for himself, but
the strange concavity of what had been the metropolitan skyline, the impression of
a body supine and overrun by tubercular rot, and the brooding silence that waited
across the bay would have encouraged his worst fears.

The last time he had seen this city, more than six years earlier, it had been the Far
East’s liveliest port, and looking over his shoulder, on the ocean liner that would take
him to Hong Kong and then to America, he would have, in the gathering dusk, seen
and remembered Manila as a ribbon of sparkling lights, throbbing with trombones

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