Whatever Happened to Walter?I never learned his real name. I will just call him Walter because he most probably belonged to the Sixth Army commanded by General Walter Krueger. Were it not for his blue eyes, brown hair, and unusual height of about six and a half inches he could pass for a native. His erstwhile Caucasian skin has become deeply tanned and the clothes he wore were just like what every man in the busy restaurant wore.
It was 1949. I was in my senior year at Calasiao High School when I came to know of Walter. His story was familiar in the immediate community where he circulated.
Four years earlier, in 1945, Walter must have been a soldier in the 20th Infantry when the Sixth Army set up headquarters in the town of Calasiao after landing on the shores of Lingayen Gulf. I discovered the identity of U.S. army units in Calasiao years later when I came across books about the landings at Lingayen Gulf in the liberation of Luzon.
From those books I gathered that from the shores of Lingayen Gulf the 20th Infantry advanced south to a village called Balingueo. Walter, obviously never a good soldier, deserted and stayed behind in Calasiao. He has gone native since then. He married a local girl and he learned to use a primitive plow pulled by a carabao, helping his Filipino father-in-law till a hectare of rice land.
He supplemented his income as a bet collector for an illegal (but tolerated) numbers game called jueteng. He even learned the local language that he no longer stood out in a crowd in spite of his being a tall foreigner. His old army boots were long gone and now he wore wooden clogs. Out in the fields and creeks he went barefoot catching mudfish or frogs for dinner. He learned to gather snails and came to love them cooked the native way.
We were renting a room in a house of a family that ran a restaurant catering mostly to jueteng collectors and I saw Walter almost everyday eating lunch there. While he was no longer a community novelty any stranger who happened to eat at the restaurant certainly would notice him wolfing down rice, dinengdeng, or fried dried anchovies called “tuyo” instead of ham and eggs.
Eventually, we moved away from Calasiao and I never saw Walter again. I once met in Manila an old classmate from Calasiao High School and I asked him whatever happened to Walter. He shrugged his shoulders. He, too, has been away from Calasiao for some years. But he heard rumors that American agents from the American Embassy in Manila tracked Walter down and took him away.
Fred Natividad
©2008 Livonia, Michigan
