Hunter Sniper

They followed the road toward the city, occasionally passing detritus left behind by the retreating Japanese, everything from broken crates to discarded gas masks and an occasional dented canteen. Once or twice they passed a wounded soldier who had succumbed and whose body had been left behind. The GIs studied the bodies with curiosity, hoping for some clue to the enemy. But dead men told no tales. The GIs trudged on down the road.

In places the road ran through wide rice paddies, the sun sparkling off the water that lay in the flooded fields. They passed a few small houses that looked abandoned and forlorn. There was no sign of the Japanese.

* * *

Ormoc was a place that few Americans had heard of before late 1944, and it was a name that few would remember in the intervening years, with the exception of those who had been there and perhaps lost a buddy in the street fighting or during combat with Japanese holdouts in the surrounding jungle.

The name itself had come from “Ogmok” in the old Visayan language — a precursor to the modern Tagalog spoken by Filipinos — from a word that meant “low-lying place.” The name hinted at the abundant rice fields on the city’s outskirts.

Perhaps it was not an auspicious name, but the sprawling, small city always had been a busy port, going back centuries, so it had a worldliness to it that belied its remote location.

Stretching back centuries, Ormoc had been a seaside trading village. The Spanish had arrived in 1595 but had never seemed to put their stamp on the place, as they had in larger towns. Ormoc looked and felt very much Filipino.

Given this history of watching the world come and go, there wasn’t much that the people of Ormoc hadn’t seen, and not much surprised them.

Yet it remained a welcoming place. The seaside port had the easy, languid feel of many tropical towns. There was an innocence about the city when the Japanese were out of sight and the city wasn’t under threat of imminent attack. It was rare to see a man in a suit. Younger teenage boys rarely wore anything more than shorts, and the girls went about barefoot in colorful skirts.

You might say that Ormoc was busy but not ambitious. Few buildings were more than two stories high, and judging from the humble nature of even these taller buildings, there was very little wealth in the town. It didn’t help that the war had squeezed dry what little commerce there was, wringing out the local businesses like a sweaty bandanna.

Although the town was pleasant and friendly, it had a ramshackle appearance and made no effort at order or neatness. Even the houses along the waterfront, with its beautiful view of the bay, looked as if they had survived one typhoon too many. These buildings near the waterfront tended to be the largest structures in town.

The streets were winding, unpaved, passing between tightly packed small houses covered in stucco and with tin roofs. Many of the houses occupied miniature compounds with fences or even walls around the cramped yards. Muddy brown chickens scratched in the dirt, and friendly, tan-colored dogs wandered everywhere.

Despite the poverty and oppression by the occupiers, the residents had not lost their love of plants. Entire fronts of houses were taken up with rows of potted plants, sometimes stacked on rickety wooden shelves several rows high. Lush greenery grew in every yard and untended corner, giving the town the appearance of being one sprawling garden. All in all, Ormoc was a town that a Western visitor found easy to love — as long as there weren’t any bullets flying.

Considering that the Japanese preferred everything to be neat and tidy, which was the opposite inclination of the average Ormoc resident, it was easy to see how from their perspective the occupants of the city might be inferior. The residents had been treated accordingly.

To that end, an entire element of the port city’s population was absent. The older boys and men had long since been rounded up to work as slave labor on the Japanese defensive projects, such as the bunkers at Ipil. Without any heavy equipment, most of the work had been done with buckets and shovels, requiring backbreaking effort in the tropical heat. There was little food or rest.

The Japanese were harsh taskmasters. Treated cruelly, given little to eat and forced to work long hours, many of these Filipinos would never return home.

With a battle imminent, it was fortunate that most of the residents had fled. Where they had gone was anybody’s guess, but they had likely hidden in the surrounding forests and rice paddies.

It was only the Japanese who now occupied Ormoc, and they had turned the entire city into a fortress. Sandbags had been placed around the sturdier stucco houses, which now bristled with machine guns. Soldiers had dug trenches at key crossroads and corners, enabling them to command long fields of fire along the city streets.