She was right, and despite the miasma of
alcohol that obscured my perspective, my mind once again generated
the image of those four defenseless, shoeless Filipino prisoners
being executed in Caloocan.
We had walked on for another half hour or so
when we smelled food cooking.
“Where’s that coming from?” Manfred
asked.
We continued ahead for another two hundred
yards or so, and then we saw smoke curling from a stovepipe that
poked through the roof a nipa hut. We dropped to our knees and
crawled through a wide swath of five-foot-high cogon grass until we
got to within fifty feet of the hut. The smell of fried rice,
garlic, pork, and eggs was intoxicating to us as we lay in the tall
grass watching the hut. All we had to eat before leaving Caloocan
was some coffee, hardtack, and
