THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509070045
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLISE LYLES, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 162 lines
UPON THE 50TH anniversary of V-J Day, Lt. Col. Leon Flores Punsalan was summoned to the MacArthur Memorial in downtown Norfolk to speak on the merits of the late general.
The 85-year-old retired army man went gladly from his comfortable Cheswick Lane home on the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach, his medals in place, his speech meticulously prepared.
His bushy brows poised and baritone wrapped in a rhythmic Filipino accent, Punsalan praised MacArthur. He memorialized officers of the Philippine army who were killed in ``mopping up'' battles at Samar and Corregidor and those executed by the Japanese just before American forces landed.
Then he drove home to his wife, Rosario, took off his uniform, put his medals away. In the back of his mind was his own untold battle. (Rosario and his six children are the only ones who've heard it, dozens of times.)
It's not so much about the master's degree in engineering he earned from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not about the 1944 U.S. patent for a rifle cartridge injector invention. Not about his encounter with MacArthur. Not his Bronze Star. Not his U.S. citizenship.
He waves a liver-spotted hand, dismissing all that.
And it's not about the Axis and Allies, atomic bombs or death marches. It's only the battle of an island boy becoming a man and setting out for greater territory. Perhaps worth the book Punsalan is writing. Perhaps not, he muses.
But some days, something has him believing it was truly the decisive battle of his life, the one that laid the foundation for Samar, Red Beach and beyond.
That's when he dresses in all white, settles on the sofa next to Rosario and tells his story. From his pants pocket he flips a flat, pearly box that holds his hearing aids, screws one into each ear and squints hard at you.
Military is in his muscle, the way he moves quick and crisp, even at 85. The way he gives cussing a sort of dignity - ``son of a gun.'' And the proud, rote way he recalls records, certain essential details, numbers, maneuvers, procedures.
``To make this story short,'' he says, ``West Point to me was just like a lottery. You couldn't depend on it because it was one out of a million.''
From 1914 to 1944, under Public Law 154, the Department of Defense allotted one place per year at the U.S. Military Academy for a Filipino cadet.
They were commissioned as officers in the Philippine army because the American military did not consider Filipinos U.S. citizens, though the archipelago was U.S.-owned and -operated. In those years, hundreds on the impoverished islands groveled for the chance to be the chosen one.
In 1932, Leon Flores Punsalan was.
As a boy growing up in Pampanga province, he had seen the men called ``scouts'' in the Philippine troops. While all the scouts were native, most officers were American. But a few were Filipino. They strutted about in tall boots, brown leather belts, brass buttons with sabers at sides, gleaming and hot from the island sun.
They were somebody. They could court any girl, awe any boy.
Even a grown man. As a teacher and later as a civil servant who crunched numbers in the public works department, Punsalan marveled from afar.
But practical ambitions drove him to compete for the coveted place at West Point. More pesos.
With 60 pesos, he supported his widowed mother and two sisters on a plat of land left by their father.
``The salary of the Filipino officers was big - $125 a month. A dollar was equal to two pesos so that equaled 250. . . . I didn't want to be a teacher all my life,'' he adds almost apologetically.
There was one other factor.
He squints and grins. Then on purpose or out of nervousness, he removes the hearing aids from both ears, almost tossing them on the coffee table like dice.
``One. Only one in the whole Philippine Islands could go. . . . It was competitive. I had to take a preliminary competitive exam with 400 or 500 others.
``Competitive,'' he says spitting out the p and the t's. ``I took it four times.''
The first time, he scored sixth. The next year, fourth. He was given alternate status, which required a physical exam. He flunked. A sinus condition almost permanently disqualified him from the whole venture.
A medical intern friend felt sorry for him.
Pusalan remembers the public surgery: a quick puncture of nasal cartilage, a hooking sensation, blood rinsing down filling his mouth with the warm wet taste of iron, and all the eyes of the medical students staring up his nostrils.
Third try. He made it. ``Matas dili'' - ``the highest one,'' his friends serenaded in native Pampango.
``Can you imagine this boy, beating everyone in the Philippines. I beat the heck out of everyone.''
A newspaper published his victory. Something about hard-working student goes to West Point. But too soon. Punsalan flunked the algebra portion on the actual West Point exam.
The fourth time he made it.
But he was broke. All his pesos had gone to build a thatch-roofed, bamboo nipa hut on the lot his father had bequeathed to him.
He needed about 800 pesos for meals on the ship to the United States, train fare from San Francisco to West Point, N.Y., and a uniform deposit.
``I want you to understand this part,'' he says, screwing those hearing aids back in. ``My mother was the greatest person that ever lived next to Jesus Christ. She went around the eastern part of the province, trying to borrow money to use the lot as collateral, while I was lying down on the floor of the nipa hut.
``I had given up.''
Mother returned with 300 pesos borrowed from the parish priest.
Then friends, relatives gave 10, 50, 100 pesos. Finally, enough even to buy a handsome white linen traveling suit, tailor-made. In San Francisco, the wind would blow right through it.
Before he could leave Pampanga, men drunken and jealous of the ``matas dili'' challenged Punsalan to wrestle in cloying heat, mud and sand. He was sober, cautious and agile. He had heard of one high scorer in a neighboring province who met an envious rival's knife and never made it to West Point.
The 24-day journey across the Pacific on a U.S. transport ship was Punsalan's prelude to a battle he hadn't really given much thought to fighting. In a nasty encounter, `a guy named Frank who looked like he had been picked up off the streets of Manila' warned: `` `Remember fellow, you're now going to a white man's country.' ''
Punsalan's brown face turns to stone. He digs out the hearing aids again and spins them on the table like marbles. ``That's the first racial slur I ever heard.''
Not the last.
The gated academy in the rolling hills of New York looked as stately as he had imagined after reading about it in a book found in a basement back home. The pages said Gen. Robert E. Lee had learned honor and duty here.
Punsalan would learn.
``Hey Punsie,'' they called him for short. ``Do Filipinos have tails?'' He still heats up like lava just thinking about it.
``Do you know what I said? `Son of a gun, you're closer to a monkey because you have more hair on your chest.' '' He snickers. ``I was bad, too.''
Then dead serious again. ``Those things hurt my feelings, but I kept them inside me. . . . No. No, you better not put this in the newspaper. People will think that I am bitter.''
Suddenly, he is off the sofa. Hearing aids balled in his fist, he marches sharply to the dining room and a faded cadet portrait - West Point, class of 1936. He points at a dark dot in the top row.
``The one I pity most was Benjamin O. Davis. He was the only black man in my class. He had no roommate.''
``I was walking with my friend - you know, we Filipinos, we don't have that race prejudice - I said, `Hi, Ben.' And my companion left me, just like that.''
Customary hazing compounded the insult and humiliation.
Here he was, a grown man, four years older than most of his fellow cadets. He had gone to college, taught school, been a civil servant, supported his mother.
Now boys were ordering him about. Off the latrine to drill up and down two flights of stairs until told to stop. Stop studying to fetch candy. They were minor indignities, unless you were ``the other brown man.''
``If I hadn't wanted to go to West Point, I would've gotten out. But it was the Depression, so I had to suffer. I'm glad I didn't show too much of my contempt.'' He rarely wrote home. He wasn't going to look like a coward in a new world.
Though no commission was in the offing, he drove himself hard. He excelled in physics and engineering. He won a letter for fencing. He earned respect. And he learned, ``You do your duty no matter what, even if you die.''
To make this story short, he says, ``This is what I achieved.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
Lt. Col. Leon Flores Punsalan, 85, fought in World War II, but his
greatest challenge may have been winning admission to West Point -
and finishing.
by CNB