Tooth and Nail

(First posted here. It didn’t win but it was still fun enough to write and now I have a kernel of an idea for the start of my alternate history stories.)

Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was a crazy bastard but he did some good.

For example, Martial Law? He had his reasons for it, the primary one being to kill all monsters. Big-assed, flying, digging, crawling, teeth and claws, bloodthirsty monsters. They were coming out of the woodwork and it took all Marcos and the government to put them down without panicking the public in the ‘70s.

Of course this took a toll on Marcos’ New Society with accusations of corruption and killings. Marcos couldn’t reveal we were actually fighting a war of shadows at that time and this would later cost him when the military took the side of civil society in Edsa ’86.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Take for example Jabidah Massacre. Remember that? Where more than a hundred Moro soldiers and officers were recruited and trained to invade Sabah? And when the operation was aborted, it was said the soldiers were summarily executed by the military?

Well, there’s an even more interesting story behind that one.

Reports started to surface in 1965 of four monsters appearing on the islands off Tawi-tawi, near Sabah. They killed all the islanders and turned the place into a ‘desolate wilderness.’

Reports indicated they were the four monsters of legend: the many-limbed Kurita, the man-shaped Tarabusaw, the gigantic bird-like Pah, and the seven-headed bird that was not named.

In order to save the remaining inhabitants, Marcos had ordered a special unit of Muslim soldiers be drawn up for a special mission.

Their first task was to try to retrieve the people there and bring them to safety. Marcos’ strategy in using the Muslim soldiers was that they would be able to talk to the people there.

Their other task was to kill the monsters.

One thing you could say about Marcos’ claims of being the Filipino Audie Murphy of World War 2, he had the balls to back it up. With only a handful of his own PSG, he led the Jabidah commando unit into action against the monsters.

What happened? Of more than 200 Muslim soldiers who had landed on the islands, only twenty were left when they finally managed to kill all the monsters. Marcos was severely wounded—that damned kidney problem—and he was never truly the same afterwards.

But that was the start of it all, when the government’s official war of shadows started and the declaration of Martial Law.

So yeah: Marcos was a bastard but he eventually did some good.