Take Life

This is from Jone, a former ChE rep and external affairs committee member to the ESC 2004-2005.

Take life
Gail Ilagan / MindaNews / 27 May 2005

DAVAO CITY -- Mark was on the phone to thank me for the box of pomelo I sent over as requested. I could tell from his voice that there was something else he wanted to share. Mark is my eldest nephew, son to my eldest sister. He was a handful as a baby - all curls and pixy eyes, so precocious and interactive. Growing up, he was the kind of kid Promil would have claimed, if not for the fact that he was breastfed and supplemented with S26.

Mark graduated last year from the United States Military Academy, 29 years after his dad did. He was commissioned to the Philippine Army soon after and is now serving at a training camp in Luzon.

On Tuesday night, he mounted what would have been just another "take life" operation. "Take life" means courting infraction of military regulations. Mark left the base for a personal errand, intending to be back before taps. Along the way, a speeding motorcycle overtook him. He barely had time to register that the bike was going too fast and that its driver did not have a helmet, when the bike started to swerve crazily coming into a corner. It crashed into a pole, throwing its rider on the roadside.

"Tita," he said in a disbelieving voice, "there were three cars ahead of me. None of them stopped." More motorists passed and moved on even as he was picking up the victim. I didn't think it was the time to lecture Mark on bystander effect. It's actually classic fare in Social Psychology that was opened up in 1964 when Queens resident Kitty Genovese got attacked and stabbed to death on the sidewalk as 38 of her neighbors watched from their windows. The attack lasted for 30 minutes, but none of the 38 called the police.

Since that New York incident, many researchers staged emergency situations to study altruism, the most controversial of which was the recent one done on Princeton Theology Seminary students. They were told to lecture on the parable of the Good Samaritan. On their way to the session hall, the researchers arranged for them to pass by a man groaning and choking in an alley. They ran several trials of this, but the results tended to be the same. Suffice it to say that the number of seminarians who stopped to help seemed to indicate that the convictions of the mind and heart rarely translated to action.

Study upon study consistently established that the more witnesses there are to an emergency situation, the less would be the victim's chances to elicit help. Bystanders don't want to get involved because emergency situations usually require special skills to mitigate and, more importantly, knowing that there are other witnesses leads one to assume or hope that someone more qualified will come forward and deal with the situation. Number has a way of diffusing one's own sense of responsibility to help. (Hmmm, the Deadma Dedo Syndrome does make sense of the audience impact of the DDS.)

Mark also expressed disappointment with the public hospital where the victim was taken. Even to his layman's eyes, frothy blood coming out of the mouth and nose meant that the lungs may have been punctured. Indeed, this was established to have been the case during autopsy, which also showed up a discernible trace of alcohol in the blood.

Ayayay, biktima din pala ito ng commercial ni Kris Aquino. Drive to drink. Drink and drive.

The victim had no ID. He was not X-rayed nor CT-scanned upon admission, and without family to see to his care, it didn't look like he was accorded emergency procedures above the barest minimum. For all Mark's efforts, the rider died within hours, his family blissfully unaware. Reporting the accident to the police made Mark late getting back to the camp. Automatic demerits. He knows better than to argue with military regulations.

In the morning, the police were able to trace the victim's family through the bike's plate number. Mark was allowed to go and talk to them. The father was quite rational, but the elder sister attacked Mark with an acrimonious accusation of foul play in the death of her brother. Later on, she did calm down when the facts of the case sank in. Mark asked her to inspect his car just so she would see that it did not have a dent that told of the kind of impact to throw a bike out of control.

Mark understands grief and denial and does not hold it against the sister for directing unjustified anger and suspicion at him.

"If only he had an ID, we could have traced his family before he died. Tita, he was only 23 and he was the only son," he said.

"Like you," I acknowledged. There's nothing like someone like you dying in a horrible way to make you realize that you won't live forever.

"About my age," he concurred. "They told me at the base that I'll get an award for what I did, but they'll give it along with the demerits for my violation of lights out," he sighs. It was obvious to me that even without the award, he'd take those demerits as a badge of honor.

"That's the way it is, boy. You did the right thing. I'm proud of you."

Oh yes, I am. Never mind if his car is going to smell worse than rotting fish from all that blood. Never mind if he's going to have nightmares from losing his valiant fight to save another's life. And never mind if he comes to realize that the bearer of bad news is likely to get his head lopped off. The world isn't fair. Mark just found out that it needs more than one man to make it come out all right.

Helping is a lonely job and it exacts a steep price. A man in the service - as Mark has every intention to continue to be - would do well to take that as a matter of fact.

It was the hardest thing, but he did what nobody else had the guts to do. He did the right thing.