The Unbelievable Irwin Ver (updated)

Being reposted on Facebook is Esquire magazine’s 2017 essay “Strange Bedfellows: A Martial Law Love Story” by Aurora N. Almendral. It’s about the romance of the author’s mom, Gemma Nemenzo (sister of Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, high-ranking communist in the ’60s and ’70s) and former colonel Irwin Ver (son of Marcos’s AFP chief of staff Gen. Fabian Ver in the time of martial law).

No offense meant to Gemma, whom I met in 1983, Sesame days  (she was the media liaison of the Philippine Sesame Street Project), but Irwin Ver’s pronouncements about Ninoy Aquino and the dictator Ferdinand Marcos are nakaka-offend, being clearly of a piece with Bongbong Marcos’s flippant dismissal of anything negative about his father. In effect, Irwin and Bongbong paint their fathers innocent of any crimes and unjustly ousted by the people.

ON NINOY’S KILLING 1983 | “No, I don’t think he was involved”

Irwin’s story is that, like his father the general, he was at home when Ninoy was shot.

He was watching TV when his father barged into his quarters dressed in pambahay, to tell him something had happened at the airport.

“If he knew that something like that would happen,” Irwin said, to me, to my mother, to my mother’s friends and family, to everyone who has asked him, “he would have been in uniform. He would have been at his office, monitoring the situation. But he was as shocked as the rest of us. No, I don’t think he was involved.”

But But But. According to the Agrava Fact-Finding Board, at around 1:30 PM, AVSECOM commander Gen. Luther Custodio  “reported the incident [read assassination] by telephone to General Fabian Ver who was at the time in his office at Malacañang Park.”

There is no doubt that Gen. Ver was monitoring the situation. Two days previously, August 19, his order to Custodio was to “return Aquino to his point of origin on board the same aircraft he took in coming in.” He must have realized after that there was no way China Air Lines could simply immediately turn around and fly Ninoy back to Taipei. Early on the morning of August 21, he revised his instructions, ordered Custodio to: “Arrest Aquino and turn him over to the Military Security Command in Fort Bonifacio.”

That the general was nakapambahay lang, as Irwin claims, means nothing. It was a Sunday, after all, and his office was right next to his home in Malacañang Park (correct me if i’m wrong). How he was dressed, or not, has no bearing on whether or not he was monitoring the situation. Unless it was deliberate, if true, to give the impression, in case the shit hit the fan, that he was off-duty and completely uninformed and uninvolved and innocent, or something silly like that.

In November 1984 the Agrava Board’s Majority Report (that so displeased the dictator) unequivocally named Fabian Ver (and 25 others) indictable for the “military conspiracy in the premeditated killing” of Ninoy Aquino.

ON MARCOS IN THE TIME OF EDSA 1985 | “He did not want to kill his own people”

Irwin’s kuwento is that he was at the Palace sometime after Marcos’s high-noon oath-taking.

The same day, Colonel Irwin Ver, head of the presidential guard, favored son of General Fabian Ver, Marcos’s most loyal aide and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, was at Malacañang Palace. Irwin saluted Marcos, who was still dressed in the barong he wore for the cameras. Despite the oath-taking performance, Marcos seemed to have already accepted defeat. Irwin had not. Our position is still defensible, Irwin reported, ready to fight off an attack from the rebels. “No,” Marcos said. He did not want to kill his own people. Irwin recalled seeing the sadness in Marcos’s eyes, and for a moment he feared that he himself might cry.

Drama queens. Question is, what were they so sad about?  Were they sad about not killing their own people? Or were they sad because their officers were defying orders to kill the people.

Surely Irwin Ver remembers the very eventful morning of February 24, Day 3 of the four-day EDSA uprising. By then, Enrile and RAM had left Camp Aguinaldo and joined Ramos in Camp Crame.

Early that morning, according to Alfred McCoy [Veritas Special Edition, Oct 1986], Fabian Ver gave the signal for an all-out attack on Camp Crame by riot police using tear gas, Marine artillery, helicopter gunships, and low level jet bombers.

Riot police teargassed the human barricades in Libis / Santolan and cleared the way so that two battalions of Marines led by Col. Braulio Balbas were able to enter Camp Aguinaldo, from there to take positions within sight of Camp Crame.

Meanwhile, Sikorsky gunships were ordered to fly to Camp Crame and bomb two helicopters parked there to prevent Enrile and Ramos from escaping by air. Instead Col. Antonio Sotelo led the 15th Strike Wing’s seven gunships bristling with rockets and cannon to Camp Crame and defected wholesale.

CAMP AGUINALDO ► Looking down from the high ground of Aguinaldo’s golf course, Balbas had awesome firepower “boresighted” on the rebel headquarters only 200 meters away: 3 howitzers, 28 mortars, 6 rocket launchers, 6 machine guns, and 1000 rifles. [McCoy]

CAMP AGUINALDO, 9:00 AM ► General Josephus Ramas gave Balbas and his Marines the “kill order.” With his artillery ready to fire at pointblank range, Balbas lied to Ramas. “We are still positioning the cannons and we are looking for maps.” Ramas: “The President is on the other line waiting for compliance!” [McCoy]

CAMP AGUINALDO, 9:20 AM ► Ramas again barked the command through the radio: “Colonel, fire your howitzers now!” Balbas replied, “Sir, I am still positioning the cannons.” [Cecilio T. Arillo. Breakaway. 1986. page 77]

At some point Balbas radioed Tadiar, made certain that the order had been cleared with / by  Marcos. But even so, the Marines could see that even Camp Crame’s grounds were teeming with people.  Balbas just could not order his men to fire. “We will be hurting a lot of civilians,” he said to Tadiar.

Just about then, over at the Palace, a Sikorsky gunship sent by rebel chief Fidel Ramos to rattle not harm the Marcoses, fired six rockets on the Palace grounds. Damage was negligible but the Marcoses and the generals freaked out.

CAMP AGUINALDO ► Balbas got a “frantic call” from Col. Irwin Ver, Commander of the Palace Guard, ordering a “full attack” on the rebels. Lying boldly, Ver said the Palace was hit and they suffered 10 casualties. [McCoy]

Yes, Irwin Ver himself, who would have us believe that Marcos did not have the heart to kill his own people.

That Malacanang presscon where Marcos tells Ver that his order was NOT to attack Crame? That was pure palabas. As in moro-moro. Dramarama sa umaga. The dictator saying one thing and doing the opposite. Messing up the narrative, as always.

ON FABIAN VER & MARTIAL LAW | “It felt like a war situation”

As a son, Irwin is loyal to his father’s memory and defends his reputation. … He knows there were many regrettable abuses of power at the lower levels of government, but insists that Marcos never ordered foot soldiers to commit arrests, torture, and disappearances. “It felt like a war situation, a combat situation. We were both on the offensive and the defensive. It is not uncommon that would happen,” said Irwin, “that some soldiers would act on their own.”

True. Marcos had nothing to do with foot soldiers, but he had everything to do with the generals who lorded it over the police and military forces, the Rolex 12—topped by Ver, Enrile, and Danding–in particular, who implemented his orders and  benefitted greatly (got rich) in / over the 14 years of martial law.

General Ver became the fall guy for the Marcoses. He went into hiding and spent his life on the run, using fake passports and assumed identities, in part because he could not afford defense lawyers for the cases the American and Philippine governments were mounting against him. He died without seeing his family again.

… In the accounting of misdeeds after the fall of Marcos, General Ver was associated with the corruption that came with unfettered power—and his sons have inherited an on-going case for plunder.

Irwin would have us believe that his Dad didn’t share any secrets with the family. Like, who was the mastermind of the Ninoy murder?

Irwin believes his father did find out, but he took the knowledge to his grave. “It’s better you don’t know,” General Ver told him, “You’re still in your military career.”

And yet Irwin Ver has stories that make me wonder. Take this one about Marcos and Ninoy in Inquirer‘s “Marcos: ‘My best successor is Ninoy'” by Fe Zamora back in August 2008:

On at least four occasions before May 8, 1980, Marcos sent his most trusted officer, AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Fabian C. Ver, to deliver a note to Aquino at his detention cell in Fort Bonifacio. On the last two visits, Ver asked his son, Col. Irwin Ver, commander of the Presidential Guards, to join him.

Ver told his son they were to bring a letter to the detained senator. The younger Ver expressed surprise; he thought all along that Marcos and Aquino hated each other’s guts. Ver explained that Marcos actually admired Aquino, that Marcos even saw him as “brilliant enough to be president someday.”

Selective sharing? Propaganda? Anything to help along the story that Marcos could not have ordered Ninoy killed because he admired Ninoy, Ninoy was his friend? Anything to help Bongbong get elected in 2022? Anything to bring back the happy days when the Marcoses reigned supreme and the Vers, too, in their own fashion?

I wonder how the Nemenzos really feel about that. #NeverAgain #NeverForget

*

Sources

“Strange Bedfellows: A Martial Law Love Story” by Aurora N. Almendral. Esquire Magazine. Sept 22 2017. https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/notes-and-essays/strange-bedfellows-a-martial-law-love-story-a1999-20170922-lfrm3

Reports of the Fact-Finding Board on the Assassination of Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Mr. & Ms. Publishing Co. 1984. pp 205, 40.

Veritas Special Edition. “Coup!” by Alfred McCoy, Marian Wilkinson, Gwen Robinson. Oct 1986. http://edsarevolution.com/chronology/day3.php

Chronology of a Revolution 1986. Vol. 1 of DUET FOR EDSA. Published by Eggie Apostol (1996). Edited by Lorna Kalaw-Tirol.  http://edsarevolution.com/chronology/