Veterans

By Col. (Ret) Frank B. Quesada, USA        fbquesada@cox.net 

    Former Senate Committee Secretary

    Veterans and Military Pension Associate, PMA Class '44

    The idea of the State taking care and providing for the welfare and rehabilitation of its war Veterans dates back 600 B.C. in Greece under its legal system.

   Solon, the immortal said “ Those who have been maimed in war are to be fed, at the expense of the public treasury.”

      Pres. A. Lincoln’s Address

   In the United States, in Pres A. Lincoln’s second inaugural address in 1861, he said, “With malice towards none; the charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us the to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the have been borne in battle, and for his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish  a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

             In the Philippines

           In the Philippines, at the end of World War II, the nation’s immediate concern was to build the nation anew from the ravages and destruction wrought upon the Filipino people and their institution. As a matter that  Filipinos perished in that war was not of their own war, and doing but a war of America against Japan. The conscription of Filipino soldiers into the U .S. Army is a valid contract employing Filipinos which have to be paid like any member of the U.S. Armed Forces

              Wretched  Pawns

          The Filipinos were a wretched pawn in a conflict between two colonial imperialists whose interests exploited Filipinos as an  instrument in war. The toll on the Filipinos and the nation was unprecedented; their lives, industries and properties had been laid waste, entire families shattered and displaced moral values deteriorated and law and order was under extreme pressure  from those who were fighting for survival.

    Comrade Fabros’s  Research

           My contemporary and fellow Veteran, Arsenio “Ching” Fabros, could not have  described this better when we both researched the moral and legal responsibility of any State to its fighting men who laid their lives in the altar of freedom, in  other frontlines in the Philippine archipelago during World War II.

          The late Fabros, was  senior researcher and comrade crusader (was Secretary General of   the Veterans Federation of the Philippines (VFP), when I was  Vice President of the VFP and later was Senate Committee Secretary on Veterans and Military Pensions. Fabros wrote; to wit -

   “And it was against such background of material destruction , of human misery and want, chaos and despair,