Felipe, a remorseful teenage Filipino, narrates his ambivalent roles during the Balangiga conflict and its aftermath. Working as a houseboy in the main barracks of Company C, he was tipped by his friends about a plot to kill the Americans, but he did nothing to alert Sir Tom Connell the garrison commander. During the attack, he and another Filipino houseboy in the Officers' quarters, fought with the American soldiers against the Filipinos. They survived and fled with the remaining soldiers to Basey. Back in his hometown, his brother Victor, an insurrecto officer, took him to the Sohoton camps. The Marines under Major Waller arrived in Basey to carry out the "kill and burn" order of Gen. Smith. When the Americans stormed and captured the base, Felipe fought the Americans with the insurrectos. Victor and other insurrectos, disguised as cargadores, infiltrated Waller's mission to march, explore, and possibly string a telephone line from Lanang to Basey. But the mission failed, eleven Marines perished in the forbidding jungles of Samar, partly to blame was the obstinate, mutinous cargadores. While it was a failure to Waller, so it was to Victor. Waller foiled an attempt on his life in the jungle - Victor the would-be assassin. Waller ordered Victor's execution and ten other cargadores to match the number of Marines lost in the march. Weeks earlier in Basey, Major Glenn, in Waller's absence, had tortured and executed the town officials implicated in a plot to carry out another Balangiga-like attack on the Basey garrison. It was the peak of the brutal campaign to turn the interior of Samar into a "howling wilderness." Not only would ghosts come back to haunt; so would the feelings of guilt and shame that mired those unfortunate events in controversy.
