Here is a link to an article about the devastation of Jolo, written decades after the war. I heard in 1974 that napalm was used. Where the napalm came from was obvious: it had only one source, the US. We did not really know what happened. There was apparently a news black out by the Marcos government.
But here is a confirmation that napalm was used as I mentioned in “Sulu,” one of the 4 poems from my book “Ascension and Return: Poetry of a Village Taoist” (Tambuli Media: 2019) I read at the Marble Summer Arts Festival in New York City on June 22, 2025. I was right, after all.
https://www.rappler.com/philippines/mindanao/remembering-jolocaust-burning-jolo-february-12-2024/
My poem written in 1974. It is in the shape of an airplane.
SULU: 1974
(On seeing a photograph of a child in the ruins of the city of Jolo southern Philippines)
Child, you are pushing with your frail arms
A cart in the ruins of your hometown
Bombed by your own countrymen.
Child, you snatched a world out of the flames:
A rusty nail, a pot or a can:
In the wreckage of the present
Or the past, or the future, which?
I can’t see your eyes in the eerie smoke
But I know they burn with fear and anger
Since that night the mercenaries of the fascist
Regime swept down from the skies
Flying death-machines marked U.S. on their wings.
Now every day you watch and run
When the dark cross-shadow of a plane passes by.
You listen to the rumors of flight, the distant
Formations above the dark clouds of your isles.
You wonder, as you pick this hammer, that screw,
At the hellfire far away belched by napalm bombs
That rained beauty and death on your land.
© RN 2025
