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In the Oldsmobile. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, the stage was set for another leap in the Marcos legend. Called to duty as an intelligence officer, 2nd Lieut. Marcos required only a few weeks to become a hero. His idea of intelligence duty was to prowl behind the Japanese lines—often in his personal Oldsmobile sedan—probing for weak spots. He found one on Bataan's Mount Natib: a Japanese military battery that was lobbing 70-mm. shells into U.S. General Jonathan Wainwright's beleaguered defenders. Marcos and three privates scouted the battery, trailing two bearded Japanese artillerymen to it, then cut loose. They killed more than 50 Japanese, spiked the guns, and escaped with only one casualty. Marcos won the first of a brace of Silver Stars for the operation, and a few weeks later was recommended for the U.S. Medal of Honor for his part in the defense of the Salian River. But the recommendation was never filed with Washington, and Marcos failed in becoming the only Filipino to win America's highest military award.
Hit by shrapnel and rifle fire in the last days of Bataan's defense, Marcos was captured by the Japanese and began the infamous Death March half dead already. He was imprisoned at Camp O'Donnell, where Filipinos and Americans died at the rate of 300 a day. There, he says, "I learned to hate." At Manila's Fort Santiago, where the Japanese Kempei Tai (secret service) tortured him in the hope that he would reveal the whereabouts of Filipino guerrilla groups, Marcos refused to talk. The Japanese pumped him full of water and jumped on his stomach. After eight days of "the water cure," he agreed to lead a patrol to a suspected guerrilla camp south of Manila. In the course of the march, he led the Japanese into a prearranged ambush—his captors died and he escaped into the hills.
Marcos' guerrillas were among the most effective in the islands. When Douglas MacArthur made good his promise to return to the Philippines, Marcos won his second Silver Star. Singlehanded, he stood off a 50-man Japanese patrol; when his submachine-gun fire drove them off, Marcos pursued them alone for two miles—despite the fact that he had taken a bullet in the leg.
Graft & Huks. War's end left the Philippines with wounds even more painful than those Marcos had suffered. Filipinos had learned a way of life that centered on murder, thievery and revenge. Every Filipino had a gun—or soon acquired one from the vast caches of armaments left behind by the Japanese and American armies. Though graft had its roots in the Spanish period, the postwar inundation of the Philippines with large stocks of U.S. military surplus turned black-marketeering into a national pastime. "First you became a small businessman," recalls one observer, "then a crook, then a big businessman."