Thou Shalt Not Kill — Part I: The Question I Asked at Six

Marikina, Philippines • July 2026. Thou Shalt Not Kill — Part I: The Question I Asked at Six. Isabella Gonzales Jordan, martial law Philippines 1972, Battle of Jolo 1974, Marist School Marikina, chosen people Deuteronomy, 1 Peter 2:9, Alhambra Decree 1492, Filipino Catholicism, decolonization, Moro conflict, Fil-Am identity.

Thou Shalt Not Kill • Part I

The Question I Asked at Six

A 19-year-old private died in Jordan last week, and the reason she died changes depending on who is talking. Fifty-two years ago I sat in front of a black-and-white television in Marikina and learned that this is how it always works.

Part I of an open-ended series  •  18 min read

A Marikina living room, 1974. The television told one story. The bookcase down the street told another.

Isabella Gonzales was nineteen years old. She was from Carrollton, Texas. She graduated from Hebron High School in the spring of 2025, and on Friday, July 17, 2026, she was killed in an Iranian strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. One year out of high school.

Two other soldiers died in that attack. 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii. Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York, who was listed as missing before his death was confirmed. Four more were medically evacuated. The Pentagon says nearly a hundred U.S. service members have been injured.

And then there is this. The Pentagon stated that Gonzales and Feehan were supporting Operation Inherent Resolve — the campaign against the Islamic State group that has been running since 2014. They were not, technically, part of the war with Iran, which the Pentagon has named Operation Epic Fury. The President said on Sunday that they were killed ensuring Iran does not get a nuclear weapon.

Those are two different wars. And to be fair to the record — which is the whole point of this series — they are not necessarily a contradiction. Operation Inherent Resolve is an administrative mission assignment. A president describing strategic context is doing something else. Both statements can be technically accurate at once. Nobody has documented a lie here, and I am not alleging one.

But a nineteen-year-old is dead, and her country has offered two different accounts of what she died for. Whether that gap is bureaucratic or something worse, I do not know yet. What I know is that I have stood in front of that gap before.

I was seven years old the first time.

📌 Did You Know? Before Spain arrived, Islam had already reached the Philippines and was moving north. The Sultanate of Sulu was established around 1457 — roughly seventy years before Magellan. By 1571, when Legazpi took the settlement at the mouth of the Pasig River, Maynila was ruled by Muslim datus with dynastic ties to Brunei. Marikina sits eleven miles up that same watershed.

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🇵🇭 Tagalog Word of the Day Tanong — tah-NONG
A question. From the root that also gives us tanungin, to ask. In a household, a classroom, or a country where asking out loud carried a cost, a tanong could live entirely inside a person for fifty years and still be waiting for its answer.

Two Broadcasts, Fifty-Two Years Apart

I was six years old when I memorized the Ten Commandments, and I have never gotten over the fifth one.

The house was #9 Carmine Street, SSS Village, Marikina. We had a black-and-white television set. In February of 1974 that television showed the Philippine military fighting Muslim rebels in the south, and I sat in front of it doing a piece of arithmetic that has taken me fifty-two years to finish. Thou shalt not kill. I had memorized it at Marist School, from Catholic Brothers, out of a Bible I read cover to cover — twice — before I turned eight. It did not have an asterisk. It did not say unless.

So why were we killing them?

I never asked out loud. I have never asked much out loud. I asked it in my head, the way I asked everything, and I filed it away, and it sat there through Chicago and Vallejo and a marriage and three children and a wife I buried in 2020.

In 1974 a censored press told my country the dead in Jolo were Maoists. In 2026 the paperwork and the podium do not match. I am not yet prepared to say those are the same thing. I can tell you what the second one feels like from the living room floor.

This series is me finally answering the question. It starts here, in a living room in Marikina, because that is where I first learned that a government will tell you why someone died, and the reason will be shaped to fit something other than the truth.

What I Was Actually Living In

Here is the part I did not know at the time, and could not have known.

I turned six on September 12, 1972. Nine days later, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. signed Proclamation No. 1081. Two days after that, on September 23, he announced it on television. I was in Prep at Marist School. Martial law is not something I remember arriving. It is the air I started school in.

• September 12, 1972I turn six.
• September 21–23, 1972Proclamation No. 1081 signed, then announced on national television. I am in Prep at Marist School, Marikina.
• June 1973First grade begins. I read the Bible cover to cover, twice.
• February 7–8, 1974The Battle of Jolo. I am seven years old, halfway through first grade, watching it on a black-and-white television.
• August 19, 1976I leave for Chicago at age nine, with borrowed books in my luggage.

What Happened in Jolo

Before dawn on Thursday, February 7, 1974, fighters of the Moro National Liberation Front infiltrated the town of Jolo, capital of Sulu — some of them arriving by sea — and took up prepared firing positions. MNLF chairman Nur Misuari directed the assault. They seized most of the town. Government forces counterattacked over the following days with ground troops, naval bombardment, and air strikes.

By the time it was over, much of Jolo had burned. Each side blamed the other for the fire.

A note on the numbers The death toll at Jolo is contested and probably unknowable. The MNLF has long put the figure above 20,000 Muslim, Christian and Chinese civilians. The Department of Social Welfare and Development said at the time that 10,000 people were dead or unaccounted for — a number that strains against a town population then under 100,000. Gen. Fidel Ramos gave a far lower estimate, saying roughly a quarter to a third of the town had burned. Contemporary wire reports out of Manila carried the higher figures. This publication is not going to pick one and print it as fact. What is not in dispute: thousands died, much of the town was destroyed, and some 6,000 refugees landed by boat in Zamboanga City within days.

Jolo was not an isolated tragedy. It was the largest engagement of a war that had already been running for years and would run for decades more. The late MNLF peace panel official Abraham Iribani called it the mother of all battles of the early Moro war. He was seventeen when it happened. His parents died in it.

The Part I Could Not Have Known

Here is the thing that stopped me cold when I finally went looking, half a century later.

There is now a peer-reviewed study of exactly what my country was told about Jolo. Researchers read every issue of Bulletin Today from February through April 1974 and documented how the Marcos-controlled press filtered, fabricated, and censored the coverage — branding the MNLF as "Maoist Muslims," praising the competence of the military, and suppressing the government's own role in the bombing and burning of the town.

I was not a confused child. I was a correct child inside a national press that had been censored and, the record now shows, made to fabricate — in a language I could already read.

Think about what that means for a seven-year-old in front of a television in Marikina. The question I was asking — why are we killing them — was the right question. The reason I could not answer it was not that I was too young. It was that the answer had been removed from the country. Every adult around me was working from the same censored feed.

That is the first thing I want my children to understand about the faith they inherited and the country I came from: a story can be true, complete, confidently told, and still be an instrument. Someone decides what you are allowed to know. Then they hand you a book and tell you it contains everything.

The Bookcase at #34 Carmine Street

My Tita Gigi lived at #34, up the street. Her house held a bookcase full of everything she and my dad's siblings had kept from their school years — a whole family's education stacked on shelves. I went through it the way other kids went through a toy box.

In one year, off those shelves, I read:

• A Philippine history textbook that opened with Malakas at Maganda — the first man and the first woman, emerging from a split bamboo — and ran all the way through the Korean War.
• Perseus, and the Greek myths.
• The Iliad and The Odyssey — gods who scheme, quarrel, take sides in human wars, and hold grudges for a decade.
• And at school, Genesis — the first man and the first woman, formed out of dust.

I loved all of it. Religion was my favorite subject. I had an appetite for mythology and for origin stories specifically — where things came from, where people came from. I did not have a word for what I was doing. The word is comparative mythology, and I was doing it at six on the floor of my aunt's house.

And here is what a six-year-old notices, even without the vocabulary:

Malakas at Maganda was a legend. Homer was mythology. Genesis was the truth. On my aunt's shelf they sat together, and to a six-year-old they occupied the same space in the mind. Only one of them was allowed to be true in my classroom, and it was not ours.

I could not have said it that way then. But I felt the asymmetry, and I never stopped feeling it. When I flew to Chicago on August 19, 1976, I brought those books with me. Borrowed, let's say. I was nine years old and I was carrying the evidence out of the country without knowing it.

For most of my life I assumed the answer to my question was somewhere in Philippine history — that if I read enough about Mindanao, about Marcos, about the Spanish period, I would eventually find it. That is not what happened. Every book I opened pushed me farther back. Marikina sent me to Manila. Manila sent me to Spain. Spain sent me to Rome, and Rome sent me to a text older than all of it.

The question I asked in Marikina turned out to be older than the Philippines.

The Second Question: Who Gets to Be Chosen

The other thing that would not sit right arrived a year or two later, around second and third grade, and it was about the Old Testament.

I had read it. All of it. And what struck me was that it was, in large part, the national history of one people — their kings, their wars, their genealogies, their covenant. The chosen people. And I was a Filipino boy in Marikina reading it as the foundation of my own faith, and I could not make it fit. If God made everyone, how could a sacred text elevate one nation above the rest? I believed God loved all people. That belief was, ironically, something the Brothers themselves had taught me.

Since people always ask for the receipts, here is where the text actually says it:

Passage	What it says
Deuteronomy 7:6	The clearest statement in the Hebrew Bible — a people holy to the LORD, chosen out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be a treasured possession.
Deuteronomy 14:2	The same formula, repeated almost word for word.
Deuteronomy 10:15	God set his affection on the ancestors and chose their descendants above all nations.
Exodus 19:5–6	The covenant terms at Sinai: a treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.
Amos 3:2	The counterweight almost nobody quotes: You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities. Chosen means held to a harder standard, not exempted from one.

Amos matters. A seven-year-old reading straight through does not get to Amos for a long time, and by then the impression has set. But it is there, and it complicates the simple reading badly: in the text itself, being chosen is a liability.

Still — the question I had at seven stands, and I want to put it to you plainly, because it is the question this whole series turns on:

Can a sacred text rank human beings? And if it can, what happens when someone gets hold of it who wants a reason to take your land?

Notice that I am not asking whether one people is better than another. The answer to that is no, and it does not require a footnote. I am asking about the structure — the idea of chosenness itself, the notion that God sorts nations into first and second. Because the moment you accept that structure, the only remaining question is who holds the title.

And that turns out to be the most contested piece of property in Western history.

1 Peter 2:9 — The Title Changes Hands

Here is what nobody explained to me at Marist School, and it is the single most important thing in this article.

One influential Christian reading did not reject the chosen-people claim. It transferred it.

Open the New Testament to 1 Peter 2:9, and read the words applied to the church: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession. Now put it beside Exodus 19:5–6. It is not a paraphrase. It is the same vocabulary, lifted intact and reassigned.

I should say plainly that Christians have never agreed on what that means. Many theologians read 1 Peter as extending covenant identity outward — grafting in, not replacing, with Israel's calling still standing. Others read it as replacement, the older claim voided and the title handed over. That second reading has a name, supersessionism, and it has been formally repudiated by significant parts of the Church in the last sixty years, including by Rome. I am not competent to settle that argument and I am not going to pretend to.

What I can say is which reading got on the boats.

And I want to be precise about the claim, because this is exactly the kind of place where an argument like mine can go wrong. The claim is not that this verse produced empire — most Christians across two thousand years have read it as a statement about grace and never gone near a ship. The claim is narrower and harder to dodge: some Christian kingdoms read the elect-nation language as divine sanction for expansion, and one of them reached us.

That is not a hypothetical. That is a date on a calendar.

1492: The Year the License Was Cashed

Three things happened in Spain in a single year, and every Filipino should know them in sequence.

• January 2, 1492Granada falls. The last Muslim state in Iberia surrenders to Ferdinand and Isabella. The Reconquista — seven centuries of holy war — is over, and Spain has won it as a self-consciously Catholic nation.
• March 31, 1492The Alhambra Decree. Spain orders the expulsion of its Jews. Convert or leave by summer.
• August 3, 1492Columbus sails.
• May 1493Pope Alexander VI issues the bull Inter caetera, granting Spain title to lands across the ocean and charging it with converting the peoples found there.

Same year. Same monarchs. Same self-understanding. A nation that has just spent seven hundred years defining itself as God's chosen instrument against Islam finishes the job at home, expels the Jews who remain, and immediately points the same machinery at an ocean it has never crossed.

Twenty-nine years after Granada, a cross went up at Cebu.

The word Spain brought for our kababayan in Sulu and Mindanao — Moro — was not a description. It was the word they had just finished using in Granada. They arrived already knowing what to call us.

Here is where I have to be careful, because this is an interpretation and not a documented fact, and I would rather say so than get caught pretending otherwise.

I came to believe that the war on my television in February 1974 was still carrying Spanish vocabulary — that "Moro" was a category imported from a religious conflict that ended before Magellan sailed, and that the Republic of the Philippines inherited the word along with the province.

That is not the only thing that was happening, and I will not pretend it was. The Moro conflict of the 1970s also ran on land — Christian resettlement into Mindanao under policies going back to the American period, and the dispossession that followed. It ran on Cold War politics, on Marcos's own strategic calculations, on the Jabidah massacre in 1968, on genuine and modern claims to self-determination. A historian would list all of those before mentioning Granada, and would be right to.

But the word survived all of it. The state was calling them Moros in 1974, and the reason that word exists at all is a Spanish war that ended in 1492. Categories outlive the arguments that made them. That is the part I could not stop seeing once I saw it.

The Argument Inside the Church

If I stopped here, I would be handing you a clean story, and clean stories are usually the ones that have had something removed. So let me put back the part that complicates my own argument.

The Church was never one voice on this. The conquest was contested from inside it, in real time, by people who had every incentive to keep quiet.

At Salamanca, the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria argued in the 1530s that the peoples of the Americas held genuine dominion over their own lands, and that neither papal grant nor imperial claim could simply erase it. Bartolomé de las Casas, who had been an encomendero himself before he turned on the system, spent decades documenting Spanish atrocities and arguing that indigenous peoples were fully rational human beings — an argument he made to the Crown's face at Valladolid.

And it reached us. Domingo de Salazar, a Dominican shaped by that same school, arrived in 1581 as the first Bishop of Manila. He convened a synod that examined whether the Spanish presence in the Philippines was just at all, condemned abuses of the encomienda and the tribute system, and pressed the Crown on the treatment of Filipinos. He did not win everything. But he made the argument, in Manila, four hundred and forty-five years ago.

The instrument was contested by the people holding it. That does not undo what it did. It does mean the story is not "religion arrived and crushed us." It is messier, and the mess is where the truth lives.

I will come back to this repeatedly in this series, because it only gets more complicated from here. Filipino priests were garroted in 1872 for demanding equality within the Church. A Filipino priest founded a national church in 1902 rather than leave the faith. Filipino Catholics filled EDSA in 1986 and brought down a dictator. The tool got taken away from the toolmaker, and what happened next is one of the more remarkable things our people have ever done.

But that is later. First I have to tell you who was actually standing in front of my classroom.

Who Was Actually Teaching Me

I assumed for most of my life that the Catholicism I grew up in was Spain's. That is the story we all get: the conquistadors came, the friars came, the cross went up at Cebu in 1521, and four hundred years later here we are.

But look at who was actually standing in front of my classroom.

Marist School in Marikina was founded by the Marist Brothers — a congregation established by Marcellin Champagnat in Lyon, France, in 1817. Not Spanish. French. And not colonial-era, either: the first four Marist Brothers arrived in the Philippines in 1948, half a century after Spain had been expelled, two years after the Republic became independent. Their first school was Notre Dame of Cotabato. Marist Marikina came second, in the mid-1960s, on land at the foot of the Sierra Madre.

Spain left in 1898. The machinery did not. It was inherited — by the Americans, then by an independent Philippine republic — and by the time it reached me, the catechism was being administered by a French teaching order in a sovereign nation ruled by a Filipino dictator.

The instrument outlived the empire that built it. That is why I am still asking the question in 2026.

And one more thing, which I did not learn until this year and which I am still sitting with. The Marist Brothers in the Philippines run schools in Kidapawan, Koronadal, General Santos, Cotabato, Marikina — and in Jolo, Sulu.

The same order that put a Bible in my hands in Marikina had been in Mindanao since before I was born, and has a school in the town I watched burn. I was not asking an abstract question in front of that television. I was asking it from inside the institution that stood on both sides of it.

What This Series Is — and What It Is Not

I am going to be honest about the limits of what I can prove, because the moment a piece like this overreaches, it stops being history and becomes a grudge.

What the record can establish: That the book I was handed did not descend intact from heaven — it was assembled, edited, translated, argued over, and voted on by councils of men with politics. That its oldest stories share a family tree with Mesopotamian texts written centuries before. That the chosen-people claim was transferred from one community to another and then used as a warrant for conquest. That in the Philippines, Church and Crown operated as a single instrument by formal agreement. That indigenous spiritual authorities were destroyed deliberately, not incidentally. And that the Philippine state inherited a religious war it did not start and is still fighting it.

What the record cannot establish: Whether God exists. Whether my mother's faith was worth having. Whether the Pasyon my ancestors sang in Holy Week was a cage or a weapon — and I will argue, before this series is finished, that it was both.

That distinction is the whole thing. I am not writing to tell anyone their lola was a fool, and I am not writing to point at any people and say they think they are better than you. That is the oldest trick there is, and it is a trap: it accepts the premise that chosenness is real and only argues about who holds the deed. I reject the premise. That was my objection at seven and it is still my objection.

Not that the faith is false. That it arrived as an instrument — and nobody was ever told.

Six-year-olds were handed the commandments and not the footnotes. That is the offense. Not belief. The withholding.

Where This Goes

I do not know how many parts this will run, and I am not going to pretend I have it mapped.

I am diabetic. I have high blood pressure and sleep apnea, and I know what those things do to a man's arithmetic. So I will not promise anyone a long life. I will say this instead: I hope to live longer, and I will keep writing — asking the questions I have had since I was six, until I get to the bottom of them or run out of time. Whichever comes first, my granddaughter can read the whole thing in 2070 and decide for herself whether her lolo got it right.

Thou Shalt Not Kill — the series

1. The Question I Asked at Six — Marikina, 1974. You are here.
2. Before Genesis — What the oldest stories in the Bible were built from, and how the book itself was assembled, edited, and voted on.
3. Patronato Real — How Church and Crown became one machine, and what it did to the babaylan.
4. The Moro Wars Never Ended — From Spain's campaigns in Sulu to Bud Dajo, to Jabidah, to Bangsamoro today.
5. Who Profits — Every war has an accounting department. We will read the filings.
6. — and however many more it takes.

But I know where it starts. It starts with a boy in front of a black-and-white television in SSS Village, Marikina, in February 1974, holding a commandment in one hand and the evening news in the other, and finding that they did not fit.

They still don't. Isabella Gonzales was nineteen. She is dead, and her own government has given two different reasons why. I just finally understand what I was looking at.

Hindi ako naguluhan noon. Tama ang tanong ko. I was not confused back then. My question was right.

Sources

• U.S. Department of Defense — Casualty identification releases, July 2026 (Pvt. Isabella Gonzales; 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan; Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad)
• CBS News — "3 soldiers killed in Iran strike on base in Jordan were from Texas, Hawaii, New York" (July 2026)
• CBS News Texas — Pentagon identification and Carrollton community reporting (July 2026)
• NBC News — "U.S. military identifies 2 soldiers killed in Iranian attack in Jordan" (July 2026)
• U.S. Central Command — statements on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base attacks (July 2026)
• Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines — Proclamation No. 1081, September 21, 1972
• MindaNews — "PEACETALK: The Jolo Siege of 1974, Half a Century Hence" (2024)
• MindaNews — "KISSA AND DAWAT: The 1974 Battle of Jolo, narratives and quest for social conscience"
• International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies — "Legitimising Martial Law: Framing the 1974 Battle of Jolo (Sulu, Philippines) in the Bulletin Today Newspaper"
• "Remembering and Forgetting: Counter-Memories of Tausug Survivors of the 1974 Battle of Jolo"
• U.S. Department of State — Manila Embassy cable on the 1974 Battle of Jolo (declassified)
• Marist School Marikina — Official school history, maristschool.edu.ph
• Notre Dame of Marbel University — "The Marist Brothers" (arrival in the Philippines, 1948)
• Alhambra Decree (Edict of Expulsion), Crown of Castile and Aragon, March 31, 1492
• Pope Alexander VI — Inter caetera, May 1493
• Vitoria, Francisco de. De Indis (relectio, c. 1539), School of Salamanca
• Las Casas, Bartolomé de. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552); the Valladolid debate, 1550–1551
• Synod of Manila (1581–1586) under Bishop Domingo de Salazar, O.P. — on the justice of the conquest, the encomienda, and tribute
• Gutierrez, Lucio, O.P. Domingo de Salazar, O.P., First Bishop of the Philippines (1512–1594)
• Scott, William Henry. Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society. Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994
• Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. Duke University Press, 1988
• Ileto, Reynaldo C. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910. Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979
• Berlin, Adele, and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds. The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2014

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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.

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