The Man in the Montagut

It’s that day of the week again. I am in front of my computer, watching the cursor idly blinking on my favorite word processing app. I wonder how painters like Claude Monet and our own Amorsolo and BenCab found inspiration for their obra. Mine usually comes from the quiet corners of my mind — those recesses where thoughts swirl like dust, readying to unfold.

Sometimes, I just drift away into some imaginary world, a place where stories find me, not the other way around.

Today, I imagine myself in a newsroom from decades ago, somewhere I can’t place. Smelling faintly of ink, instant coffee, the clack of Adlers and Olympias echoing across the room. An editor looks up from a stack of folders and almost offhandedly says:

“Find the man who walked away from Tacub.”

Tacub. A vague place. A massacre I was never really taught.

“They say only one survived. Go find him.”

Lacoste — a shirt brand I had always wanted a spectrum of neatly lined in my closet. Never actually having one, I find myself thinking instead about Montagut — Lacoste’s apparent alternative from another era. Still around, but only in a few places now. Like Tacub — fewer people remember, a handful of names, a few sources left.

They say Mito-on Ampang wore a Montagut that day in 1971 — of the Tacub Massacre. Gunned down at a checkpoint in Tacub, Lanao del Norte were over 40 Muslim Filipinos, after they voted in a special election. A tragedy, one of several brutal episodes in the 1970s that quietly fueled the broader struggle for recognition among Muslim Filipino communities.

They said he walked away.

The story goes that because of that shirt, the brand became a legend, a badge of invincibility, passed around in murmured recollections. Like the massacre itself, the brand — and the story — faded to that place where memory goes when unwritten.

Intrigued, I dig through directories, old minutes, blurred citations. Slowly, the name surfaces: Mito-on Ampang. Former Board Member of Lanao del Norte; later, OIC Mayor of Balo-i, Lanao del Norte; then elected Mayor of Piagapo, Lanao del Sur, 1986 to 1987.

A survivor, perhaps. A public servant, definitely. But, in local memory, he was something more.

Some said he was indestructible, not just in Tacub, but in many close calls. Another version goes that he played dead, collapsing with the others as the firing began. When it stopped, he wandered away. Later, he resurfaced — tattered Montagut on his back, spent bullets lodged in the shirt pocket, as if fate had folded itself just right.

Others recall how he eased the pains of children, earning a reputation as a quack doctor of sorts, known more for comforting than curing.

Yet — no photo. No interview. Just a name, passed down in fragments.

The newsroom fades.

I’m back at my desk. The screen glows. The cursor blinks. But something remains.

A name. A shirt. A massacre nearly erased from our collective memory.

Mito-on Ampang? Was he truly the lone survivor of Tacub?

There’s no anger in the asking — just a quiet kind of longing.

Maybe it begins with a room. A Heritage and Cultural Center — not for display, but for dignity. A place where Muslim Filipino stories — both the great and the quietly painful — find their space, and where names like Tacub aren’t forgotten, but remembered with care.

Mito-on Ampang passed away in 1987. No headlines. No anniversaries. Just quiet footsteps, fading into the soil of Lanao. If he truly survived, so did the story. Maybe, if we ask again, it’s ready to be told.