When bullets fly

Never. I’m not one to look for trouble, but as a shirt I used to have announced, “trouble seems to always find me.” Take that instance decades ago along Marcos Highway, when a cop jumped right in front of my car, rifle raised against an enemy I could not see.

Not wanting to be caught in a volley of gunfire and, out of the sheer luck of having space for a quick U-turn to the left, I steered and sped off to safety, away from a possible crossfire, telling my passenger all the while to duck low behind the relative safety of the firewall behind the engine block.

Last Wednesday, it happened again.

I chanced upon a police operation along Macapagal Boulevard in Parañaque City — one of those times an ordinary road suddenly becomes memorable. A 78-year-old kidnapping victim was being rescued, they would later say. At that moment, all I knew was that something had broken the rhythm of the traffic.

Just as I approached the City of Dreams on my motorcycle, men in civilian clothes — undercover cops, I would later piece together — were engaged in a firefight in the middle of it all.

We don’t wait to confirm.

Instinct, in such moments, is rarely wrong. I turned right — hard — off Macapagal, slipping into the side road by Ayala Mall, certain I was within range of whatever was flying in the air.

Enough time on the range has taught this Contrarian: a standard 9mm round, the most common pistol caliber, does its lethal work within 50 meters, but it does not simply stop there. Under the right conditions, it carries farther, still dangerous, still searching for mayhem.

A 5.56mm rifle round, on the other hand, stretches that several times over. It’s effective well past what the eye might casually measure and still be capable of harm long after the shooter is out of sight. Which means that if we can hear the shots, we are already part of the equation.

Bullets obey physics, not intention. They arc, they skip, they glance off surfaces that seem solid enough — concrete, metal, thick glass. Each has a surface that can deflect, redirect, or slow a round just enough to send it somewhere else. Not always where it was meant to go.

So we move — not blindly, but decisively — away from the sound, away from the line that connects shooter to target. A turn, even an imperfect one, is often better than staying within that invisible corridor where everything travels fastest.

We also learn very quickly what is not protection.

A motorcycle is not cover. Neither is a car door nor a wall that looks thick but is not enough to stop slugs. If we must stop, we look for weight — concrete, an engine, anything dense enough to interrupt what is coming.

And we stay low, because most rounds travel straight until gravity begins its quiet work. What we do not do is linger.

There is always that urge — to look, to witness, to understand. Resist it. Curiosity has a way of placing you exactly where you should not be.

The official version comes later. Names, motives, numbers — the story cleaned up, arranged, and explained. But in that brief moment between the first shot and your first decision, none of that matters.

We are not part of the story; we are simply trying not to be.