Word: victors
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...voice belongs to Comrade Victor, 39, the political officer assigned to look after us. (Victor, like all N.P.A. fighters, uses a nom de guerre. The platoon's machine gunner is called Comrade Bren.) A handsome man dressed in shin-length shorts and orange flip-flops, Victor first apologizes for his poor English (he speaks it perfectly), then for our circuitous journey: a rebel operation had caused more "bad weather" to the south. "Our people were carrying out a punitive action," says Victor, meaning an assassination by an N.P.A. "sparrow unit" or death squad. The man killed was a farmer...
...There are no ranks in the N.P.A.," Victor tells me, "only responsibilities." But experience makes some comrades more equal than others. Platoon leader Jorex, 41, is a brooding giant with a bandolier of grenades strung across his chest. As a youth, he was recruited by a government militia to fight the N.P.A. but instead defected to the rebels...
...late 2005, the rebels launched hundreds of raids across the country in what Victor describes as "the first nationally coordinated N.P.A. attacks since 1992." He claims 200 firearms were seized in Mindanao alone. With the violence intensifying, Giegie's sister Lenlen, 19, has already survived three shoot-outs; she was almost killed during an N.P.A. attack on an army post in Agusan del Sur province in 2005. One bullet hit her neck and ripped an exit through her armpit, while a second drilled into her thigh. "All I could think was, 'If I die here, I die for the people...
...EXTREME EXAMPLE OF HOW CHANGES IN the input reaching the brain can alter its structure is the silence that falls over the somatosensory cortex after its owner has lost a limb. Soon after a car crash took Victor Quintero's left arm from just above the elbow, he told neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego that he could still feel the missing arm. Ramachandran decided to investigate. He had Victor sit still with his eyes closed and lightly brushed the teenager's left cheek with a cotton swab...
Where do you feel that? Ramachandran asked. On his left cheek, Victor answered--and the back of his missing hand. Ramachandran stroked another spot on the cheek. Where do you feel that? On his absent thumb, Victor replied. Ramachandran touched the skin between Victor's nose and mouth. His missing index finger was being brushed, Victor said. A spot just below Victor's left nostril caused the boy to feel a tingling on his left pinkie. And when Victor felt an itch in his phantom hand, scratching his lower face relieved the itch. In people who have lost a limb...