4. The Civilians Terrorized and Preyed Upon by This Jerk for Decades Did Not See Him as a Heroic Paragon of Devotion to Duty
While Hiroo Onoda was being lionized in Japan and around the world, those most impacted by his decades-long holdout – Lubang’s civilian population – did not hold him in such high regard. Back home, Onoda released his autobiography, No Surrender: My Thirty Year War, in which he detailed his years as a guerrilla in the Philippines fighting a long-since-ended war. However, a documentary interviewed the locals upon whom he had preyed during those years, and it revealed details that Onoda had omitted in his self-serving book. Such as the fact that he had murdered dozens of innocents.
The people of Lubang viewed the famous holdout the way we would view a psychopathic serial killer terrorizing a community with a decades-long violent crime spree. To the Lubangese, Onoda was a bloody-minded idiot and a jerk who, during his 29-year-holdout, had inflicted sundry harms upon them such as stealing, destroying, and sabotaging their property. He also killed about 30 local police and farmers with whom he and his band had clashed while stealing or “requisitioning” food and supplies in order to continue fighting a war that had ended decades earlier.
