Lt. Col. Ma. Rowena Muyuela: Seeing death in battle steeled Marines’ first woman commander
Just two weeks as a Marine lieutenant, Ma. Rowena Muyuela was put in charge of two armored vehicles in a military convoy sent to Al-Barka town in Basilan province on July 10, 2007, in search of Italian priest Giancarlo Bossi who had been kidnapped a month earlier in Payao, Zamboanga Sibugay.
As they entered Guinanta village in the morning, Muyuela, then 29 and a newbie in the 1st Marine Brigade, felt something strange. While clothes hung on the clotheslines, there were no women or children around. The lone man she saw quickly walked away as the convoy passed through.
Muyuela’s intuition told her there could be danger ahead.
The convoy was forced to stop when one of the vehicles was mired in mud. Some 15 minutes later, sniper and mortar fire rained on the troops from different directions, in an attack that lasted for about eight hours, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Blood and gore was everywhere. At one time, Muyuela’s gunner fell on her lap after being hit.
“Deep inside me, I wanted to cry, I wanted to shout. But I had to be strong and firm… to focus, to make sure that I could save lives, to ensure that we’d have fewer casualties,” she told the Inquirer then, three days after the fateful incident that left 14 of her colleagues dead, 11 of them beheaded.
Amid continuous fire, Muyuela, already wounded in the right ear, commanded a maneuver of the armored vehicles to extricate the other wounded soldiers, a move made more difficult by the pouring rain that worsened the road condition.
After some five hours of being in the line of fire, Muyuela was able to leave with some of the wounded in tow.
Later, when not all of her colleagues had returned, and driven by her strong concern for their welfare, she insisted to her superiors that a force be mobilized to extricate them dead or alive. For this, Muyuela was made to explain before a court martial proceeding.
Outspoken, tough
Muyuela was also outspoken in her recollection of the involvement of Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) forces in the attack, prompting a joint probe with the government given the peace process then underway between the two sides. It was found that while MILF forces engaged in battle with the soldiers, it was Abu Sayyaf bandits that beheaded the 11 Marines and took their belongings.
The attack tested Muyuela’s toughness to face situations of extreme adversity, and to accept the hard battlefield reality of the imminence of death.
The experience somehow prepared her for the duties of a civil-military operations officer from 2012 to 2014 in Cebu province. She was involved in carrying out disaster response in the aftermath of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan), the world’s strongest storm that devastated large areas of the Visayas.
Almost 17 years after her baptism of fire in Basilan, Muyuela, now a lieutenant colonel, was chosen in March last year to lead the Marines’ Assault Armor Battalion based in Zamboanga City. It is a national unit that provides maneuver brigades with armored assets to support their operations.
She is the first woman to lead a Marine battalion.
“In terms of responsibility and accountability, holding the most sensitive and one of the most significant combat support units in the Marine Corps is tough and challenging. But as a Marine warrior, I look at it as an opportunity to exceptionally perform and stand out in a positive way so that I can influence other people to do more, not only for the battalion or combat support brigade but also for the entire Corps,” Muyuela told the Inquirer.
“I once said when I was a company commander that gender is not a basis to become a good leader. It is the person’s character and values that speak of him or her,” she added.
Muyuela credits her parents, especially her father, a retired Marine enlisted personnel, for nurturing in her “the importance of integrity in one’s life.”
“This is among the guiding principles he passed on to me,” she said.
A psychology graduate from Western Mindanao State University before enlisting in the Marine Corps, Muyuela was among 13 female officers in her cohort in 2007, but only she chose to be on combat duty.
