In the pantheon of Negros Oriental’s history, certain names flare like sudden brushfires in the dark, and then burn themselves into permanence. One such name is Salvador Sureta Abcede, whose 112th birth anniversary we celebrated last September 6. His nickname was Badong, and he was born in the quiet town of Indan [now Vinzons], Camarines Norte—but he was destined to carve his legacy in the mountains of Negros, among the ragtag men and women who dared to resist Japanese occupation.

Abcede was soldier, patriot, police chief, and—often forgotten in the catalogues of Philippine letters—novelist. To remember him is to remember how history’s brutality demands both a rifle and a pen, and how the story of our nation, particularly in wartime, is not only etched in blood but also written in words.

He began like many young men of his generation, full of zeal for uniform and flag. He entered the Philippine Constabulary Academy in 1935 and graduated just as the country teetered toward independence, yet shadowed by another colonizer’s ambition. When World War II came, he was in Dumaguete, commanding ROTC cadets at Silliman University. There, on the cusp of the Japanese invasion, he made a decision that would shape not only his life but the fate of the island: he would not surrender. When General Wainwright capitulated to the Japanese forces in 1942, Abcede chose instead to disappear into the folds of Negrense mountains, gathering farmers, students, and disbanded soldiers to form a guerrilla unit.

It is difficult to imagine now, from the vantage of a peacetime Negros where sugar and politics dominate the headlines, what it must have meant to live in those hills, hunted and starving, yet steadfast in defiance. For Abcede, resistance was not abstract—it was a daily calibration of courage and desperation. And when liberation came, his name was already legend, the commander who had held Negros together under the banner of a ragged sun.

His career after the war reads like the trajectory of a model soldier in a new republic. He went to Fort Leavenworth in the United States for advanced military training, returned to command Filipino troops in Korea during the Battle of Hill Eerie, and later became Chief of Police in Manila in the 1950s. He was, in other words, a man who had embodied the shifting faces of Philippine nationhood: colonial subject, guerilla rebel, soldier of a new state, custodian of law and order.

He died on 19 August 1982, and today his remains rest in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

But if we remember Abcede only in terms of his campaigns and commands, we risk forgetting his most human endeavor: his turn to literature, his attempt to make sense of history not through strategy but through story. That endeavor is crystallized in his novel Nita—a work obscure in the annals of Philippine literature, and yet, for those who know it, a vital testament to the emotional cost of war.

Nita, published in 1985 by Express Commercial Printers Corporation, is not the military report of a commander; it is, instead, a narrative of intimacy written against the backdrop of conflict. Set in Negros during the Japanese occupation, the novel tells the story of a young woman—its titular character—who becomes entangled in the complicated web of love, loyalty, and survival in a land scarred by war. What makes the novel remarkable is how it refracts history through the lens of the personal. For while history tends to monumentalize battles and leaders, Abcede insists that the truer measure of war is in how it shatters ordinary lives, how it tests the boundaries of affection, how it remakes the texture of everyday longing.

There is an almost Tiempo-esque sensibility to Nita, which is perhaps unsurprising, given the novel’s affinity with Edilberto K. Tiempo’s Cry Slaughter!—another Negrense novel that dared to place love amid war. Both novels emerge from the same soil, both attempt to grapple with the peculiar violence that befell the island, and both are written by men whose lives were inextricably bound to those years of Japanese occupation. Yet Nita feels different because it bears the authority of someone who was not merely a witness, but an architect of that very history. Abcede was there, in the trenches and in the forests, and when he wrote, he wrote with the memory of gunfire still echoing in his ears.

What does it mean, then, that a soldier would write a love story? Perhaps it means that even in the most brutal of times, the human need to imagine tenderness persists. Or perhaps it means that the work of resistance is incomplete without also recording the quieter devastations—the disrupted courtships, the unspoken affections, the homes left empty by men who never returned. In this sense, Nita is not just a novel; it is Abcede’s attempt to humanize the statistics of war, to remind us that behind every casualty was someone’s beloved.

Today, Nita remains an under-read text, eclipsed by more widely anthologized works of Filipino wartime literature. Yet its significance lies in its rarity: there are not many novels about Negros during the Japanese occupation, and fewer still written by those who commanded its resistance. To engage with the novel is to bridge the gap between history and emotion, between the martial and the domestic. It is to see war not only through the glare of strategy, but through the eyes of a young woman navigating her own survival.

Salvador Abcede lived many lives—cadet, commander, general, chief. But in Nita, he allowed us to glimpse another facet: the man who understood that history must also be written in the language of longing. To read him today is to recover a voice that insists on the fullness of our wartime memory. His lone literary output insists that the stories of this island are not only about battles won and lost, but also about the fragile persistence of love amid ruins. And perhaps this is Abcede’s greatest gift to Philippine literature: that he reminds us the past is not just a ledger of victories and defeats, but also a novel waiting to be read.