WHY I wrote this book.

This is a book I didn’t want to write, until I had to. For 10 years, I was immersed in the politics of the Philippines and saw things through the eyes of a foreign correspondent. But unlike other reporters who were there on short-term assignments, my vision of events was influenced by the fact that I was living in the country, married to a Filipina, and associating with Filipinos far more than I did with Westerners. When I left the Philippines in 1987, Marcos had gone. His dictatorship was unquestioned. But in recent years the Marcos regime has undergone a social media cleansing. It has been whitewashed, mythologised, and propagandised. This distortion of history offended me. Then it motivated me to write of my experiences, to tell what I knew. What I have written is my contribution to preserving the truth. It must be preserved because truth underpins history.