“Same Banana”: Hazing and Honor at the Philippine Military Academy

On june 15, 1936, 120 fresh cadets assembled at Manila's Tutuban Station to board a train for the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), recently established in the mountain city of Baguio. At the end of the line, the cadets changed to Benguet Auto Line buses for the 4,000-foot climb up the zig-zag road to Baguio. As the buses pulled into the campus, some forty upperclassmen, all transfers from the superseded Constabulary Academy, were waiting to greet the new arrivals with a ritual called “hazing.” Even fifty years later, these cadets would recall their reception as traumatic (J. Mendoza 1986, 16).