Recipe for a Military Spouse

1 1/2 cups Patience
1 cup Courage
3/4 cup Tolerance
1 pound of Ability
dash of Adventure

To the above ingredients, add 2 tablespoons elbow grease and let stand for one year. Marinate frequently with salty tears. Pour off excess fat and sprinkle ever so lightly with money, then knead dough until payday. Season with international spices. Bake 20 years or until done. Makes unlimited servings. SERVE WITH PRIDE.

WHOEVER concocted the above recipe obviously did not have Arlene Orejana-Trillanes in mind. If they did, they would have included a clove of crushed coup d?état, one big tomato chopped in Oakwood, a pint of politics brewed in Malacañang and 5 cups of cached intrigues from military intelligence units.

But then again, Orejana-Trillanes is not your garden-variety military spouse.

A graduate of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), Orejana-Trillanes was among the first batch of women to earn diplomas from the country?s premier military academy in 1997. It was her second college degree. Her first was an AB in Psychology from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, intended to be the requisite preparation for a medical course and career in medicine.

Born in General Santos City in South Cotabato to a non-military family of five daughters, Orejana-Trillanes said PMA was never a career option. At least not until her high school years, when she met her elder sisters? classmates who went to the PMA.

?They were cadets. They looked nice, they told inspiring stories. I thought it was a nice thing to be,? she recalled. When the PMA flung its doors to women in 1993, Orejana-Trillanes was among the 854 stout-hearted female examinees who tried their luck. The best of the best, all 14 of them, were eventually admitted on April 1, 1993.

Thus did the tall (5?7?), fit and brainy Orejana end up marching on military parade grounds, instead of doing the rounds in a medical center. She graduated number 9 in her class.

Then she fell in love and married her upperclassman at the PMA, now Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, who graduated in 1995. The romance did not bloom in balmy Fort Del Pilar, she said.

?A relationship with someone who is in the chain of command is not allowed,? she explained. Trillanes was already an incoming junior when the girl from GenSan was accepted as a cadet. Besides, she belonged to Alpha Company, while the tantalizing, lambent-eyed Trillanes was with Echo Company. ?We could only interact with company-mates,? she said. ?There was no way of getting to know the cadets from other companies.?

Officially, the courtship started only after she marched out of the Academy in March 1997 and was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the Philippine Army, and Trillanes was a Lt. Junior Grade in the Philippine Navy. They married soon after her graduation. When the babies started coming, Orejana-Trillanes opted for non-combat duties as a member of the PMA Corps of Professors, teaching sociology, information technology and psychology. She kept house at the Academy with son, Francis Seth, and daughter, Thea Estelle, while her husband would come home on weekends and furloughs while pursuing a career in the Navy.

Published accounts cite that Orejana-Trillanes, like most wives, was the last to know about her husband?s decision to demand the resignation of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on July 27, 2003. She acknowledged that this was accurate. ?No inkling at all.? Just a few days earlier, she had found out she was pregnant with their third child, and had informed her husband about it.

What she saw on TV that day?her husband and his classmates, and some of her own classmates from the PMA, all of them in full battle uniform brandishing shiny weapons?stunned her. But there was no confusing the fact that she was also in the military and bound by the same exacting rules provided in the Articles of War (AW). She knew, as a member of the military organization, that it was a breach of the AW to denounce the commander-in-chief, much less demand her resignation in public. It was a difficult situation, she said, but not so much on her part.

?I was in a very professional environment,? she recalled. ?I was told to just do my duties, and that?s what I did,? she said. A few days after the failed mutiny, Orejana-Trillanes and her two children, Seth and Thea, then aged 5 and 4, visited Trillanes at his detention cell in Camp Aguinaldo. Without histrionics, she told her children their father would not be coming home for a while. It turned out to be a long, long while.

Just before Christmas last year, Trillanes, 39, was released from detention under an amnesty program offered by the Aquino administration, ending a roller-coaster ride of seven years. Seth and Thea are now teen-agers. (The third child, born in March 2004, died a month after.) His wife has resigned from the military and he has become a senator, elected in 2007 even while he was in jail.

Orejana-Trillanes has leaped from military wife to senator?s wife. But military training is hard to break. She still chooses her words carefully, especially when speaking about politicians and politics.

Her family is a priority, as always. ?They can say what they want to say. They have said enough. I don?t have a problem with that,? she said of the intrigues sown by the military against her husband.

She laughed at suggestions that the only decisions she makes are limited to the budget and the children, while the important issues like terrorism, national security and foreign relations are reserved for her husband.

?All other issues on the table are open for discussion,? she said. ?We discuss things before making a decision. Who gets to win really depends on one?s argument.?