Thread by @BorneoBah

Happy birthday🎂to my friend and ex-crew mate Daniel Lindström.
DO YOU KNOW what’s that he stuck to his arm? That’s a toy ‘Spinner’. HOW is it stuck to his arm do you want to know??
There’s still💥‘grenade fragments’ in his body.

Well, most of it has come out during the years but he decided to just let it be. 😉 The toy spinner is stuck to his arm by a magnetise fragment still in his arm. He said “It’s FUN” as the metal detector’s alarm will go off at the airport! Hahah.

He is just one among many others who still have fragments in their bodies.

The Story..
The Zamboanga Incident.
Twenty nine yrs ago we were involved in a grenade attack by terrorists which at the time was a rogue group by now the world knows it by the name of Abu Sayyaf.

Two of my friends both 19 yr old girls from NZ and Sweden were killed and 30 injured by the attack.

We were a crew onboard a FG (foreign-going) vessel a long time ago when we were younger.🙂He was a AB seaman, I was a Deck Cadet. We worked on a humanitarian ship for ..

2 and half yrs sailing frm port to port conducting training programs, events and working with NGOs and churches with the local communities.
On August 1991, we arrived in Port Zamboanga. Too cut the long story short, we had various programmes and events lined up for ..

various groups and venues during our 2 weeks stay. One of the highlights of every port we visit is the ‘International Night’. As the ship’s crew and various departmental personnel comprised of 30 nationalitlies, the event hosted an exciting night of cultural dances..

and international parade.

Fortunately I was not involved for this particular night as we were short of personnel for our particular item, the Malaysian Dance - which at the time was very popular in the almost every port but this! It would have been a different outcome...

(or fatal) if we were involved. I wouldn’t not be here writing this. ☹️

I was not at the venue, which was not far from our ship. Only a mere 10 minutes walk. The venue that the International Night was held was in a Ferry Terminal that had a semi-open structured building.

As I was not involved, I was quite free for the night. I actually went for an ice cream with my friends nearby, passing through the event just for a look-see then I left to go back to the ship.

Fifteen minutes later, it happened….

Almost at the end of the night while the..

..participants were backstage, someone from the crowd threw into the backstage full of our participants - MY FRIENDS; a hand grenade. Not one, but two. One was a fragmentation grenade which dropped into the group of people sitting together, the other a bigger one,..

rolled underneath the main stage but didn’t explode. My friend Nate from the US, saw the grenade in front of him, it took him a few seconds to realise that it was a grenade - he kicked it away and it exploded after that. The backstage was full of people and it wouldn’t have..

made any difference anyway which way it went.

I had just arrived back to my cabin after stopping over the venue 15 minutes before, halfway undressing to take a shower when I heard the ‘7 rings & 1 long ring’ on the ship’s alarm system, the General Alarm.

I thot to myself “That was funny to have a drill at this time?” But then my training kicked in realising that it was real and I ran to my stations. When I got on deck, I saw many people running from the venue and our participants in their costumes running back towards the ship.

Some were carrying those injured on their backs. I saw Philippine Army jeeps also had the injured in them.
It was like a scene from a horror monster movie when you see scores of people running away from something. This incident is too long to tell everything, even right now,..

I can still smell the cool night, the atmosphere I was in and the sight of blood on people. My hand was shaking and my heart pumping hard. It was like being in a dream or in a movie but this was the real deal. I saw soldiers in their jeeps scouring the grounds for the culprits

but mostly to see that people are safe and evacuated form the site. I saw my friends, some bloodied from broken glass or from carrying the injured with them back to the ship. We were ordered by the Captain to cut the mooring lines if we had to moved away from the pier..

if we needed to. We did everything in double or triple time! Army helicopters with searchlights on were flying low over the area searching and checking the boats or anything that was out of the norm. It was a Saturday night of August the 10th we lost Sophia from Sweden...

and Karen from New Zealand. Both were only 19 yrs old. I was 21. The grenade explode in front of them.
That whole night till the next day we were on ‘special watch’. I was still feeling ’numb’, confused, sad and lost not until the early morning on Sunday was I a little calmer.

The local hospital in Zamboanga could not cope with the amount of casualities that night and they didn’t have enough medical supplies for all till the ship’s medical crew had to go back and forth to get supplies from our small ship’s hospital for more.

2 dead, 43 wounded.

It could’ve been ‘3 dead’ cos I definitely would’ve sat next to Karen. 100% Most definitely!

Our next port after Zamboanga was Tawau, Malaysia. On Sunday afternoon the authoriies prepared a mercy flight to transport our injured to Manila in a Philippine Air Force C-130.

Navy divers checked the underside of our ship for bombs. The army bomb squad found a package of explosives hidden in a small ditch covered with concrete slab nearby our ship - possibly for another attacked that never happened. We left Port Zamboanga late afternoon for Tawau..

under escort by the Philippine Navy to the Malaysian border and handed over to the Malaysian Navy all the way to Port of Tawau.

We spent 2 weeks there healing and recuperating especially for us the remaining crew members who involved in this whole incident.

To grief and to reflect on oneself. Or just,..to rest. My mom heard the news on Saturday night of the attack through the TV3 news, in the middle of watching the series ’Dallas’. My parents were worried about who was injured. The KL office was jammed with telephone calls.

Fortunately, ALL Malaysians onboard were safe. Me included. My mom flew from KK to see me for a few days. That was good to see a homely face. The Malaysian crew members can opt for a week off if we wanted to. We didn’t. We wanted to stay and help the crew. I stayed.

Daniel was with the injured flown to Manila. After a week, each one of them were flown back to their respective countries and families. All of them had grenade fragments in them, some had more, others, less. We were updated of their recovery as we went on our port of calls..

in the next few months. Daniel and some of them wanted to join back the ship as soon as their cleared fit. He joined su while we were in Solomon Islands, 4 months after the incident. The rest, have recovered from their wounds both physically and emotionally.

Some are still recovering after 29 years. Daniel is just one of them.