InsiderPH features the inspiring stories of Metrobank Foundation’s awardees as Outstanding Filipinos for 2025—teachers, soldiers and police officers who are making significant contributions to nation building.
To the untrained eye, it is unremarkable terrain – shrubs, scattered grass, the occasional crumbling trench. But to UO1 Turallo, it is something else entirely: a graveyard of forgotten explosives, history packed with peril, and a place where one misstep can mean never taking another.
There is no swagger in his stance, no clamor of war stories, though he has them in abundance. Instead, he goes about his work with the practiced discipline of a man who knows that real danger makes no sound before it explodes.
Battlefield to bombs
In 2016, as a rear security and grenadier with SEAL Team 18 in Butig, Lanao del Sur, UO1 Turallo crawled beneath sniper fire and improvised explosive devices to reclaim four barangays from the ISIS-inspired Maute Group.
For three days, he and his men were pinned at the berm – trapped under fire, suffocated by heat, the air humming with threat. Yet when they broke free, it wasn’t just victory they secured. It was the lives of over 10,000 civilians, and the dignity of a town once claimed by terror.
“We recovered our fallen, rescued the wounded,” he recalls. “We saw how war erases names, and we made sure ours would not be forgotten.”
“After that mission, I asked myself, what more can I contribute?” he says. That question would reshape the arc of his military life. He would trade the frontlines of combat for another kind of war: the painstaking, surgical labor of bomb disposal.
‘No room for error’
By 2017, he had joined the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Group, becoming not only a technician, but later an instructor and subject matter expert. His mission expanded from neutralizing explosives to educating soldiers, civilians, barangay officials, disaster teams, and students on how to survive them.
To date, over 10,000 Filipinos have sat in his lectures, watched his demonstrations, and walked away knowing how to identify the signs of an IED, how to respond to a bomb threat, how to keep others alive.
“I wanted to go beyond the battlefield,” he says, “because protecting lives doesn’t stop at the perimeter of a combat zone.”
In Cavite, in classrooms and command centers, in basements and bomb sites, UO1 Turallo has become a name synonymous with calm under pressure.
As Pit Supervisor for the Philippine Navy Disposal of Unserviceable Ammunition and Explosives Committee, he supervised the disposal of over 1.2 million rounds of Philippine Navy unserviceable ammunition and explosive remnants of war during the World War II – amounting to over 800,000 pounds of net explosive weight.
He also led the render safe procedures of unexploded ordnances found in nearby barangays in Cavite City for a total of 25 responses – to eliminate threat to life, properties and activities in said vicinities.
“There is no room for error,” he says. “Because your first mistake could be your last.”
Service without pause
In place of old, unreliable timed fuses, UO1 Turallo helped implement a Remote Firing Device system that’s precise, controlled, and far safer. “Innovation isn’t luxury in this line of work,” he adds. “It’s survival.”
And yet, his uniform carries its share of scars. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while the world paused, UO1 Turallo did not. Virtual training sessions replaced field drills.
When Metro Manila was rocked by bomb threats that emptied schools and offices, it was UO1 Turallo who was called to educate. To stand between fear and ignorance with only a laser pointer and a projector.
In disaster response to humanitarian assistance, as a leading petty officer in NAVSOCOM, UO1 Turallo was also affiliated with aiding our countrymen who suffered from unnecessary loss of lives and labor during the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic up to date.
A total of 8,150 individuals benefited from the outreach program and relief operations conducted.
Duty beyond self
Off-duty, he is a husband, a father of five. He speaks of them with the reverence of a man who has missed birthdays, sat beside hospital beds only long enough to return to the field.
“There are moments I leave my wife recovering from surgery or my child confined in the hospital,” he says, “because I am needed elsewhere.” These sacrifices, he does not offer up as heroic. Only as necessary. “My service is for the nation,” he adds, “but also for the future of my family.”
His father, once a Navy man himself, did not live to see his son’s enlistment. “I took the exam to honor his dream,” UO1 Turallo says.
“At first, I wanted to be a seafarer. But I chose this path out of love, out of tradition. We obey our parents.”
That tradition now lives in a legacy that stretches from classrooms in Cavite to jungle fields in Mindanao, from mangrove replanting in Subic to demolition pits in Capas.
“We know that our flag does not fly because the wind moves it,” he says, voice steady. “It flies with the last breath of each soldier who died protecting it.”
But for now, the soldier lives. And as long as he does, that flag will fly a little more safely.
UO1 Turallo’s exceptional dedication and service have been recognized with several accolades—from being recognized as enlisted personnel of the year and EOD technician of the year to receiving commendations for local government units and civil society groups. Most recently, he was honored by The Manila Times as an awardee of its newly-minted Tribute to Soldiers Award. —Metrobank Foundation
