I wish to thank Francis P Sempa for his review (7 June 2022) of my book Moro Warrior, which he generously described as “groundbreaking”. In the book, I rely on new or largely overlooked historical sources to present a perspective on the Mindanao guerrilla movement that is markedly different from the one that has been provided by American memoirs and histories for nearly 80 years.

I appreciate also that he has given me the opportunity to clarify a pair of statements I made at the very end of the book in an author’s note on “Sources and Methods”. In that note, I state that in this work of narrative history, “no events have been invented or dates rearranged.” Further along, I also write that occasionally, when my historical sources lacked details, I “imagined them based on my firsthand anthropological knowledge of Mindanao or on inferences drawn from other people, periods, and places.”

Professor Sempa detected an apparent contradiction in those two statements due to my imprecise language. I am an anthropologist, and the details that I added to the narrative exclusively concerned Moro cultural traditions—the typical clothes worn, foods eaten, and rituals observed by the Moro peoples of Mindanao and Sulu—details that I have studied and recorded in other settings. That clarification should have been included in the author’s note, and I thank the reviewer for prompting me to provide it here.

Thomas McKenna