By Ana Cristina Acosta
For most Americans, walking down the street, entering a restaurant through the front door or going to the grocery store is routine. But for Mary Murillo, 75, who grew up at a time when Mexican Americans suffered blatant discrimination, those simple things weren’t always possible.
By Lindsay Fitzpatrick
Jesus Humberto Morales survived 11 months unharmed in the jungles of New Guinea. It wasn’t until after that, in the Philippines, when he got hurt.
Shrapnel hit Morales and his partner as they were reloading a bazooka. His comrade died, but Morales managed to survive, sustaining an injury that required an artificial joint be implanted in his thumb.
Morales, who was born Oct. 25, 1918, served in Company L of the 20th Infantry, 6th Division.
By Haldun Morgan
"We were in Saipan when I had my first taste of combat. Not combat, [but] of bombs being dropped on us, trying to sink us. And I'm staring at the airplanes dropping, and I'm sure everyone is gonna hit us."
Before his initiation into World War II, Alvino Mendoza wondered what it would be like.
By Yazmin Lazcano
The experience of stepping over hundreds of bodies -- the sounds of mine blasts, surf pelting the coast and bullets whizzing overhead filling his ears -- is as vivid to Porfirio Martinez today as it was 55 years ago.
For Martinez, WWII isn’t over. He fought in major battles, and continues fighting today through nightmares of the D-Day landings.
Martinez recalled the 'tiradero' (the mess) of thousands of bodies on the beach during the second wave of D-Day landings.
"Dead. All dead," he said.
By Ayesha Mirza
Jose Angel Lopez saw myriad battlegrounds while braving the frontlines across France, Belgium and Germany in World War II.
His tales of loss and heroism are as abundant as the grains of sand on the Normandy coast. He was part of General George S. Patton's 3d Army, who liberated one of the first and largest Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald, captured Hitler's designated successor, Hermann Goering, and saved the city of Luxembourg from German troops in the Battle of the Bulge.
By Kimberly Tilley
On the walls of a small, comfortable East Austin residence, family photographs fill the house. A framed photo of a beaming couple sits on the mantle, and an adjacent bedroom contains a small altar with a photo, surrounded by a crucifix and several candles, of a young man with long black hair and soulful eyes. On the handcrafted bookcase, more photographs of happy faces adorn the shelves.
by Minette Hernandez
MCALLEN, Texas -- Ask Heriberto Longoria, Sr. about the license plate on his 1996 Mercury Grand Marquis, and he will proudly tell you the piece of metal, which displays a Purple Heart, cost him only three dollars. To earn those plates, he valiantly fought in World War II, but the scars of war, which tend to toughen a man, have not overcome the 81-year-old veteran.
By Chris Nay
Even before arriving at the European concentration camps in 1945, Joe Lerma of San Diego and his division could smell the dead.
"The sight and smell of human death is terrible," he said.
His division's job was to inform the camp survivors that the war had ended.
"The people were afraid to come out," he said, describing the difficulty in convincing the men and women that conditions were safe for them - that the nightmare was over.
The Americans were also instructed to leave quickly to prevent contracting disease.
By Monica Rivera
When she was being trained as an airplane mechanic in the 1940s, Josephine Ledesma was the only woman in her training group. Later, as an airplane mechanic at Bergstrom Air Field, she was one of three women out of her seven-person workgroup.
One typical scenario was having several people working on one plane.
"You had people working on the electric part, on the hydraulic part, on the engine," said Ledesma during an interview at her home. "I happened to work on the fuselage, the body of the plane."
By Amanda Crane
Ruperto Soto Juarez, of Norwalk, Ca., has not had an easy life: he was orphaned as an adolescent; he quit school as a child, he fibbed about his age in order to join the Navy and serve his country in WWII. He has been a political activist, fighting for a fairer world. When his wife was terminally ill, he stayed by her bedside, holding her hand.
His is the story of an everyday hero.