Lansing

By Michelle Witters

San Antonio native Francisco Vega survived D-Day on Omaha Beach unscathed. That’s not to say he didn’t suffer acute pain later during the war, however.

By Erica Sparks

Unlike most World War II soldiers from the U.S., Reynaldo Benavides Rendon joined the military to get out of jail.

He wound up there in 1942 after an immigration officer outside of Corpus Christi, Texas, stepped onto a bus on which Rendon was riding. He’d been picking cotton in Mississippi with his father and was headed back to Robstown to recruit workers to help out on the plantation.

According to Rendon, the immigration officer asked him where he was born so he gave an honest answer:

Mexico.