TX

Felix B. Treviño

By David Zavala

Negotiating a minefield on a snowy day in World War II Germany, 1945, Felix Treviño encountered a young German soldier who looked no older than a teenager; he was leaning against a tree, one leg gone from the thigh down, the wound still bleeding.

Oswaldo V. Ramirez

By Robert Mayer

Refusing to be segregated or treated as second-class citizens, Oswaldo Ramirez and about 15 of his Mission, Texas, schoolmates boycotted the new junior high school built solely for Spanish-speaking students.

Lillian Margerite Hollingsworth Ramirez

By Raquel C. Garza

On June 6, 1944, Lillian Marguerite Ramirez was baking gingerbread men as a surprise for a neighbor's child.

Ramirez's husband, Oswaldo, meanwhile, was thousands of miles away, serving on the front lines on Omaha Beach.

Her brother-in-law, Rafael Ramirez, had come to visit her in her parents’ home in Biloxi, Miss., a day earlier. He arrived the night before D-Day, or Operation Overlord, was scheduled to take place.

"All that day, they kept turning off the radio when I would walk in," Ramirez said.

Miguel Pineda

By Sandra Ibarra

Miguel Pineda recalls Gen. Douglas MacArthur trying to inspire him and the other inexperienced soldiers upon their arrival in Brisbane, Australia. Pineda, 21 at the time, remembers MacArthur saying: "You kill him or he'll kill you!"

That was the defining moment when the reality and hardship of war and death hit this young man.

Eliseo Navarro

By Tammi Grais

Eliseo Navarro and his three brothers found a positive experience, overcame the hardships and returned home safely.

Born in 1925 in Asherton, Texas, a small town 100 miles southeast of San Antonio, Navarro suffered through a segregated world. The whole town was divided into Anglos and Mexican Americans.

Ruben Munguia

By Guillermo X. Garcia

Ruben Mungia, a career printer, laughs as he recalls "how smart the U.S. Army was" to let him join the service in the middle of World War II, only to assign him to Randolph Field in San Antonio, his hometown, where he ran the print shop at headquarters command.

Antonio F. Moreno

By Frank Trejo

When Antonio F. Moreno stormed ashore Iwo Jima as a U.S. Marine medical corpsman, a familiar odor greeted him.

Moreno, who grew on Texas' Gulf Coast, knew there was no mistaking the smell that wafted up to him as he dug into the earth to prepare a foxhole. The sulfur bubbling under the volcanic island smelled just like the sulfur of his childhood a half a world away.

"It smelled like rotten eggs; that's why it reminded me of home," he said.

Raul Mata Martinez

By Brian Villalobos

Raul Martinez's hands, thick, square and accented by a crest of jagged, walnut-sized knuckles, don’t seem to match his large, soft eyes.

Over the past 76 years, these hands have handled everything from cement to machine guns to mortar charges.

Martinez was born and raised in Cementville, Texas, a small cement company village north of Alamo Heights in San Antonio. One of 10 children born to Teofilo and Manuelita Martinez, both Mexican natives, he soon got a job at the same local cement factory where his father and grandfather had both worked.

Johnnie Marino

By Robert Mayer

Johnnie Marino was working as a tinsmith in Houston, having learned the trade from President Roosevelt's National Youth Administration program, when he heard about Hitler's running amok in Europe.

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