By Caprice Padilla
Turned away on his first attempt to join the Army because of a bad eye, Marshall Vasquez’s determination and will were fierce. Sitting next to his serviceman photo and an array of framed medals, Vasquez, who by showing courage and leadership overseas, proved he was as good as, if not better, than soldiers without a disability, told us his story.
By Kayla Young
Peering through the door he’d just kicked in with his combat boots, the Manuel Camarillo serving on the front lines of World War II Germany was a different man from the one he’d been back in South El Paso. Back then, he’d started fights just for fun.
“I spent my time fighting. I wanted to fight anybody,” said Camarillo of his early teen years. “My oldest brother would get two or three guys in the morning. He would get them so I could fight with them. I went in [the alley] and I gave them a good whipping.”
A full moon showering light over Mt. Fuji one night while on lookout duty in Japan is the wartime image Antonio Uribe recalls most vividly as he recounts his humble beginnings in Texas and the world of basic training and nautical knowledge that transformed him from boy to man.
By Brooke N. Miller
World War II flung Lita De Los Santos’ eight brothers across the world. The front room of the De Los Santos’ home in Eastland County, Texas, was dominated by a map of the world. De Los Santos and her mother, Angelita Guajardo, would run a finger across the smooth paper, pausing on foreign places with exotic-sounding names; places she’d never been, some of which she’d never even heard of.
By Cheryl Smith Kemp
When military recruiters showed up at the local Post Office in early August of 1942, Roberto De la Cruz saw it as a ticket out of the Rio Grande Valley, an escape from a lonely laborious life in South Texas.
So when a recruiter asked the 15-year-old how old he was, De la Cruz said he had just turned 18 on August 5.
A day or two later, De la Cruz and one other San Benito guy, Jerry Tarwater, were on a train headed for Houston, to get their Navy physicals.
By Laura Clark
At 5 o’clock on the morning on July 4, 1944, Ruben Ramos stood on the deck of the USS Denver and watched three squadrons of Navy Hellcat fighters take off from a nearby aircraft carrier to attack the airfields on the heavily fortified island of Iwo Jima.
This would mark the Americans’ first attack on the island that would come to forever symbolize death, sacrifice, uncommon valor and the spirit of the U.S. Marines.
By Hason Halpert
For Air Force Gunner Luis Garza, the worst thing that could have happened to him during World War II occurred before he even got overseas.
“While we were waiting [to go overseas], my mother got a notice that my brother [Pablo Garza] had been killed [in France],” Garza said. “I was playing ping pong, and my mom called and said my brother was missing. He was reported killed in action later that day.”
Rife with emotion, Garza asked for a leave of absence from his port of embarkation in Georgia.
By Jared Hill
Manuel Perez was one of the hundreds of thousands of Latino citizens forced by way of selective service to join the military after the United States joined World War II following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And just like many other Americans, Perez had to put his own life on hold to serve his country, even though he never stepped foot on the battlefield.
By Kathy Adams
As an immigrant from Juarez, Mexico, living in East Los Angeles in the ’20s and ’30s, Leno Flores Díaz remembers going to school in hand-me-downs and feeling ostracized when the teachers anglicized his name.
“They had all kinds of names. They never could pronounce my name. … It was discrimination, racism,” said Díaz, adding later in writing that whenever there was trouble at school, he was always called to the office as a suspect.
Mexican immigrants Antonio Jasso and Genoveva Ramirez Jasso, who picked cotton in South Texas, would see five of their sons go off to war.
Their granddaughter, Evelyn Jasso Garcia, set out to record their story, and that of her father and uncles. An associate professor at San Antonio College, she regrets she wasn't able to interview her uncles, but gratified her dad, Jose "Joe" Jasso lived to see the fruit of her research.