What If: Flipping Off the Commies

Esteban Torres is an unsung hero of United States history who died recently with his as-told-to-Michael-Sedano autobiography a GOPlague-paused draft after two years of conversations. We'd pretty well wrapped up his recollection through the Chicano Moratorium and his unsuccessful run for Congress when the country fell flat on its unpresidential ass and shut down. 

We stopped exposing one another to possible infection, but left his story hanging.

With an unhealthy dose of character assassination still ringing in his ears, Torres leaves The East Los Angeles Community Union for Washington D.C. He reaches untold new heights of achievement for a kid from East Los: Ambassador, an office in the White House, BKK Landfill victory, Eight Congressional terms. 

And familia, Torres is not alone in all these achievements. We'd explored raising kids, homes to be lived in, a woman's side of the Great Man's story that rarely gets mentioned. Arcy was to tell her story.

Torres' early story has the hallmarks of your average mid-century urban U.S. Mexican. A kid grows up in a single-parent multi-generation home, nearly a high school drop-out, he enlists in the Army right out of Garfield and finds a home in the military.

Esteban Torres, like every other Chicano ex-G.I. you know, has Army stories he loves to relive. The silly pendejo muck-ups, his Article 15 punishment story, the colorful local resident stories, the high adventure stories, and the death-defying pivotal points in life. 

Torres, like any Vet, loved remembering that frisson of fear that made him feel alive when it was all over, and tells his death-defying story with keen enjoyment of that moment he knew he would live forever. 

All the history and social progress that came after Torres' maturation in the Service would never have come to be, had Torres been killed in a Jeep roll-over somewhere in the Black Forest.

Excerpt from The Autobiography of Esteban Torres As Told To Michael Sedano... 

Schwarzwälder Roll-Over and the First Communist

That nopal en la frente made friends among many Germans. Brown skin intrigued some, while the Mexican part of “Mexican American” raised questions I was happy to discuss. More Germans spoke a little English than GIs spoke a little German. An evening in a bierstube wasn’t complete without a slightly soused alter soldat mustering up enough English words to declare he’d never fought Americans in World War II. Etiquette demanded now I buy a round, and together, the old warrior and I, cursed the Russians. 

The United States Army is legendary for giving a man training then assigning him to something completely different. I was no exception. Trained as an engineer in electrical systems in the States, I was sent to Radio School in Europe, to learn field radio operations. I would not be working in electrical systems at all. I found myself “humping the frontier” for weeks at a time. 

That desire I’d felt back home in East L.A.—to get out, see new places around the world--was coming true in unusual ways. From East L.A. I traveled to Monterey, California to train at Ft. Ord. From California to Virginia and the nation’s capital, for engineer training. Then, shipping out from the U.S. east coast, I find myself living in a large German city, until I’m assigned to go into the forest, report Russian troop movements, and cruise rivers identifying bridges to blow up in case of war. I am one of thousands of United States soldiers guarding the German border against the Warsaw Pact. 

Three men jump in a jeep at zero seven hundred hours on Monday, exit the main gate then return Saturday afternoon. We’re called a Reconnaissance Team. The three of us drive along the border all day, mostly on roads, updating maps and locating Russian troop positions. Hauling a three-wheeled trailer behind us, we are, in theory, a highly mobile, hard-hitting defensive force. In practice, that Willys jeep and trailer keep us on the edge of our seats.

Civilians in the late 1940s knew the Willys brand autos. On the streets, Willys was as common as Studebaker, and Austin. Willys had the contract to build a light 4-wheel drive truck. In 1950, the company sold the Defense Department the model M-38 1/4 ton 4x4 truck, that’s the official name for a vehicle everyone calls a jeep. Everywhere we traveled in our shiny green Willys, we hauled either a Bantam M-100 Trailer, or a T3 Trailer. No matter which trailer we drew from the motor pool, we respected that trailer. It was a life-taker.

A soldier learns to disassemble his rifle in the dark and take Immediate Action when you break down. For the same reasons, I learned the basics of the jeep. Breaking down during an attack would put us out of operation and were critical in the first hours of war. We were supposed to blow up the bridges.

We weren’t at war, so getting stranded in the middle of the Black Forest meant waiting around for hours. Help arrived, got us back on the road. After you returned to post you got a razzing from the guys for days, until the next team got stranded from a poorly-maintained jeep or impassable ruts.

Chicanos created an art form of automobiles, out of our long history of loving creative pleasures, out of forced auto shop in high school, and because some like to ride in style. I wasn’t a mechanic, only one of my friends in high school owned a car. Though I knew how to drive, I walked a lot because most of my friends were homebodies too, and we spent hours challenging each other to chess matches. Now I was the Commo Man sitting in the uncomfortable back seat of a Willy’s Jeep.

The jeep’s wide wheelbase holds onto flat and uneven terrain solidly. The body sits on top of a high undercarriage to make it over rocky terrain. That high undercarriage makes the jeep wobbly on curves, and, other than enemy action, the jeep has always been one of the top killers of soldiers.

Hauling that two-wheel trailer around curves was especially prone to accidents. I think every Veteran has a jeep experience, one of those near-misses that causes your mother to turn white when you tell her about it.

Mine happened in slow motion.

The driver was operating as he normally did, not speeding on the road because civilian traffic frequently narrowed the road. This part of the road followed a rolling terrain, like a bumpy roller-coaster. Combine an undulating road with a sharp downhill curve and you have me one moment sitting all comfortable in the back seat, leaning back, one foot on the back of the Sergeant's seat, looking at the shadows and the upright trunks of trees, then the trees turn sideways and the view changes from the earth to the sky then back to the earth again. For the briefest moment I feel exhilaration of weightlessness even as gravity and kinetic energy are propelling my body through space. Trees and shadows and light blur, I sense my trajectory curving to the ground, the jeep is rolling toward me on its side. I feel the cushioning forest litter under my back and I come to rest flat on my back, staring into the dappled sunlight, blinking at the bright light.

I used to go swimming at Huntington Beach. When a wave would wrap itself around my body and thrust me shoulder-first toward shore, feeling the force of the entire earth around me, propelling me, I screamed in delight. Then the wave curls at the shoreline and pounds me face-first into the hard sandy bottom. 

That day in the Black Forest was like a great day in the water, except I was thrown through the air out of a jeep. I felt exhilarated—I’d flown!

The three of us pushed the jeep back on its wheels—the trailer had whipped us around but the properly-maintained hitch performed to specification, just like the Manual. The M-100 had stayed on its feet. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Union quality—form, fit, function, every individual one the same as the one before--saved three lives. 

I lived that day. The boy from East L.A. who had nearly dropped out of high school had found a place, and recognition, in the United States Army. That boy had a future, but would have died near the East German border, a casualty of the war against the Communists. 

The border exists as an imaginary Line running through miles of anonymous forest. It’s not as simple as East is that way, be careful. The Line zigs and zags following rivers, natural barriers, and political negotiations. 

To a team pulling border recon, the Line means: don’t make a mistake, don’t cross the made-up Line. We'd been to Buchenwald, we'd learned the Russians were as bad as the Nazis. Don't get caught on their side.

We were finding our way along a dirt track, through an isolated wood, studying the map and compass. In the deep woods, unless you recognize a tree or shrub, there are no landmarks to keep you oriented. You just drive and keep your eyes open.

The road bumped across a gully that water eroded out of the base of a gentle slope. Up we drove, the slope grew steeper, and I’m remembering that hill at Ft. Ord and the cans of tear gas that so-and-so dropped on us as we crested that rise. At the apex, the road heads almost straight down the other side. There, at the foot of this hill, we come face-to-face with the Iron Curtain. It’s made of logs.

The Russians must have found a sawmill on their side. Whole trees had been sharpened like pencils and buried pointing like double rows of spears toward our side. 

Russian engineers were trained as were we. They used the best trees for the picket line, Douglas fir and Norway Spruce. Our side of the line had a lot of Juniper and Silver pine. Not that I was trained as a forest agronomist but every detail stood out when I wrote my report.

Down at the foot of the slope, I was looking at the other side of the Line, at that Russian tank. Communists.

My driver had not been going too fast in the unknown terrain and he stopped right away as we crested. On the other side of the log wall the road was blocked by a Russian tank. The sun caught cigarette smoke against the forest shadow, the Communists were taking a break.

When they saw us come over the hill and stop, they just stared at us. I guess they were as surprised to see us, as we were astonished to see them. We thought enemy territory was over there somewhere, not behind us. We needed to fix our map, blitzschnell! 

Every month we troops went through mandatory training. We learned about the Cold War, the newly-forming alliance called NATO, the Russian nuclear threat, and what to do if captured. 

Looking down that dirt road at the Russians dropping their smokes and climbing up onto that tank sent a message we didn’t wait to hear. 

The driver put the jeep into reverse and began to turn around. That trailer makes every maneuver slower than you'd want sometimes. 

The Sergeant in the front seat and I waved and called out “Bye-bye.” I don’t know what got into the Sergeant. Maybe he was about to rotate home and he didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to the first Russians he’d seen. 

“Slow down,” he told the driver. The driver slowed. The Sergeant stood up in his seat and held onto the windshield with his left hand. He raised his right hand high in the air and gave the Russians the middle-finger salute. 

The driver laughed. “They don’t know what the hell you’re saying, Sergeant.” 

I agreed, the finger was all over East L.A., but those guys were Russians.

One of the Russians standing on the deck of the tank grabbed the cannon with one hand and raised the other hand high in the air. 

He gave us the finger. 

That was my first and last encounter with Russians on the East German frontier. The vato threw the finger at us and got away with it. Me, and Communists, that’s another story.

Note: In coming weeks, La Bloga will share Torres' story in bits and pieces so gente can share the life of this average Chicano who plays a major role in the movimiento. The book need not be be published for readers to find its story.