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In the last post, "The Way It Started," Anthony Reza remembers the day he was the only survivor in a squad surrounded by enemy soldiers. This is the continuation of Anthony's story.
PART 1
Los Angeles
2013
1.
Again, the American Airlines terminal,
like stepping into a time machine, not sure if I'll be hurled into the past or remain, here, in the present, or spit out into the future. I don't fight it, the past, the same place, different terminal, nearly fifty years ago, my mom jittery,
her eyes glazed over when they announced my flight. We hugged tightly, with
some shyness. When her arms loosened and dropped, I stepped back. I picked up
my bag. “Bye Mom.” She stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to do next. We
weren’t a hugging family. She said to a sergeant, a stranger standing beside
me, “Please take care of him.”
Young, mid-twenties, he’d recently arrived
from a skirmish in Santo Domingo, and like me, new orders for Vietnam, he said,
good-naturedly, “Yes, mam, he’ll be home before you know it.” We exchanged
nods, and he was gone. I had no reason to doubt him.
My father knew better. He’d been through
it, a real war, not a “conflict,” a government concept nobody understood. Some said, “More
like Korea than Europe or the Pacific.” Stoic, like his Mexican father, my dad
stood there, hands in his pocket. “Mi ‘jo, take care of yourself,” no
smothering kisses like the Italians, my dad more Indian than Spaniard.
In the 1940s' war, my parents had lost friends, neighbors who never returned, killed in foreign lands, their families forever
changed. Earlier, back in the 1900s, their parents escaped the ravages of the
revolution in Mexico and the deaths of millions, mostly civilians. My parents
knew the jetliner waiting for me outside on the tarmac meant this might be the
last time we’d see each other, ever.
To me, 19, it was abstract, vague, no context,
like the movies, pure fantasy, still a blur, an American kid like any other,
one day here the next day there, visions of adventure in an exotic land.
Never on my radar, the military scooped me
up when I took a semester break from community college to save money. I was one
of the few kids from my neighborhood to enroll in college, more to fulfill my
parents’ dream than my own. My friends found jobs, bought their first cars, and
enjoyed the freedom of youth, oblivious to the government’s war drums rumbling around them.
As the oldest, I was the role model my
parents molded for my younger siblings, the first on the path to graduate
college, a feat out of reach for my parents but a reality for their
children.
My dad quit school in the eleventh grade
to work and help his family. A few years later, wars broke out in Europe and the Pacific. Uncle Sam came calling. My dad received his draft notice, shipped out overseas, did his time, returned home, wounded, and faced the aftermath, something he
rarely discussed, his emotions evident whenever he drank, which, for us, was
too much. A union man, an expert at anything to do with cement, he was a reader, whatever he could get his hands on, newspapers, magazines, and novels by Steinbeck, Hemingway, and
Styron.
My mother graduated high school, only two
in her family of seven kids to finish. For the next few years, she boarded the bus each day from
her home in Santa Monica to work at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, no real
plans except to wait and see, so different from her girlfriends on the prowl
for men to marry and start families. My mother savored her independence and enjoyed
working. She gave a portion of her paycheck to help her family after her
father’s early death. She’d been an excellent student, A’s and B’s, but for a young
woman with Spanish last name, her teachers encouraged to work instead of
going to college.
To my parents, education meant freedom for their
children to choose their own future. To jump-start our interest in reading, they purchased the Encyclopedia
Britannica, one book a month to fit the family budget, my mom suspicious of the
Lay-Away-Plan, no credit on her ledger. She proudly displayed the
prune-colored, golden filigreed collection on a low shelf in our living room, so to see me in uniform had to have disappointed them.
2.
My letter from the Draft Board with
instructions to report to the Induction Center in downtown Los Angeles, put my
friends on notice, some going so far as to marry and start families, hoping the
draft would pass them by.
“That’s bunk,” said Mario Martinez, when
he heard I’d been drafted. A tasty blues guitarist and lead singer in rock
band, totally anti-war, Mario had started calling himself a “Chicano,” like how
my dad and his friends referred to each other, but only in private, with
friends, never in public. We called ourselves, “Mexicans,” if asked where we
came from.
Mario complained, “They’re starting to
take Chicanos left and right, man. I don’t dig school, but I’m getting into
J.C. until this thing blows over.” Mario stayed in school so long, by the time
the government stopped the draft, he’d become an attorney.
Albert “Guero” Samaniego, was a good kid.
He excelled in school, and was star second baseman in Little League. Tall,
handsome, and a pretty good vocabulary, until junior high when he started
greasing back his hair, wearing pressed khakis and a white T-shirt,
gang-banging, and talking tough. Guero had told me, “Shee—it, Reza, let them
call my number. I ain’t going, no way, homie. Check out Terry Weems, dumb as a
tamale wrapper, man, got a deferment ‘cause his jefa had connections with
someone on the draft board. White boys talking about going to Canada to wait it
out. If they come after me, I’m bookin’ it to Mexico.”
A year later, after Guero got his draft
letter, he had a cousin drop him off near the Tecate border. His clothes in
tatters, no I.D., Guero tried passing himself off as a bracero to get deported
to Zacatecas, which might as well have been Timbuktu, since he’d never been
there. The judge gave him a choice, jail or the army. Guero fell on a grenade
and saved some guys in his squad on an operation in the Mekong Delta with the 9th
Infantry. He should’ve received a Medal of Honor instead of a Silver Star. His
death opened an empty space inside the rest of us. “Hear about Guero
Samaniego,” people whispered, even years after the war?
We only lived six miles north of L.A.’s
International Airport, near the National Soldier’s Home in the western part of
L.A. known as Sawtelle. As kids, we’d watch the passenger jets make a wide loop
over the Pacific, fly high above our homes, and head east, I imagined, to
magical places, with names I’d read in the encyclopedia, like the Cairo, the
Balkans, Bavaria, Bali, and Segovia.
3.
The first time I stepped into an airport
and onto a plane was the day the Army flew a load of us, more Mexicans than I’d
see in one place, from L.A. International to El Paso’s Municipal Airport, for
Basic Training. My emotions so scrambled I had no idea what to think. I might
as well have been on a spaceship to Mars. When we landed, they loaded us onto
military buses and transported us inside the gates of Fort Bliss, the name a
cruel irony for what we were about to experience.
A gaggle of drill instructors met us.
Under the stiff brims of their Smokey the Bear hats, they put their faces up to
ours, and shouted as we stepped onto the pavement, calling us ladies, girls,
pussies, and panty wipes. Oh, the barracks, once inside, black and brown faces
everywhere, nothing like my college campus where white faces crowded the
sidewalks, cafeteria, library and classrooms.
The D.I.’s did everything they could to
break us psychologically and physically, to remove “the civilized kid and
replace him with a violent killer,” was how my friend from New Mexico, Rudy Morales, analyzed it. Most recruits hung tough and made it through
those first weeks. If you were athletic, social, and fairly smart, you had the
best chance of surviving.
The guys who failed, as our drill
instructors said, “Couldn’t get with the program.” An Undesirable Discharges
wasn’t as bad as a Dishonorable Discharges but nothing any of us wanted on our
records, weighting down our egos, and our plans for the future. Nobody wanted
to be the one who couldn’t cut it.
In the mess hall, we couldn’t talk. Get
your chow, eat, and get the hell out. The only thing we heard was music on the
P.A. and the banging of trays, dishes, and silverware, or the mess hall staff
hollering at someone, “Idiot! Get a move on there,” embarrassing as hell in
front of everybody.
One guy, Waltzer, a tough bastard, big,
well over six-foot, melted down at lunch when the Rolling Stone’s “19th
Nervous Breakdown” came on over the speakers. He jumped up, tossed the table
over and sent everything flying. He blew right past a sergeant who tried to
stop him. We could hear him hollering outside, a looney escaped from the
asylum, his voice getting fainter the farther he ran.
The rest of us continued eating in
silence, like nothing had happened. It rattled us. Later, we heard from a kid
in Waltzer’s squad that Walzer had been talking about his wife and kid
non-stop, obsessing about how much he missed them and wanted to see them. He
finally snapped. If Walzer could snap under the pressure, what about the rest
of us?
One time, my friend Joaquin Ornelas had
trouble keeping up on our morning runs. The D.I.’s started getting on his case about other things,
his messy footlocker and personal area, the loose blankets on his bed, the
corners not tucked in correctly, and his boots too dull to pass inspection. Agustin Para, a high school wrestler from San Antonio, who mashed Spanish, calo, and English when he talked, led a group of “Chicanos,” his word, the rest of us spoke mostly English, warned, “Ornelas, aguantate, carnal, y get your shit together. Don’t make the raza look bad.” It was a message we all heeded and knew we could lean on each other during tough times.
4.
After Basic and Advanced Individual
Training (AIT), I changed. It happened slowly, thinking myself in the
collective us, part of the institution. My body hardened and my mind sharpened.
No experience with a rifle, I could hit, with cool regularity, a popup carboard
target at 100 yards. I’d toss a grenade into a bunker, holding on to the pin
until the last second, my heart rate surging. I could handle any mortar,
rocket, or grenade launcher they put in my hands.
Something about hand-to-hand combat got my
blood racing, using my rifle as a cudgel, deftly dodging opponents, and
stabbing stuffed dummies with a bayonet, light on my feet, from so much boxing,
I moved like a dancer. We marched in time and sang ditties, like, “I want to go
to Vietnam/I want to kill some Vietcong,” over and over, drilled into us until
the enemy had no face.
At Fort Gordon, Georgia, we slogged
through alligator and cotton mouth infested swamps, day and night, in full
combat gear, without sleep, and little food, spring football training a walk in
the park, in comparison. After a time, we were ready to kill something, needed
to kill something. We started hearing stories from returning soldiers about
ambushes and guys dying, hard to wrap our heads around. It became real,
something serious, yet exhilarating.
They primed us like fine-tuned engines.
The military turned on the key, started us up, and we hummed, no hesitation
about taking another person’s life, the abstract enemy, obstacles to our
freedoms as Americans. We thought of ourselves as invincible, and the death of
an American inconceivable.
My dad got it. When I received my orders
for Vietnam, he told me, “Stay alert, always.” He taught by telling stories.
“You know, Nino Vela? Nino’s brother Nico made it through North Africa into
Italy, and in a village, he saw a fountain. He went over to get drink. A sniper
got him.” He waited, to let the story sink in. “Remember, think first, keep
your eyes and ears open, don’t panic, and Mi’jo, don’t volunteer for nothing.”
My dad had me working from the time I
could hold a rake. He pointed out a flower from a weed. We worked every
Saturday, cleaning the yard. In summer, my uncle picked me up in his truck and
took me to work in his gardening and landscaping business. He taught me to use
tools and equipment. A good job meant a slap on the back, a bad job and I got
an ass chewing.
I watched other guys, no shame, guys who
had never worked a day, and didn’t know how to follow the simplest orders. They
floated, talking their way out of duties they didn’t like or feared. They bitched and questioned everything, sometimes pretending to be sick, making
themselves miserable. The ones who couldn’t hack it went AWOL, ignorant of the
consequences.
Even if I couldn’t stomach some D.I.’s, I
respected them, their toughness, and value as teachers, under their steely
surfaces. Others I admired, even if we feared them, like Sergeant First Class
Eugenio Villareal, from Colorado, an infantryman in WWII and Korea, who did a
tour in Vietnam, and his sidekick, Sgt. Saul Mendoza, another Chicano WWII,
Korea, and Vietnam veteran. No joke, Army all the way.
The two NCOs came up on a group of us
drinking pitchers of watered-down beer at the post Enlisted Man’s Club. The
sergeants had a few too many. When we saw them, we clammed up. The strolled
over to our table. “Looky here, Sgt. Mendoza,” Villareal said, turning to his
partner, “who we got?” He leaned over our table, and said, “Carne fresca. Let
me tell you one thing, babosos, La Raza no se raja.” In his
heavy-accented English, Mendoza, enunciating each word carefully, said, “When
you get over there, show the cabrones you got balls.”
Then came the day I stood over Irish Red’s
body, our squad’s first casualty. Red’s best friend Teddy O’ Shay, both of them
Boston boys, the Charleston area, cried like a baby as they zipped Red’s body
bag. So much for our invincibility and the racist myth that a lowly Vietnamese
couldn’t kill Americans. I told Kenny Bolger, “Man, dig it, Irish Red’s folks
back in Charleston don’t know their son’s gone, and here we are, right now, we
know it, and thousands of miles away, his family has no idea. They’re just
going about living their lives.”
Kenny answered, “That there’s some deep shit, Reza, man.”
Kenny's day came at Pleiku. I didn't even get to see his body.
